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SNES RPG Fan Translations (Part 1)
I decided to make an effort to use my various handhelds to try out some of the fan translations of SNES games that I’ve had sitting on my backlog for a couple of years. Some of them I had poked at already (on my RG350) but not taken useful notes on; I vowed to give them each a good college try and see what there was to them.
Ryuuki Heidan: Danzarb aka “Dragon Squadron Danzarb” – This is a great concept that screams “shonen anime,” as you’re a cadet whose father and brother were killed by the enemy right after they developed the latest giant dragon robots; and you get promoted into the giant dragon robot squad. In practice…it barely qualifies as a standard (and kinda boring) early-SNES rpg. It’s got squat character sprites that look like up-colored NES designs and with the exception of a couple of anime cutscenes, both the dungeon and enemy designs are routine and forgettable. The battle sequences scream Phantasy Star but with fewer actual options—at least for the first three missions, your options are limited to “attack” or “use a healing item;” and fast-forward autobattle works fine. Characters level slowly and don’t seem to get special abilities or attacks. There’s a crafting (read: shop) option from the menu that can make new equipment, but there’s no indication it’s better than what you have. Oh, and there’s an unskippable klotski puzzle near the end of the first mission. (There are several places where the mission puzzle is “bring the right character”, though it’s never clear if that’s necessary or optional.
There are apparently 15 missions total, but despite the very well-done fan translation (of a very stock plot), I gave up after three. This got an hour, but it’s not actually a good enough game to get any more.
Albert Odyssey – The evil wizard Globus has returned after ten years, and he’s searching for the girl Sofia who banished him the first time. This is a tactical rpg in the vein of Shining Force, where every character on your side moves and attacks, and then all the monsters go. The first battle (traveling from town to town with three characters) took about 45 minutes, but I eventually figured out that magic was unlimited and you can both attack and cast a spell in the same turn, which make picking off the “Frubats” before they reached me more feasible. The big sprites and rotating battlefield are very pretty (especially for 1993); these folks had clearly figured out mode-7. I’m not entirely clear on who did the fan translation, but it’s…functional? It makes the game understandable in a 90s bad translation sort of way, but it’s clunky at best, with weird abbreviations, no apostrophes, and no nuance. Unfortunately, when you hit the third town and pick up your fourth character, the English translation breaks down entirely. There's a massive cutscene showing that character's backstory, and none of it is translated, not even the guy's name. I had been leaning towards playing a few more scenarios to see if there was more to the battles than just fighting monsters as you travel between towns, but it's not interesting enough to muddle through with a walkthrough trying to guess at the plot.
Aretha – A fairly standard rpg, it opens with a ten-year-old girl having a nightmare about a castle falling to invaders, and then being sent on errands by her grandmother. This is the prologue, where young Ariel saves some dwarves and gets a dragon egg and her grandmother's ring. Years later, she and her dragon Fang try to help an old man and have her the ring stolen as thanks. She releases a wizard named Doole from a crystal and they learn the legend of Aretha, the goddess of light who used a magic doll to defeat the Demon King Howard. Ariel vows to go to the Aretha Kingdom (currently occupied by the Vandal Empire) to find the old man and retrieve her ring and her missing grandmother.
This has clunky controls, basically no in-game explanations, and the typical squashed-sprite, repetitive early snes rpg graphics. There are a bunch of questionable game design choices: The second island has no weapon or armor shop (and you can’t go back to earlier towns) and has enemies that petrify, but no item shop that sells petrify cures, either. You have to go back to the inn if one of the common enemies with petrify gets you. You get elemental "souls" from defeated enemies, and while certain people let you craft souls into gear, good luck doing that without a guide. You apparently need to cast lots of spells to learn new ones; it’s a primitive version of SaGa’s “spark” system. The dungeons are short and don’t seem to have any puzzles or tricks, but the high encounter rate makes up the difference. Oh, and there's a system where up to a dozen enemies can surround your party and all of them can attack, so battles can suddenly be very dangerous and take a long time. Did I mention you can't tell how much damage your attacks do? You have no idea which attacks are actually being effective or not. (And why does the battle cursor look like Garfield the cat? No idea!)
The fan translation is solid, though there are some points where the game doesn’t really give you any direction. There’s apparently a LOT of game on this game; HowLongToBeat puts it at 30+ hours. I gave it two and a half and decided my issues with the game design were enough to make me stop.
