Get ready to defend White Base from the Principality of Zeon, Saturn fans — the English fan translation patch for Mobile Suit Gundam is finished and downloadable.
The patch’s lead developer, Shadowmask, posted the patch today in SegaXtreme’s Resources area. It can be applied to an original copy of the game using version 1.91 of the Sega Saturn Patcher.
Shadowmask and his team have worked for a year and a half to bring their translation of Gundam across the finish line. The main localization team included:
- Shadowmask: Localization Lead, Graphics Artist, Video Editor, Script Editor
- Mr. Conan: Reverse Engineer, Tools Developer
- wiredcrackpot: Translator, Script Editor
They were assisted by:
- Bo Bayles: Debug Menu Hack
- Silos: Additional Hacks
- Malenko: Graphics
- SoloNerfherder: Translator
- TrekkiesUnite118: Video Tools
- Danthrax: Research and Testing
Shadowmask marked the occasion with a trailer — featuring SHIRO!’s own PandaMonium narrating — modeled after a TV commercial for the original game:
There are nine Gundam games on the Saturn, all of them exclusive to Japan, but the one Shadowmask and his team translated is the very first one released on the console. Simply named “Mobile Suit Gundam” — or “Kidou Senshi Gundam” as it’s called in Japanese — it was developed by CRI and published by Bandai in December 1995.
It’s a sidescroller that blends hack-n-slash and run-n-gun gameplay. It follows the plot of the first three Gundam movies from 1980 and ’81, which were a compilation of the first Gundam anime series from 1979. The game includes occasional clips from the movies as well as a few story elements that appeared in the TV series but were cut from the movies. Its voiced dialogue features all new performances from the original voice actors.
Not only has the English localization team subtitled Gundam’s cutscenes, it also upgraded their quality by using higher-resolution versions found in the PlayStation 2 game “Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo.”
On the left is the original Japanese game’s cutscene. On the right is the English patch’s enhanced cutscene.
“This allowed me to match or exceed the original FMV clips in terms of quality, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible by using the original Cinepak clips from the Saturn version,” Shadowmask told SHIRO! over Discord. “They had extra footage mixed in so I had to edit them frame-for-frame to match the Saturn versions, before adding subtitles and encoding to Cinepak through Virtual Dub.”
The subtitles they used for those cutscenes are based on the ones from official home releases of the movies. But other parts of the game needed to be translated, from menus to staff credits to dialogue spoken by characters during levels.
That’s where wiredcrackpot came in, the project’s translator. She worked on two Saturn patches last year: Jung Rhythm as well as the retranslation patch for Silhouette Mirage.
”The cutscenes were subtitled before I came onto the project, using the official subtitles from the movies,” wiredcrackpot told SHIRO!. “All of the main game’s dialogue is present in the show (or movies) but I translated it how I’d translate anything else and I only worried about rendering some of the most well-known lines verbatim to how they’re known. The one guy proclaiming ‘This is no Zaku, boy! No Zaku!’ and Char’s ‘Blame this on the misfortune of your birth’ being two that easily spring to mind.”
But translating all of the non-video material presented its own challenges. In particular, to avoid having to redub the voice-only in-level interstitial scenes, the team had to find a way to add subtitles to the on-screen graphics. That meant figuring out Gundam’s compressed file format, which Shadowmask said was the team’s biggest hurdle.
“The stage titles, credits and the ANMs we added subtitles to were all run-length encoded (RLE) and the file structure needed to be reverse engineered,” he said.
Mr. Conan was instrumental in developing tools and reverse engineering the compression and file structure. He’s worked on other Saturn translation projects, including Lunar, Lunar 2 and the still-in-progress Soul Hackers and Terra Phantastica.
Once they reverse engineered the file format, they found it contained the palette and multiple run-length encoded bitmap graphics, including the main portrait and mouth animations used for in-level interstitial scenes.
”This enabled us to not only import new graphics, but crucially, increase the resolution as well,” Shadowmask said. “This was needed to create text boxes with the same dimensions as the rest of the game. The intent being to blur the line between the two.“
On the left is a spoken dialogue scene without subtitles during a level in the Japanese version of Gundam. On the right is the patch’s graphic with subtitles added — the green is transparent when used in-game.
The translation shows up like this in-game.
The higher quality FMVs aren’t the only quality-of-life improvements that the patch makes. It also includes easy access to the game’s debug menu — just press the X button at the title screen to bring up options for choosing a starting stage, turning on invincibility, viewing any video and more. It originally was accessible via much harder cheat codes and more stringent requirements about beating the game a certain number of times.
That easier cheat code was made possible by — who else? — Bo Bayles, the author of Under the Microscope features about secrets and cheat codes for SHIRO! each week.
“It’s difficult to enter; you’ve gotta go fast,” Bayles said of the original debug mode’s cheat codes. “So making it one button allows people with normal reflexes to enter it.”
For more information on those cheat codes and how Bayles found them, look for a new Under the Microscope feature about it here on SHIRO! later this week.
As for the future, Shadowmask said he’s likely going to tackle the two games based on Mobile Suit Z Gundam released in 1997.
“I’m excited to move on to Zeta Gundam, because it’s the same engine,” he said on Discord. “There’s less work to do. Just FMVs, narrated stills and gameplay. But it’s split between two games.”
They’ve even already got a start on it — wiredcrackpot transcribed the in-game text for the first Z Gundam game last year.
Awesome writeup, Dan!