Ninpen Manmaru on Saturn FINALLY Gets a Completed Translation!

You might be seeing this article, and thinking, “Wait, didn’t Ninpen Manmaru get a fan translation?” And you would be right! It did, well sorta..

Over 20 years ago, Alex Kidd and Simon Fang set out and did a partial translation of Ninpen Manmaru. Most of the text and cutscenes were translated, but many visual tile elements remained in Japanese. Sadly, the translation patch stopped updating quite a while ago, and the website and detailed information is long gone on the translation process, and now only exists as an internet archive site: http://web.archive.org/web/20020105004548/http://www16.brinkster.com/ninpen/PIY.html

Around February of 2020, SEGA Xtreme user darkfalzx decided to start hacking away at completing the translation effort by adding translated graphics into the game:

darkfalzx also found the game crashing when displaying the ending game text. I’m unsure if this glitch was introduced in the latest patch of the game before the original team went dark, or was introduced when the patch was implemented in Knight0fDragon’s patching program:

UPDATE:

Sega Xtreme user and contributor to the fan translation Privateye, Confirmed that said glitch existed way back in 2001 in the original patch:

Link to the bug report:
https://segaxtreme.net/threads/ninpen-manmaru-english-patched.24159/page-2#post-177337

Only a day ago from this post, darkfalzx finished his graphical element translation, and fixed the crashing ending text. As of now, the game is 100% playable in English!

Knight0fDragon and others mentioned working with him on tightening up some of the cutscenes to fix subtitle timing, and the font used in said subtitles, so we’ll have to wait a little longer to get a finalized patch. For those of you who want to just play the game in English, I’d highly recommend checking out the latest released patch!

If you’d like to follow the patch development on Ninpen Manmaru, you can follow the SEGA XTreme thread here:

https://segaxtreme.net/threads/ninpen-manmaru-english-patched.24159/

Thanks again to darkfalzx and everyone else for working on this patch! It’s crazy to see such an old fan translation get a tune up after all these years!