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.
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:
This is fantastic news! I played through the entire game some 20+ years ago with Anoop’s guide but have been dying for an actual English translation on disc. Hats off to everyone that contributed to this, just awesome to get this game playable in English after so long. Hopefully they can get the bugs ironed out eventually, but still… just awesome 👌