Blast Wind Patch Boosts Music, Adds English Dub

A patch for Blast Wind — a 1997 Saturn-exclusive vertical shooter from the heralded shmup specialists at Technosoft that only released in Japan — came out over the weekend that boosts the game’s notoriously quiet music and translates the story via an English fan dub.

C_f, known as Terri in the SHIRO! Discord server, uploaded the patch Saturday to Mega.nz and linked to it from a SegaXtreme Resource page. It uses the XDelta patcher, since Terri said they couldn’t get it to work with the Sega Saturn Patcher.

The patch’s ZIP file includes a set of folders — drop a copy of Blast Wind into the “redump_original” folder, then double-click the apply_patch.bat file to automatically create a patched version of the game in the “patched” folder. Terri got help from Derek “ateam” Pascarella on creating the batch file.

The patch accomplishes the following:

• Newly added English dub during the intro sequence.
• A newly dubbed voice actor for the leader of the GORN Empire.
• Script injections that fix typos in the original English portions of the game (such as changing “Atlantiss” to “Atlantis”).
• Balances audio to make the music much more audible.
• A 1CC guide as a bonus.

A comparison between the audio balance in the original game and the fan patch. Footage captured using the Bizhawk emulator.

Both of the English voice actors are professionals who Terri said were paid for their work. The narrator is played by Nina Nikolic while the GORN leader is played by Noir Thornton.

The translation was done by Terri, who was up to the task — they said they’ve studied Japanese every day for three years. But still, as with many Saturn translation projects, it came with its own challenges.

“There were kanji I had to use a drawing tool for and check with a [Japanese-]speaking [friend],” Terri said on Discord. “So hard to make out characters in those old games a lot of times.”

They also had a hard time fitting their translation of the intro sequence into the time allotted. “Fitting the narration within like 80 seconds was quite brutal,” Terri said. “[I] had to reword the intro like crazy.”

Blast Wind’s intro with an English voiceover added to translate the Japanese text.

The original Blast Wind intro doesn’t have a voiceover, just on-screen characters, but choosing to add voiced dialogue to the intro’s music instead of editing the text was borne out of necessity.

The intro sequence is displayed using compressed graphics, and Terri said that compression prevented them from finding the graphics in the game’s files. That made replacing the audio with a version that adds voiced dialogue the easier option.

“So I opted to do a voice over instead, plus it was motivation to recast GORN’s leader,” Terri said.

GORN’s leader does speak English in the original version of Blast Wind, but it’s “nearly indecipherable,” Terri said.

“I had to rewind over 50 times to make out what he was saying,” they said.

Dubbing the game wasn’t what Terri set out to do originally, though. They wanted to boost the game’s music volume, which is often drowned out by its sound effects because of poor audio balancing.

“It’s one of my [favorite] shmups nobody played and a friend asked how feasible it would be to boost the volume of the [background music],” Terri said. “It just snowballed from there.

“Also there was no walkthrough for the game online so I thought it would be cool to bundle one with the patch where people would see it in 2024.”

This was Terri’s first Saturn patch, but they’re certainly not new to hacking and translation in general. Their Romhacking.net profile lists three other translations and eight hacks, including helping to translate Rent-A-Hero No. 1 on the Dreamcast last year.

This may not be their last Saturn patch, either — Terri said they’ve got their eye on Guardian Heroes, a game that did release in the West in 1996 but with an intro sequence that completely cut out dialogue present in the Japanese original. Whether they’ll add subtitles or make another fan dub remains to be seen.