Princess Minerva – I could tell when I started playing this that there was an anime it was based on (apparently they were developed together and this was a whole franchise that also includes a manga and a serial novel), because it has nine color-coded characters on the hero team and seven more on the villain team, all of whom are busty women in bikini armor who like to make jokes about each others’ breast size. There are cutscene splash animations of close-ups of said bikini armor, and artwork every time you equip new armor on a character. The battle system is reasonably clever, in that you have three teams of three that you rotate or choose between at various intervals; though in turn it’s annoying to have to equip and grind nine different characters, because there’s no “leaked experience” between the three teams. (If a team dies, it isn’t a game over, but the enemies take a huge percentage of your money and you still have to pay to revive them.) Further complicating matters is the skill system: Each character has MP, SP, and TP to keep track of, and each set of skills (in the five classes, which each character divides their XP differently among) uses a different amount of whichever points. And which weapons you can equip seems tied to your class levels, so you need to revisit shops periodically to see if you can upgrade any of your characters. (Though again, I give them credit that the “Test” feature in shops makes that easier.)
The fan translation is crucial to making this playable, of course, and while it’s full of repetitive language and crude boob jokes, I have no reason to believe that’s not accurate to the original. This feels like a 90s T&A anime, so it’s only recommended if that’s what you’re looking for. That said, I think it’s the grinding that actually broke me, because the difficulty ramps really fast after the first (short) mission and your characters are swiftly outmatched if you don’t level them all up before taking on the second cave. This got two hours before I’d had enough.
Bushi Seiryuuden: Futari no Yuusha, aka “WARRIORS Legend of the Blue Dragon -The Two Heroes-“ - On your fifteenth birthday, a giant bird-monster kidnaps your sister and blows up your house. As the son of a great warrior, you’ll need to rescue her and probably also defeat the Wicked God of the Sea along the way. A girl transformed into a floating monster joins you as the peanut gallery for your silent hero, as well as being your jump button and the source of some of your special attacks. And I need to give credit that the fan translation is excellent, giving personality to all the characters and narration while keeping an eastern feel to the setting.
This was made by Game Freak in 1997, and was one of the last SNES games. It feels a little like Gargoyles Quest with the multiple views, random battles, and side-scrolling action areas. It’s turn-based the way a roguelike is, where enemies only move and act when you do (on the map screen and in battle). Each battle is a puzzle to try to win in as few turns for the bonus XP and magatama (which you need for unlocking an endgame area). There are items to use on the map and menu screen, but the rpg elements are mixed and unusual. The side-scrolling areas are very strategic (you need to plan your moves carefully) but also still require a fast hand on the controller for a number of the puzzles.
I had started this a year or so ago on my RG350 but bounced off of the combat system. I tried again with an infinite health code and made it most of the way through the third chapter, about halfway through the game overall, before the battle sequences just because too involved and frustrating for my limited mastery of the system. I do think this is a genuinely good game (and I got about 6 hours of entertainment out of it), but you really need to grok the system and all of its nuances to play through the whole thing.
Ryuuki Heidan: Danzarb aka “Dragon Squadron Danzarb” – This is a great concept that screams “shonen anime,” as you’re a cadet whose father and brother were killed by the enemy right after they developed the latest giant dragon robots; and you get promoted into the giant dragon robot squad. In practice…it barely qualifies as a standard (and kinda boring) early-SNES rpg. It’s got squat character sprites that look like up-colored NES designs and with the exception of a couple of anime cutscenes, both the dungeon and enemy designs are routine and forgettable. The battle sequences scream Phantasy Star but with fewer actual options—at least for the first three missions, your options are limited to “attack” or “use a healing item;” and fast-forward autobattle works fine. Characters level slowly and don’t seem to get special abilities or attacks. There’s a crafting (read: shop) option from the menu that can make new equipment, but there’s no indication it’s better than what you have. Oh, and there’s an unskippable klotski puzzle near the end of the first mission. (There are several places where the mission puzzle is “bring the right character”, though it’s never clear if that’s necessary or optional.
There are apparently 15 missions total, but despite the very well-done fan translation (of a very stock plot), I gave up after three. This got an hour, but it’s not actually a good enough game to get any more.
Albert Odyssey – The evil wizard Globus has returned after ten years, and he’s searching for the girl Sofia who banished him the first time. This is a tactical rpg in the vein of Shining Force, where every character on your side moves and attacks, and then all the monsters go. The first battle (traveling from town to town with three characters) took about 45 minutes, but I eventually figured out that magic was unlimited and you can both attack and cast a spell in the same turn, which make picking off the “Frubats” before they reached me more feasible. The big sprites and rotating battlefield are very pretty (especially for 1993); these folks had clearly figured out mode-7. I’m not entirely clear on who did the fan translation, but it’s…functional? It makes the game understandable in a 90s bad translation sort of way, but it’s clunky at best, with weird abbreviations, no apostrophes, and no nuance. Unfortunately, when you hit the third town and pick up your fourth character, the English translation breaks down entirely. There's a massive cutscene showing that character's backstory, and none of it is translated, not even the guy's name. I had been leaning towards playing a few more scenarios to see if there was more to the battles than just fighting monsters as you travel between towns, but it's not interesting enough to muddle through with a walkthrough trying to guess at the plot.
