English Fan Localization Finished, Released for J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues

The English fan localization of Saturn adventure game J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues is finished, its project lead, Arjak, announced Sunday night.

The patch can be downloaded from SegaXtreme. It includes the utility needed to apply the patch, Knight0fDragon’s Sega Saturn Patcher version 1.95.

Arjak mentioned two “important notes” in the patch notes:

• IMPORTANT NOTE #1: If you are upgrading from a previous version of the patch, be sure to re-patch a clean copy of Disc 1 with the new version. The ending scenes are on Disc 1, and are not translated in the previous version of the patch, meaning that if you do not create a new Disc 1 image, the ending will NOT be translated.
• IMPORTANT NOTE #2: Also, only apply the new patches with the included version of SegaSaturnPatcher! If you use another version, the patch will not be applied properly and the resulting disc images will have errors!

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. 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.

Blue Chicago Blues shares a lot of the same DNA as the later Nintendo DS release of Hotel Dusk: Room 215. That’s no accident — Blues’ designer, Takuya Miyagawa, went on to found Hotel Dusk development studio CING Inc., taking Blues’ planning/scenario lead, Rika Suzuki, with him. Miyagawa handled production on the Hotel Dusk series while Suzuki handled the game design and scenarios.

Blue Chicago Blues 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 that had to be translated and modified graphically, though, and that made up the bulk of his work over the project’s 11-month duration.

One notable example of on-screen text that needed a lot of work was a letter that J.B. Harold receives from his partner at the end of the game. It’s a full-screen image with Japanese text displayed on top of a somewhat complex background:

Arjak undertook the herculean task of redrawing the background to remove the Japanese text — by hand — so he could put an English translation there instead:

“This has been a labor of love for me,” Arjak said in the patch notes. That labor of love began in October last year when he started working to translate the game with just one other person — his sister, Kate, who did some initial translation work.

She left the project early on, resulting in a need for a new translator, as SHIRO! reported that December. Thankfully, a new translator, Duralumin, stepped up to the plate by the end of that month.

After entering a translated prologue into the SegaXtreme Saturn 28th Anniversary Game Competition in December, it took about four months before an updated patch translated the first chapter of Blue Chicago Blues’ story. Progress was steady from then on, with translations of chapters two and three coming in May and July.

During the summer, Arjak got some help from another member of the SHIRO! community, Shadowmask, who applied his expertise to restore the English audio, making it sound as clean as possible when coming out of the Saturn.

The translation was finished with the completion of chapter four last week, as SHIRO! reported Friday. Arjak spent the weekend testing before releasing the final patch into the wild at last Sunday evening with a simple message of “It’s done. Please enjoy” in the SHIRO! Discord server.

Oh, and keep an eye out — there’s an Easter egg that Arjak slipped into the patched game. After nearly a year of work, he can be forgiven for having a bit of fun with his labor of love.