The team of fans working on a translation patch for Sakura Wars 2 gave an update on their progress over the weekend.
The project’s editor, Bowloflentils, posted to social media Sunday a video showing off what the team accomplished over the last year.
Bowloflentils went on to say that over the last year, translators Matto Bii, CrouchingMouse and Natsume38 have translated the games’s battle scripts as well as its postgame “Long Day in the Theater” mode. They translated the adventure portions of the game in 2022.
“This was a massive task as the battle scripts were divided up into over 400 small files,” Bowloflentils said on X, formerly Twitter.
Other principle members of the team include project lead NoahSteam, programmer TrekkiesUnite118 and graphic artist Joqu.
Bowloflentils also posted screenshots showing their English translation patched into the game.
They’re still unsure when they’ll be finished with a publicly playable patch. Bowloflentils posted an image of text giving a rundown of what’s left to do, including editing many in-game menus and graphics as well as fixing numerous bugs and technical issues:
“We’re also in the process of implementing single-byte text encoding which has remedied some of the script size issues we’ve been running into,” Bowloflentils said on X.
The Sakura Wars 2 translation project was announced live on the SHIRO! Show in January and coincided with a translated patch for a Sakura Wars 2 demo disc that was entered into SegaXtreme’s 28th Anniversary Sega Saturn Game Competition.
Most of the team also worked on the English fan translation patch for the first Sakura Taisen game, which first released in 2019 and got an update in July 2021.
Sakura Wars 2, whose full Japanese title is “Sakura Taisen 2 ~Kimi, Shinitamou Koto Nakare~” is an adventure-tactical strategy hybrid game that Sega published exclusively in Japan on the Saturn in April 1998. It later was ported to the Dreamcast in 2000, PC in 2001 and Sony PSP in 2006. It’s never been officially localized outside Japan except for a Russian release on PC in 2008 despite being one of the top 10 highest selling Saturn games in Japan with an estimated 500,000 copies sold.
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.
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