A fan translation is in the works for the sequel to a notorious Saturn lightgun shooter, Death Crimson, its project lead announced Wednesday.
Derek “ateam” Pascarella, who’s led many Dreamcast fan translation projects — from visual novel Nakoruru to puzzle game Sakura Wars Columns 2 — said on social media that he’s begun work on an English patch for Japanese-exclusive Dreamcast lightgun shooter Death Crimson 2: Altar of Melanito. He’s working with a translator named Walnut with whom he’s collaborated on other projects.
He uploaded a YouTube video showing off the progress he’s already made.
In a thread on the Dreamcast-talk forums, Derek said he began looking at the game in early November. Since then, he’s written tools necessary to extract and insert text as well as used assembly code hacks to make translation easier.
“Insanely, all of the game’s text is stored directly in the executable itself! My tools essentially just move everything around and adjust all pointers so that I can fit as much English text as I need. Furthermore, I’ll be taking advantage of the game’s katakana and hiragana fonts that are always present in RAM to store additional text that doesn’t fit in the executable. This is actually a very fortunate circumstance, as A) I no longer need either of those font sheets and B) they afford me over 12K in extra space.”
— Derek “ateam”
In addition to translating on-screen text — he estimated there are about 2,000 lines of dialogue — Derek said he plans to make a few other improvements:
- Redoing the title screen’s menu graphics (the original are seen in this preview video, which I find a bit hideous).
- Replacing the “Dream Passport” option on the title screen with an English-language web browser with baked in bonus content, like a 100% unlocked save, and perhaps some artwork.
- Subtitling all FMVs in English.
- Probably implementing a hotkey button combo for giving the player 255 credits at any point during the game (effectively infinite continues).
There’s one more improvement that he may need some help to make possible, though: Making Death Crimson 2 work with PAL-region consoles using the PAL lightgun. He posted today that he’s looking for owners of PAL Dreamcasts with non-PAL lightguns to test remedies to the issue.
Derek said he doesn’t know when he and Walnut will be finished with the patch, but SHIRO! will be sure to follow along with its progress.
Death Crimson 2 was developed and published by Ecole and released only in Japan in November 1999. Its predecessor was a Saturn exclusive and is notorious for being one of the worst “kusoge” — a Japanese portmanteau that means “shitty game” — on the console. Despite that, Death Crimson 1 has garnered a cult following for being almost so bad it’s good. (Almost.) In the very least, its music is great thanks to composer Watanabe Kunitaka.
Death Crimson 2 was followed up by a single sequel, Death Crimson OX, which hit Japanese Dreamcasts in May 2001 and came out in North America three months later.
While the series has been dormant for more than 20 years, the Saturn original remains in the consciousness of Japanese gamers. A Japanese comedy duo who love games named Kaminari interviewed the CEO of Ecole, Yoshiyuki Manabe, last month on their YouTube show.
According to a summarization by Japanese entertainment news website Gadget Tsuushin (News), Manabe said Death Crimson was developed in only five months. “He said that although he worked like he was going to die and released the game thinking that he had created a good product, the public told him to die” after the game’s release, Gadget Tsuushin’s article said via machine translation.
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