Princess Crown's English translation is almost complete.
As spotted by Sega Saturn Shiro, eadmaster's translation—forked from SamIAm and Cyber Warrior X's own localisation project, which started 13 years ago—has recently seen a pair of “Release Candidate” patches arrive in quick succession.
As the name suggests, marking something as a "Release Candidate" means it's close to being done and dusted, and released in the wild.
Here's what's featured in both of the updates:
1.0 RC1
- better fix for the soft locks after the dragon fight and the beginning of the Larva fight, restored full dialogues in the cutscenes (contributed by Mentill)
- fixed infinite loading when entering the Notice Drop side-quest tower and Demon Tower/Time Stone cutscene freeze in v0.9.5 (with the help of Mentill)
- updated widescreen hack to v1.2, fix for garbled graphics while obtaining the Earth stone (EX builds only), removed transparency on Amberstep villagers (contributed by Paul Met)
- script fixes, removed some unnecessary capitalizations
- resized and recentered a few more signs
- fixed bottom padding on the selection dialogs (contributed by Mentill)
- capitalization and other script fixes
Original Story: Wed 15th Jan 2025
Princess Crown is arguably one of the Sega Saturn's best games, but it sadly never got released outside of Japan, meaning that very few people actually got to play it.
Directed by George Kamitani, who would later found Vanillaware, this 1997 action RPG has had unofficial translation projects attached to it for what feels like forever, but it's only very recently that we've seen any progress on this front.
As we covered here, a translation venture for Princess Crown kicked off all the way back in 2012 thanks to the efforts of SamIAm and Cyber Warrior X. Despite a positive start and repeated assurances that the project was processing well, no playable version of the patch appeared.
Fast forward to 2024 and eadmaster appeared on the scene with a translation effort based on SamIAm and Cyber Warrior X's work. While there has been some drama surrounding this project, eadmaster is clearly pulling ahead when it comes to making Princess Crown playable in English, as he's just released version 0.8 of his patch, which fixes a lot of the issues that were present in the previous release.
As noted by The Sega Guys, this new version not only cleans up some of the text problems but also adds (for the first time) English text to the radial menus, combat and shops. It also deals with some of the annoying soft-lock events.
It's not perfect – there are times when text overruns into multiple boxes, which looks rather unsightly, but it represents a massive stride forward for the project.
Here's what's new in version 0.8:
- all story events, items and names translated
- using a fixed-width/monospaced font, with condensed spaces (not VWF)
- most doorway signs are translated
- all book/scenarios fully tested and crash-free
