A new adventure awaits English-speaking Saturn fans now that a translation patch for Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon is complete.
The translator and hacker, Maud, posted a Google Drive link to the patch on social media today.
[Edit: May 8] It’s now also available for download on Romhack.ing here.
The patch uses a Sega Saturn Patcher file and comes with a readme document. The readme recommends using the Redump version of Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon labeled “(4M),” although the “(3M)” version likely will work, too.
Maud decided to call the game “Exhilarating Puyo Puyo Dungeon” in the patch. In Japanese, “waku waku” is an onomatopoeia for excitement that doesn’t have a direct English equivalent.
Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon is a top-down roguelike action RPG developed and published by Compile on the Saturn in Japan in April 1998 — the same month as Sakura Wars 2, which got an English translation patch less than two weeks ago. There are three playable characters, each with unique routes, and all three must be beaten to unlock the true final dungeon.
On BlueSky, Maud said that they worked on the patch on their own since 2019. While this isn’t the first translation patch Maud has worked on — check their website to see the others — they said this is their first from-the-ground-up project. “My previous ones were addendums to existing romhacks that already had support for English built in so [this is] a big milestone!” Maud said.
In the readme, Maud credits someone named ArcImpulse with showing them the ropes to assembly hacking as well utilities like Cartographer and Atlas to dump and reinsert text and Puyo Tools 3.0 to deal with the game’s proprietary file compression format.
Maud said on BlueSky that the biggest hurdle to completing the patch was dealing with the several different routines that Puyo Puyo Dungeon uses for text. “Most of them needed to be completely retooled to not freak out if everything wasn’t double byte aligned, so there was some whackamole going on hacking in support for ASCII,” they said.
Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon is a spinoff of the Puyo Puyo puzzle games, which themselves are a spinoff of the Madou Monogatari series of RPGs. Compile released a Madou Monogatari RPG on the Saturn a few months after Puyo Puyo Dungeon in July 1998 as well as two Puyo Puyo puzzle games on the Saturn, Tsuu and Sun, in 1995 and 1997, respectively. All of them were exclusive to Japan.
Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon was ported to the PlayStation in March 1999 with some changes, which Maud addressed in the translation patch’s readme file.
“They’re mostly the same,” the readme says, “but the PlayStation one is an enhanced edition with touched-up graphics, a bonus dungeon, more enemy/item variety, a new soundtrack, and various balance adjustments to make the experience a little smoother. It’s more polished overall, but they took a fan-favorite song out of the final dungeon and it purportedly has a nasty habit of randomly crashing on original hardware, so the Saturn version does have that going for it.”
This is amazing! The amount of translations we’ve been getting lately is unreal! Just awesome suff here. As a massive fan of this game – putting well over 500 hours into it – I have to disagree about the PS1 version being better though. The added graphical effects are mainly 3D polygons, such as the 3D lava in the volcano stage, and the 3D layer of water in the Aqua stage look quite poor in my opinion. The line scrolling water in the Saturn game is far nicer, though the lava level is lacking such animation in the background. The “redone OST” also, is merely the PS1’s inferior audio chip trying and failing to match the quality of the Saturn’s music. Just like Mega Man 8, the Saturn chip has more channels and sounds far better overall. Not to be too negative though, I really have to thank the translator for their hard work, and now everyone can enjoy this fantastic game!