Crescent Pale Mist (PC, 2006) — Although there is
an English fan translation patch for the game already on Romhacking.net, but the translation quality isn't good (which even the translator himself admitted) since it gets certain terminologies wrong (e.g. Yunou's ↓↓ + Attack move is called "Rowanveld", not Royal Blade), misspelled and incorrect names, has some out-of-place swearing, as well as programming and grammatical errors in the translated text itself. The translator said he was going to fix it but that was sadly dashed when the game got localized by Rockin' Android in 2010... except those bastards (but not Sara Leen though, she's the one exception from that company) released it exclusively through PSN as a digital only game, letting it die and get delisted five years later, and then tried to drum up demand for a potential PC re-release through Steam via Steam Greenlight when that used to be a thing and never fulfilled bringing the game back through Steam (like they did with Acceleration of SUGURI X-Edition HD and the Gundemonium trilogy until the latter got delisted too) despite lots of people, myself included,
wanted the PlayStation 3 version brought back to Steam with other possible enhancement it could have gotten (e.g. proper widescreen support, switching between the original or redrawn character and the original or updated stage visuals). What sucks even more is that even the doujin circle behind the game, ClassiC Shikoukairu, has vanished from the web too and their website has been seized by spam. I really wish somebody could either re-translate this game or (preferably) maybe even port over the official localization and polish it up seeing that Crescent Pale Mist is abandonware and neither The Lone Moogle or Rockin' Android are willing to give the PC version a good translation.
For those who never heard of this game, I don't blame you since it was an obscure doujin game that didn't get much exposure and didn't do so well overseas either when it was ported to PlayStation 3 when Rockin' Android localized it, but it's one of more unique action side-scrolling games I've played. It's not for those who get frustrated easily and there are some jank and not-so-well-thought-out gameplay elements (e.g. it's easy to get lost and dying before the boss not only forces you back to the beginning, but you also get locked out of enemy drops too), but it featured a very unique approach to non-linear level design (even if Stages 3 and 4 are absolute nightmares for all the wrong reasons on a blind playthrough), the graphics are nice for a 2006 game from an indie developer, the music is great, combat feels engaging (when the enemies/bosses aren't being cheap asses), and some of the boss battles have a nice sense of spectacle to them. It's just a shame the version that does provide a decent English experience with a few fixes to the gameplay is now lost to time
outside of emulation. Gameplay of the PC version:
(YouTube)
Namco x Capcom (PS2, 2005) — Similarly to Crescent Pale Mist, although an English fan translation exists, I don't think it's very good in my opinion. The dialogue feels off, includes out-of-place swearing that definitely feels like it wasn't in the Japanese script, some off-color dialogue (e.g. Reiji calling Xiaomu "retarded" which I'm pretty sure he would never say even if she's ditzy at times to get on his nerves), and various other text in the game that was left untranslated that to me feels very unpolished. There was
a retranslation project that has a beta of sorts and looked promising, but progress seemed to have died off since 2022. God, I really wanted to play this one too ever since seeing it on G4TV back in the day on CInematech where they showed off some Japan-only games that we never got and learning how it is the predecessor to the Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier series, but the quality of the fan translation we have, which I'm sure was no easy undertaking, but it has been kinda putting me off from playing it apart from my currently full plate of games I'm playing currently. I may mention some others that I can remember or wishing it got re/translated.
) DID in fact like the ocean breeze in the Japanese version. Why DeJap felt the need to change it so that she instead feels seasick is way beyond me. There's also that bar scene which originally had no dialogue during the fade to black. The fan translation just added a bunch of raunchy dialogue which feels completely out of character.
