Death Crimson 2 English Fan Translation Patches Out Now

An English fan translation for the sequel to a notorious Saturn lightgun shooter, Death Crimson, is out now, its project lead announced Tuesday.

Derek “ateam” Pascarella said on social media that he’s finished English patches for Japanese-exclusive Dreamcast lightgun shooter Death Crimson 2: Altar of Melanito. One patch is for the Dreamcast’s proprietary GDI format, usable for anyone with an optical drive emulator in their console or who are using an emulator, while the other patch is for those burning CDs to play on untouched Dreamcasts. Both of them can be downloaded from the project’s Github where patching instructions also can be found.

Pascarella began looking at Death Crimson 2 in early November and worked with three translators: Walnut, Filler and wiredcrackpot. The patches include more than just translated on-screen text, though. The Github lists the many improvements made to the game in these new patches:

• A new ASCII font has been implemented.
• All textures/graphics have been translated into English, in addition to correction of misspelled English place names (e.g., street signs) to align with official Western release of “Death Crimson OX.”
• All in-game dialogue/menu/message text has been translated into English.
• All in-game cutscene videos have been translated and subtitled in English, with special optimizations made for CDI version of the patch.
• New code for VMU icon supported has been added to the game.
• A bug has been fixed that prevented a certain piece of dialogue text from being displayed.
• Title screen graphics have been improved and re-rendered.
• All unlockable “Mission Mode” stages are enabled by default.
• VMU save file metadata has been translated into English.
• Missing disc art PVR has been added for GDmenu users.
• A brand-new cheat function has been implemented.
• The built-in web browser has been replaced with special bonus content in the Bonus Content section (previously this portion of the game was inaccessible to those who’ve never configured ISP settings on their Dreamcast, but this requirement has been removed).

The new cheat function resets the player’s credits to 255 and any countdown clock to 15 minutes whenever the L and R trigger buttons are pressed simultaneously during shooting gameplay or free-roaming gameplay.

The bonus content added to the game via the Dream Passport browser includes the opening video of the original Saturn game with English subtitles, an option to listen to the vocal ending theme, an archieve of fan-support messages from developer Ecole’s now-offline official website machine-translated into English, and even a video of series composer Kunitaka Watanabe playing the first game’s theme song.

One problem that couldn’t quite be solved in Death Crimson 2 was its compatibility with SCART cables, which seem not to work at all when using a lightgun controller in the game. Various console regions, lightgun regions and cable setups were tested, and a compatibility table can be found on the Github.

“If possible, these compatibility issues will be debugged and fixed in a future version of this English translation patch,” Pascarella said on Github. “However, without physical development kit hardware, this task remains highly difficult.”

Death Crimson 2 was released by Ecole Software on the Dreamcast in Japan in November 1999. It added a story mode that the Saturn original lacked, making an English translation particularly handy for learning the series’ lore. Its predecessor was a Saturn exclusive and is notorious for being one of the worst “kusoge” — a Japanese portmanteau that means “shitty game” — on the console. Despite that, Death Crimson 1 has garnered a cult following for being almost so bad it’s good. (Almost.)

Death Crimson 2 was followed up by a single sequel, Death Crimson OX, which hit Japanese Dreamcasts in May 2001 and came out in North America three months later. The series has been dormant since then.