New Patch for Blue Chicago Blues Translates Chapter 2 into English

Arjak released an update to his ongoing project to localize J.B. Harold Blue Chicago Blues into English, making available a new patch that translates about half of the game.

The patch can be downloaded from its resource page on SegaXtreme.

The updated patch, released May 31, newly translates chapter 2 of J.B. Herold. Just a month prior, Arjak put out a patch for chapter 1. Before that, he entered a translated prologue into the SegaXtreme Saturn 28th Anniversary Game Competition in mid-December last year.

Considering there are just four chapters in the game — in addition to the prologue — it appears that Arjak is more than halfway finished. It’s pretty good progress after beginning the project in October with just one other person — his sister, who did some initial translation work.

She left the project early on, resulting in a need for a new translator, as Shiro reported in December. Thankfully, a new translator, Duralumin, stepped up to the plate by the end of that month. Progress has been steady since then.

J.B. Harold Blue Chicago Blues is the fifth and final entry in the J.B. Harold series of hard-boiled detective murder mystery adventure FMV games developed and published by Riverhill Soft Inc. It was first released in Japan for the Pioneer LaserActive in April 1995, then was brought over to the United States later that year.

Riverhill Soft went on to port the game over to multiple platforms, including Windows PC, NEC PCFX, 3DO, Saturn and PlayStation. The Sega Saturn version was released in Japan in September 1995 and was never localized in the West. In fact, the only English versions are the LaserActive and Windows PC ones.

The U.S. Windows release is partially what’s made Arjak’s project possible, as he’s pulled the FMV cinematics with English dialogue out of that game and used arcane ’90s tools in an emulated Macintosh environment like MovieToSaturn to swap them in place of the Saturn version’s Japanese videos. There’s still a lot of on-screen text to translate and modify, though, and that’s made up the bulk of his work over the last eight months.

Following the previous Murder Club, Blue Chicago Blues’ story features the fearless private detective, J.B. Harold, as he investigates the murder of an unknown woman in a red dress in Chicago. The previous detective on the case has been murdered, and the killer has made it look like a suicide. J.B. Harold arrives at Chicago and must work together with the local police and to solve the mystery.