I like to keep my finger on the ROM hack translation world while scrolling for news in a morning. There are so many games that came out solely in Japan that never made it over to the West, and while learning Japanese myself and just playing the games as they were intended would arguably be one option of experiencing them, the fact that we’re getting hacks that translate them certainly makes things easier.
A modder by the name of Sakimotor has translated the Xbox 360 title Tetris The Grand Master: Ace which never made it out of Japan. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; it was the first of Arika’s ‘The Grand Master Series’ to come out for a home console back in 2005, and unless you were in Japan at the time or are reading this from Japan, then the chances are you will never have come across it.
Sakimotor has translated the game for English-speaking users using a combination of Google Translate and DeepL before doing some revisions to make sure they fit into the words and terms used in ‘The Grand Master’ series, all with no prior knowledge of the Japanese language. It all sounds pretty laborious to me, but it only took Sakimotor a few days to complete the task using their hex editing skills, and they’ve spoken about possibly getting a translator on board to correct parts of the patch in a future update.
So how do you get this patch working then? Well, according to Sakimotor on the blog post that accompanies the work, ‘The patch can be applied to the retail 1.0 release of the game, and translates most if not all the Japanese text in the game (I do not have an Xbox Live Gold subscription or a region-free console, therefore it is impossible for me to verify how well the XBL-exclusive game modes work).’
Check out a review of the project on YouTube below!