Aretha – A fairly standard rpg, it opens with a ten-year-old girl having a nightmare about a castle falling to invaders, and then being sent on errands by her grandmother. This is the prologue, where young Ariel saves some dwarves and gets a dragon egg and her grandmother's ring. Years later, she and her dragon Fang try to help an old man and have her the ring stolen as thanks. She releases a wizard named Doole from a crystal and they learn the legend of Aretha, the goddess of light who used a magic doll to defeat the Demon King Howard. Ariel vows to go to the Aretha Kingdom (currently occupied by the Vandal Empire) to find the old man and retrieve her ring and her missing grandmother.
This has clunky controls, basically no in-game explanations, and the typical squashed-sprite, repetitive early snes rpg graphics. There are a bunch of questionable game design choices: The second island has no weapon or armor shop (and you can’t go back to earlier towns) and has enemies that petrify, but no item shop that sells petrify cures, either. You have to go back to the inn if one of the common enemies with petrify gets you. You get elemental "souls" from defeated enemies, and while certain people let you craft souls into gear, good luck doing that without a guide. You apparently need to cast lots of spells to learn new ones; it’s a primitive version of SaGa’s “spark” system. The dungeons are short and don’t seem to have any puzzles or tricks, but the high encounter rate makes up the difference. Oh, and there's a system where up to a dozen enemies can surround your party and all of them can attack, so battles can suddenly be very dangerous and take a long time. Did I mention you can't tell how much damage your attacks do? You have no idea which attacks are actually being effective or not. (And why does the battle cursor look like Garfield the cat? No idea!)
The fan translation is solid, though there are some points where the game doesn’t really give you any direction. There’s apparently a LOT of game on this game; HowLongToBeat puts it at 30+ hours. I gave it two and a half and decided my issues with the game design were enough to make me stop.
Princess Minerva – I could tell when I started playing this that there was an anime it was based on (apparently they were developed together and this was a whole franchise that also includes a manga and a serial novel), because it has nine color-coded characters on the hero team and seven more on the villain team, all of whom are busty women in bikini armor who like to make jokes about each others’ breast size. There are cutscene splash animations of close-ups of said bikini armor, and artwork every time you equip new armor on a character. The battle system is reasonably clever, in that you have three teams of three that you rotate or choose between at various intervals; though in turn it’s annoying to have to equip and grind nine different characters, because there’s no “leaked experience” between the three teams. (If a team dies, it isn’t a game over, but the enemies take a huge percentage of your money and you still have to pay to revive them.) Further complicating matters is the skill system: Each character has MP, SP, and TP to keep track of, and each set of skills (in the five classes, which each character divides their XP differently among) uses a different amount of whichever points. And which weapons you can equip seems tied to your class levels, so you need to revisit shops periodically to see if you can upgrade any of your characters. (Though again, I give them credit that the “Test” feature in shops makes that easier.)
The fan translation is crucial to making this playable, of course, and while it’s full of repetitive language and crude boob jokes, I have no reason to believe that’s not accurate to the original. This feels like a 90s T&A anime, so it’s only recommended if that’s what you’re looking for. That said, I think it’s the grinding that actually broke me, because the difficulty ramps really fast after the first (short) mission and your characters are swiftly outmatched if you don’t level them all up before taking on the second cave. This got two hours before I’d had enough.
Bushi Seiryuuden: Futari no Yuusha, aka “WARRIORS Legend of the Blue Dragon -The Two Heroes-“ - On your fifteenth birthday, a giant bird-monster kidnaps your sister and blows up your house. As the son of a great warrior, you’ll need to rescue her and probably also defeat the Wicked God of the Sea along the way. A girl transformed into a floating monster joins you as the peanut gallery for your silent hero, as well as being your jump button and the source of some of your special attacks. And I need to give credit that the fan translation is excellent, giving personality to all the characters and narration while keeping an eastern feel to the setting.
This was made by Game Freak in 1997, and was one of the last SNES games. It feels a little like Gargoyles Quest with the multiple views, random battles, and side-scrolling action areas. It’s turn-based the way a roguelike is, where enemies only move and act when you do (on the map screen and in battle). Each battle is a puzzle to try to win in as few turns for the bonus XP and magatama (which you need for unlocking an endgame area). There are items to use on the map and menu screen, but the rpg elements are mixed and unusual. The side-scrolling areas are very strategic (you need to plan your moves carefully) but also still require a fast hand on the controller for a number of the puzzles.
I had started this a year or so ago on my RG350 but bounced off of the combat system. I tried again with an infinite health code and made it most of the way through the third chapter, about halfway through the game overall, before the battle sequences just because too involved and frustrating for my limited mastery of the system. I do think this is a genuinely good game (and I got about 6 hours of entertainment out of it), but you really need to grok the system and all of its nuances to play through the whole thing.