Judging is over for the contest portion of the SegaXtreme Showcase, and so is the mystery surrounding its secret translation patch entry — it’s Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, as revealed Wednesday in a livestream.
Since March 2023, TrekkiesUnite118 has been working on inserting the official English script from the Nintendo 3DS version of Soul Hackers into the Saturn version, which only released in Japan.
In that time, he’s worked out how to implement a variable-width font to fit more text on screen and make it look better than a fixed-width font would. That’ll help him overcome the 3DS version allowing more characters per line, too.
But the biggest problem he’s faced over the last couple years has been rooting out problems caused by additional text that was added to the PlayStation and 3DS ports but weren’t present in the Saturn original.
“Part of getting this to work has been identifying that text and removing it because the Saturn game bugs out with it in place,” Trekkies said in the thread earlier this year.
All that work is on display in the patch submitted to the showcase, which still cannot be downloaded by the public yet. That’s because Trekkies still wants to get it in a more finished state before releasing something, he told SHIRO!.
“The main reason I submitted it was to show progress and that it’s not dead,” Trekkies said.
Most recently, he changed some of the katakana on the title screen to read “Devil Summoner” in English, although it didn’t make it into the showcase build.
Quite a bit of work remains, such as finding any remaining untranslated text and replacing it with the equivalent data in the 3DS version, not to mention rooting out any crashes or other odd issues, Trekkies told SHIRO!.
“Once that’s worked out then it’s on to implementing the [variable-width font] system and then beta testing for stability and other issues,” Trekkies said.
Trekkies is getting development assistance from Mr.Conan and playtesting help from several in the community, including CJ Iwakura, Xenogears, BowlofLentils and SHIRO!’s own PandaMonium. Mattobii has done some graphics work, too.
Trekkies, as many know, is no stranger to Saturn translation projects. He was on the team that brought the community the Sakura Wars and Sakura Wars 2 localizations. He also hacked Working Designs’ official English script into Grandia, and he released translations of the Floppy Disk Operator Disc and Sega Ages: I Love Mickey Mouse/I Love Donald Duck Collection.
Soul Hackers is one of eight translation patches submitted to the SegaXtreme Sega Saturn 31st Anniversary Showcase. You can read more about them and the showcase’s other submissions here.
Atlus developed and published Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers in November 1997 exclusively in Japan. It’s an RPG with first-person dungeon exploration that’s part of the Shin Megami Tensei series. Set in a futuristic city, the player and his hacker friends find a device that summons demons, which they use to explore a virtual reality space called Paradigm-X. It was the 27th best-selling Saturn game in Japan with about 320,000 copies sold, according to Sega Dreamcast Magazine. But it failed to reach the heights of its 1995 predecessor, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner, which sold just shy of half a million copies.
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