Princess Crown Finally Playable in English on SEGA SATURN!

Since this article was published, it has come to our attention that the person who created the patch used old resources and did not communicate with the original translator or hacker. Read the response from the original translator, who said he did not sign off on this release.

UPDATE: As of 10/30/24, CyberWarriorX and SamIAm posted an update on their current progress on Princess Crown:

“SamIAm and I began our Princess Crown translation in the spring of 2012,” CyberWarriorX wrote. “By the year’s end, we had a complete first draft of the script and a print routine displaying English characters in-game, but it was all very rudimentary, and the bulk of our work still lay ahead of us. In February 2013, I created a public GitHub with a snapshot of the project in its then-current state with the hope of attracting someone to help me solve some technical issues. After making more progress, however, Sam and I agreed to keep the team to just the two of us for the sake of simplicity. Years went by, and real life kept us both very busy, but we each made great progress, and neither of us ever considered abandoning the project. The GitHub, meanwhile, was never updated.

“Last week, Eadmaster took the assets from that now-ancient GitHub project, made a few minor adjustments, and used them to release his own Princess Crown translation. He did this without so much as giving us notice beforehand, much less asking permission. Strictly speaking, GitHub’s licensing terms do allow him to do so. However, in practice, this kind of thing is widely considered to be disrespectful and poor etiquette in the game translation scene. As we had always made clear, the translation as it existed then was not ready to be seen. Furthermore, it is now wildly obsolete.

“With this video, we aim to demonstrate our progress and show people that ours will be the translation worth playing. No, we aren’t releasing a beta now, and no, we can’t make promises about when we’ll finish. What we can say is that Princess Crown deserves a high-quality translation, and that’s what we intend to deliver. Going forward, we’ll try to release more in the way of updates and previews. To fans of the game and everyone who has been waiting, we thank you for your patience. Believe us, we’d like us to get this thing finished, too.”

You can watch the update video on their progress here:

This is the big one, the English fan translation everyone has been asking for. Princess Crown is NOW PLAYABLE IN ENGLISH ON THE SEGA SATURN!

It was posted Friday by fan hacker eadmaster on their GitHub. If you’d like to try out the fan translation yourself, you can download it and follow the patch instructions here.

For those of you not in the know, fan translators CyberWarriorX and SamIAm have been working on a fan translation patch for Princess Crown since 2013. Due to various life events going on, the translation has been notoriously delayed, and eventually the work done by both was posted online in a GitHub repository.

Fast forward a few years. A user going by the name eadmaster posted interest in reviving the project, continuing the work shared on the repository all that time ago. After less than a month of work, eadmaster successfully added English text to Princess Crown, posting about it on SegaXtreme:

Finally, after much work, all story events and names were inserted into the game, and Princess Crown in English finally started taking shape! eadmaster dropped version 0.3 on their GitHub, and Princess Crown became playable after all these years in English!

There is still a bit of work to be done to get Princess Crown ready for the big time. According to eadmaster, they wish to shorten some lines in the dialog to reduce pausing, increase the font size, insert missing symbols in the font, and insert translations for items still in Japanese.

Playing through the currently available patch, we’ve also found issues involving the item selection menus overlapping and becoming unreadable:

While some minor glitches exist, it’s amazing to see all the progress made by eadmaster, building off the work of CyberWarriorX and SamIAm to make a long sought-after game more playable for English speakers.

Princess Crown is a 2D action RPG published by Atlus in Japan in December 1997. It was developed by an internal team that would later split off into Vanillaware, whose distinct artistic style began with this game. It was a Saturn exclusive until a port to the Sony PSP in 2005 that was itself ported to the PlayStation 4 in 2020. No version has been officially translated into any language outside their original Japanese.

Fellow SHIRO! Dan the Megadriver from The SEGA Guys took a look at the translation patch — check out his video: