An English translation for Saturn dungeon crawler Dungeon Master Nexus was released by a fan Wednesday.
The effort came as a surprise to the Saturn community. It was made by ChristopheF and released on his Dungeon Master fan site, Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia, without any announcement beforehand that a patch was being worked on.
It’s a welcome surprise, though — many fans have been waiting for an English translation of Nexus. It’s exclusive to the Saturn and was only released in Japan in March 1998. It was the fifth and last entry in the Dungeon Master series, which began in 1987 on the Atari ST. It was developed and published by Victor Soft, although they did so under license from the series’ original developer, Faster Than Light.
Like previous Dungeon Master games, Nexus is a first-person dungeon crawler in which the player uses swords and magic to fight monsters through 15 levels. A fan of the series in the SHIRO! Discord server, Blueskyrunner, said Nexus is similar to the Wizardry games, except the combat and exploration are in real-time in its fully 3D engine instead of turn-based.
“Definitely one of the system’s hidden gems,” Blueskyrunner said.
The translation changes all on-screen Japanese into English and adds English subtitles to the cutscenes while leaving the original Japanese dialogue intact.
ChristopheF admitted that neither Japanese nor English is their native language, so “there might be room for improvement” in the translation. They asked for help and feedback in the thread they posted to SegaXtreme.
They didn’t just translate the game, either — ChristopheF fixed a couple bugs, as noted in the patch notes:
- Sabre and Samurai Sword item images (in inventory and on the floor), names and descriptions were swapped.
- Staff Of Manar’ and Yew Staff item images (in inventory and on the floor) were swapped.
The translation process itself is a bit more complicated than Saturn fans are used to. Rather than creating a patch that uses the Sega Saturn Patcher or the Xdelta patcher, ChristopheF provided individual files in a 7zip file with instructions in a readme for how to swap the original game’s files with them.
The 7zip file does not include cutscene video files with English subtitles because of their large size, either — the readme says those can be obtained only by downloading a prepatched copy of the game, which also is available on ChristopheF’s Dungeon Master site.
It’s also worth nothing that the instructions result in a game that is region-locked to North America. They recommend using the Saturn Region Patcher utility on SegaXtreme to change the region to something else, though.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
This is phenomenal news!!
I’ve been debating on stumbling through this one in Japanese or hold out for a patch for a long time now. What a great tike to be a Saturn fan, these wonderful people are spoling us something terrible, major thanks to ChristopheF!