Finally Lupin III Saturn fans, after all these years you can now play Lupin the 3rd: Pyramid no Kenja (Or known in English as Sage of Pyramid):
https://romhack.ing/database/content/entry/XJ5SNtjQSvK5-CLf2YUFeg/lupin-iii-the-sage-of-pyramid-english-translation
For those of you unaware, Lupin the 3rd is a famous manga/anime property in Japan written by Kazuhiko Katō, also famously credited under his pen name: Monkey Punch.
The series focuses on famed thief Arsène Lupin III, grandson of the fictional gentlemen thief Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc. Lupin III with his friends Daisuke Jigen, an expert marksman, Goemon, a master samurai who’s a descendant of the very real Ishikawa Goemon, and occasional teammate/femme fatale Fujiko Mine, plot and steal treasures all over the world with varying levels of success and seriousness.
We originally covered this game in our podcast on Tomb Raider, featuring it as our Obscure Game of the Cast. I even brought up how much more I preferred it over the game we covered for the podcast!
Patch creator Vermillion Desserts posted a video Feb. 18 of a work in progress build featuring graphical text redrawn in English and cutscenes with subtitles:
The only missing pieces at that point were Fujiko’s post-level score screens, and the rest of the level names according to his post on romhacking.net.
About 10 days later, he then released his patch, meaning the entire patch took him three weeks to complete and translate from start to finish!
Listed below are a few examples of changes in this translation patch:
We asked Vermillion Desserts a couple questions on his YouTube video, and he was kind enough to reply and give us insight on his translation project:
SHIRO: Love the work on the translation, Lupin III is one of my favourites! How did you go about translating it?
Vermillion Desserts: “I mostly just followed Malenko’s advice from the “Let’s replace Sega Saturn graphics.” thread on SegaXtreme. I used Aegisub and a couple versions of VirtualDub for subtitling. The video encoder only worked in Windows 95 though, that was a pain. All of the texture files I ended up editing used CMP compression and that threw me for a loop at first but once I realized what I was looking at I was able to find tools for that.”
SHIRO: Hey, it’s great to get an English patch for this, it’s a really impressive 3D title. Is this your first time hacking a Saturn game? What made you want to translate this one?
Vermillion Desserts: “Yeah, this was my first Saturn game, and my first time using a memory editor for anything. I picked this one because I stumbled across it, played it start to finish and loved it the whole time. I guess I kind of just wanted to give it a little exposure bump. That and I picked a bit of a big boy for my first translation project, and I kind of wanted to feel like I could finish something without dragging it out for five+ years, this felt like a good fit. I’d heard of Lupin III before this but I didn’t really know a lot about it, I started watching the 100% perfect no-notes Red Jacket dub while I was working on this and am now a fan.”
One thing to note to fully disclose, is that Vermillion Desserts is the only one listed as working on the project, with no readme or information attached to the romhacking.net entry. Looking at forum posts, he has indicated he uses both AI and Machine Translation in his processes, which could indicate those were also used to translate this project:
Let us know what you think of the fan translation in the comments below!
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