An English translation patch for the Sega Saturn port of sidescrolling beat-em-up Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom is nearly complete, according to a recent update by the fan hacker working on it.
Lirinica posted March 6 on SegaXtreme that they’ve finished translating the text that appears before gameplay begins.
”I’m reaching the end of the project, now all that’s left is the story itself,” Lirinica said.
The post included several screenshots and videos showing off the translation’s progress.
Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom is one of the two games included in Capcom’s March 1999 compilation “Dungeons & Dragons Collection,” the other game being D&D Shadow Over Mystara. The collection was only released in Japan, although a pamphlet distributed by Capcom at E3 1997 insinuated that the company planned to bring it to the West.
Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara originally were arcade games that came out in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Since those hit arcades in the West, official English translations exist for them, and that’s what Lirinica is using for their Saturn patch.
The games are available outside arcades with official English translations already, though. They were ported to the Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC via Steam in 2013 in a collection named “Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara” complete with the official localizations.
Still, the Saturn community always appreciates playing translations of games on their favorite console, so the Tower of Doom project is welcome.
Lirinica has been working on getting the official translation of Tower of Doom into the Saturn game since 2023. The hacker discovered that the game uses different files for each screen’s text, rather than one master font sheet as other games use.
That led to a lot of work to translate the game file by file — Lirinica went radio silent for about a year, resurfacing last December. But the forum thread has been updated several times since then, as Lirinica has detailed the work involved in hacking the game.
The next update, whenever it comes, likely will be the most exciting one. Lirinica ended the most recent post by saying, “I’ll probably only update the topic when the translation is ready to be released (so I hope).”
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