English-speaking Saturn fans are dancing for joy now that there’s a translation patch for the console’s only full-fledged music rhythm game, Jung Rhythm.
It was made by a team that included Derek “Ateam” Pascarella, who did the programming; wiredcrackpot, who translated it from Japanese; Shadowmask, who worked on audio and video replacement; and Malenko, who created translated graphics.
It’s available at Ateam’s Github by clicking where it says “The latest version of this patch is 1.0” in the readme:
It’s a ZIP file containing versions of the patch for use in the Sega Saturn Patcher version 1.95 as well as the Xdelta patcher.
Ateam announced the patch’s public release Saturday morning on social media after he and the team only spent about a month working on it.
Viewers of the live SHIRO! Show last Friday got a sneak peak at the patch when TraynoCo tried out a not-quite-final build.
On the SHIRO! Discord server, Ateam detailed some of the things he did to hack a translation into Jung Rhythm, including implementing single-byte encoding to fit more English characters into tight spaces.
“I’m doing mass pointer reallocation for Jung Rhythm, had to do it for Death Crimson 2 as well,” he said less than two weeks ago. “Once you map the pointers out, it’s not so bad.”
Jung Rhythm — likely a shortening of “Jungle Rhythm” based on the game’s header file, the main character saying “jungle” in the main menu and other instances of the word throughout the game — has players press button prompts on screen in time to music in a similar fashion to a more famous PS1 rhythm game, Parappa the Rapper. There are occasional freestyle sections in which players can input anything, but the best play is to input one of the “finishing moves” in main character Vanilla’s arsenal.
The game also has a two-player battle mode where players can select other characters from the game’s story mode, each with their own finishing moves. All of those are detailed on the patch’s Github page.
There’s a bonus stage with a good ending if a high enough score is achieved on stage six, but the game is unforgivingly difficult, so anyone who wants to check out the translated ending cutscene or any other FMV from the game can do so on YouTube where Ateam uploaded all of them.
Altron developed and self-published Jung Rhythm in January 1998. Like many of their other Saturn games, Jung Rhythm stayed a Japanese exclusive, although Western gamers might know two of their localized works, fighting game Robo Pit and light gun shooter Mighty Hits.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
Leave a comment