Get ready to shuffle your deck of magic cards and save the world — an English fan translation patch for Saturn-exclusive card-battling RPG Arcana Strikes is available to download now.
Team Meduza published the patch on their website Friday. For anyone having trouble accessing that site, the patch also can be downloaded from Romhack.ing.
The patch is in PPF format and its readme document directs users to download a utility known as “PPF-o-matic,” which can be found here. Paul Met, the patch’s lead programmer, said he used PPF rather than other formats like XDelta or SSP because it was more convenient for him — PPF was a popular format in the past for patching CD images.
Paul Met was joined on the project by Aishsha, the lead translator; Ryusui and TheMajinZenki, who did spot translations; Pennywise, who tested, edited and coordinated; and FCandChill, who helped test.
Paul Met said on the SHIRO! Discord server that it took about a year to finish the patch. “But the translation took much less time,” he said, “as I (was) distracted by other projects.”
The team first announced its intention to translate Arcana Strikes two months ago. At the time, Paul Met said the patch had been planned for the beginning of the year but was delayed to translate the game’s manual — a feature of previous patches by the team like Linkle Liver Story.
It seems that the team decided not to hold off on account of the manual any longer, as the readme says the manual “will be available later.”
Screenshots comparing the English patch of Arcana Strikes with the original Japanese game.
The readme lists three features of the patch:
- The game now supports one-byte encoding, DTE and color highlights for the dialogues.
- The cinematics use software subtitles.
- The game uses its own data caching system and does not require a RAM expansion cartridge.
Paul Met clarified that the one-byte encoding means two text characters are encoded in one byte of data, which allows for significant space savings. That’s important when Japanese often requires fewer characters than English to get information across.
The “cinematics use software subtitles” bullet point refers to the novel way in which the team handled the game’s FMV cutscenes.
Arcana Strikes’ cutscenes don’t take up the full screen and are centered, and they feature Japanese voiceovers with Japanese subtitles baked into the videos. Team Meduza moved the videos to the top of the screen and tapped into the game’s text box function to add English subtitles below the videos.
Arcana Strikes was published on the Saturn by Takara (of Battle Arena Toshinden fame) and developed jointly by Takara and Red Company (of Sakara Wars fame) in December 1997 in Japan only. It’s never been ported to another system or officially translated into any language other than its original Japanese.
In the readme, Paul Met said that he’d been eyeing Arcana Strikes for a long time, but didn’t have enough skill and experience to hack it properly.
“First of all, I was interested in the plot, since all the text is in Japanese,” he wrote in the readme. “In addition, the game looks very interesting (unusually implemented animation, allies and enemies in the form of a deck of cards, mysterious locations, etc.). The combat system is not as simple as it seemed at first glance (it reveals itself gradually).”
This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!