An old project to translate Saturn strategy RPG Langrisser III into English is being revived this month — by two people in unrelated, simultaneous efforts.
What’s more, neither person originally was involved in the translation.
Two members of the Romhacking.net forums, Ralfguth and Vermillion Desserts, grabbed an old GameFAQs translation and an older translation patch of the menus at essentially the same time. After seeing each other post about their work on the forums, they’re now collaborating.
You can download an in-progress patch from Ralfguth’s GitHub. It includes instructions on how to build it using Python and a cloned GitHub project. If that’s a little beyond your technical expertise, feel free to download this XDelta patch prepared by Privateye at my request instead.
How we got here
Langrisser III is one of the earliest Saturn fan translation projects. CyberWarriorX released an initial patch in October 2001 that included hacking tools and a partial translation done by ElfShadow and Oogami.
Langrisser III’s page on Romhacking.net says the patch was last updated in 2015 and it only translates the game’s menus, leaving the rest of the in-game script in “mojibake” — garbled text caused by systemically replacing characters with the wrong character encoding.
Fast forward to 2016, when Akari Dawn translated all 125 of the game’s scenarios into English and uploaded the script to GameFAQs.
Fast forward again to almost two weeks ago on April 5, when Ralfguth posted in CyberWarriorX’s nine-year-old thread for Langrisser III’s translation patch on Romhacking.net’s forums to say he’s using CyberWarriorX’s old public work as a starting point to finish the project using Akari Dawn’s script on GameFAQs.
In the post, Ralfguth said his current progress was:
- English menus are working
- English scenario text is now rendering in-game
- I have a working rebuild pipeline for the current patch path
- scenario reinsertion is working again
And he was still working on:
- text spacing is too wide
- some voiced dialog behavior still needs investigation
- the dialog/layout side is still being reverse engineered and cleaned up
“The main breakthrough on my side was stopping the attempt to force a simple 1-byte ASCII path and instead going back to the game’s original 2-byte text system, then adapting the English data to that,” Ralfguth said. “So this is no longer just ‘menu translation only,’ but it’s also not finished yet.”
The next day, Vermillion Desserts said in the thread that they began working on Langrisser III over the previous weekend.
“I was fiddling with Langrisser V and I noticed the completed [CyberWarriorX] translation of Langrisser III just laying around,” Vermillion Desserts said. “I realized my LangV work could help a lot with this and so over the weekend I’ve been playing around with text injection and tilemapping and I’ve gotten pretty far in a couple of days.”
Vermillion Desserts has been pretty active in the Saturn translation scene this year. Two months ago, they released a patch for Lupin the 3rd: Pyramid no Kenja followed by a patch for the save menu in Willy Wombat last month.
They posted some screenshots and a YouTube video of their work so far on Langrisser III.
That led to Ralfguth and Vermillion Desserts talking about their respective work, which seems to have led to them collaborating together.
“You are more than welcome to use any of my work/research/files in your project, I’m happy to help,” Vermillion Desserts said in the thread.
Ralfguth posted a GitHub for the project Sunday with instructions on how to build a patch for his “Version 0.4” of the translation. Again, feel free to download this XDelta patch instead. Thanks to Privateye for making that.
In his GitHub profile readme file, Ralfguth says that he’s “using AI agents for heavy analysis and experimentation work” on the Langrisser III patch.
For Vermillion Desserts’ part, they’ve indicated in forum posts that they use both AI and machine translation in his processes, which could indicate those were also used on Langrisser III.
On the SHIRO! Discord server, Badspot already tried out the patch.
“I tested it out and it looks great so far,” Badspot said.
CyberWarriorX’s work continues
This isn’t the first time one of CyberWarrior X’s old translation projects has been picked up by someone else decades later. Eadmaster grabbed a 2014 GitHub release of CyberWarrior’s Princess Crown translation in October 2024 and worked on it until declaring it release-worthy six months later.
CyberWarriorX, for his part, apparently is still picking away at his Langrisser III patch. After someone informed him on the SegaXtreme Discord server that Ralfguth and Vermillion Desserts picked up his 25-year-old work, he talked about what he’s done privately with the translation.
“Ironically I was about to have some free time over the next while,” he said. “I was about to look into Langrisser III again.”
He said his latest work is using half-width fonts with extra fixes to several spots.
“The main issue I ran into is I have to go back and resize the font one more time,” CyberWarrior said. “8×16 is still too big. There’s also some compression that needs to be sorted.”
Tried it out on my Satiator last night an it all gets garbled in the first speech thread. Setting up the character was fun though its like Tactics Ogre. Kinda glad its not ready actually I’ve got Sakura Wars and SFIII to replay yet. Fingers crossed it gets there in the end!