Deep Fear, Resident Evil Get Spanish Fan Translation Patches

You must play Sega Saturn — or as you might say in Spanish, ¡debe jugar a Sega Saturn! Especially now, with a couple of high-profile Spanish fan translations of Saturn games releasing over the last week or so.

Last Wednesday, Mr.Nobody uploaded to Romhacking.net a Spanish patch for Deep Fear just about in time for the game’s 25th anniversary, which was July 16 in Japan and July 24 in Europe.

Mr.Nobody has done a lot of translation patches into Spanish, but most of them have been for the PS1. This is his first Saturn patch.

“The truth is that I must have played the game about four to five times,” Mr.Nobody said on Twitter, translated from Spanish, “it is one of those survival horror games that have been forgotten over time in the shadow of Resident Evil; I was fond of it and I did the translation.”

Anyone who wants to support Mr.Nobody’s work can donate to his Ko-fi page.

Deep Fear wasn’t the only horror game made more accessible to speakers of español last week. A few days before the Deep Fear patch dropped, Kitchen34 uploaded Spanish — and French — patches for Resident Evil on July 15.

They’re not quite finished, but he’s getting close, with the latest update over the weekend translating the options menu and the map, among other things.

Kitchens34 is working with ILDucci, who translated the Director’s Cut version of Resident Evil on the PlayStation into Spanish for a patch released in 2015.

And it’s not just retail games getting Spanish translations — sort of. A big fan of 7shades’ Cubecat took it upon himself to write up a Spanish translation last Friday.

The catch is that the translation, courtesy of P0PiTiN, is not a patch. Instead, attached to P0PiTiN’s post on SegaXtreme is a zipped-up Excel spreadsheet that provides Spanish translations alongside every instance of English text in Cubecat.

“I’m a big fan of CubeCat, I love it! It has become one of my favourite homebrew and works perfectly on my Saturn,” P0PiTiN said in the post. “Since not everyone understands English language, I’ve decided to contribute with a translation into Spanish. It would be an honour if you would like to include it.”

So it’s up to 7shades to decide whether to include a Spanish option in his next version of Cubecat using P0PiTiN’s spreadsheet.

While these aren’t the first Spanish fan translations for Saturn games, there haven’t been many. Romhacking.net lists just half a dozen before Mr.Nobody’s Deep Fear patch, including The Legend of Oasis and all three scenarios of Shining Force III, as well as unfinished patches for Panzer Dragoon Saga and Tomb Raider. All of those were released between 2006 and 2019.

On SegaXtreme, “prolific” doesn’t begin to describe Kitchen34, who has released several more Spanish patches over the last year, including for Brain Dead 13, Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster, Myst and Shinobi X (aka Shinobi Legions, as it was called in North America).

SegaXtreme also hosts the Spanish patch for Dragon Ball Z Legend that pitito released in April 2021.

It’s also worth mentioning that a Spanish translation of Policenauts has been in the works for years and continues to be in development by a team including SkyBladeCloud, GameZelda, Weskerm FacundoARG, Wolverin0, SaturnAR and cafe-alpha. A manual translated into Spanish can be downloaded from TioVictor Translations’ page about the Policenauts project.