What are your gaming translation white whales? Games you want to see translated but feel it'll never happen?

[HikaruKitsune]

Oh, right, just thought of another one.

-Metalgun Slinger (GBA)

 

[Big Finger Jim]

Bastards only localized it to Italy.

 

[PhrawzT]

I wish more Princess Maker games got translated. PM2 on PC is the only one I have found in English.

Not many Japan only Xbox games, but these two never got an English port.

 

[hazys]

I wish more Princess Maker games got translated. PM2 on PC is the only one I have found in English.

PM1 susprisingly got an English version on the Switch, with zero fanfare.

I'd like to see one of the Fuuraiki games translated. My real "white whale" is Shirachuu Tankenbu... a PS2 visual novel that nobody knows about, let alone wants to translate.

 

[RustySK]

Mine would absolutely be Busin 0: Wizardry Alternative NEO these days.

Someone actually made a super detailed translation guide for it a couple years ago (as @Strategist informed me - thanks again for that, btw), but since nothing further ever came from that and oldschool first-person dungeon crawlers aren't exactly crowd pleasers anymore these days, I don't expect we'll see this one translated any time soon.

 

[Metavøid7]

Digan no Maseki​

View attachment 35510


I love the art and music for this game. The plot seems unique even today. The gameplay sounds interesting and fairly deep though I don't even know what the combat is like (I think it plays more like an early Wrpg which is more interesting to me than like a typical Final Fantasy style JRPG). Everything I know about it fascinates me, but I don't wanna look too deep into it in case it does ever get translated even though I don't think thatd happen at least not anytime soon. And maybe its actually not that good but i'd like the chance to find out. All we have for now is this.

I've posted this before in other threads but I'll post it again:
The Summon Night mainline games from 1-4
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I think Summon Night 3 should really get a fan translation because out of all the SN games Japan considers 3 to be the best in the series, also I think the PSP is the definitive version

 

[Zeroplayers]

I have a few so I will just list some off the top of my head:
Basically any JP only Gundam games from the ps3 era would be nice especially considering stuff like side stories has the stories of both the Pale Rider and the Blue Destiny (which are pretty big when it comes to Gundam game side of things), I think the closest we got to a translation for the era was one for gundam age (which that games a psp game and the translation was only for menus and all that stuff)
A complete translation of the Code Geass PS2 and DS games would be nice lol
I dont have much else that I don't think are possible its just those 2 cuase I havent really seen someone attempt to do one (or in geass' case finish one) which is fair

 

[AceOfAces]

Any Super Robot Wars game. This isn't so much 'never translated' but more 'never translated well', as the fan translation efforts have mostly been shitshows (the only ones that are really halfway decent are AGTP's SRW 3 and Alpha Gaiden patches) and the official localizations are actually awful, frequently entirely mistranslating text or adding text where there isn't any. The fan-translated A Portable, J, and OGs are just as bad if not worse, with OGs in particular choosing to grandfather in a mistranslation from A Portable for no particular reason other than it was the same lead editor and arbitrarily changing dialogue, adding anachronistic memes, and having some technical issues that aren't present in the unpatched game (notably involving text overflowing from a box when set to autoadvance). I actually wrote a review about this on romhacking.net for the patch which resulted in my info getting passed to the patch team and caused me to cop some harassment and closed-door pork-barreling.

Alpha in particular suffers here because it leans heavily into the Visual Novel style they experimented with in SRW Gaiden. You have two sexes and four personality types to choose from when you make the Protagonist and their Significant Other; each possible combination has somewhat different dialogue, reflecting their different personalities, and this does not just apply to in-battle lines; their actual visual novel dialogue is different, sometimes radically. Both previous attempts at translating Alpha that I'm aware of (both AGTP's abortive, forever-hibernating version, and a more recent attempt headed by the crew that did J, A Portable, and OGs) indicated they had no interest in actually translating most of this dialogue, and instead were planning to simply reuse the same dialogue in all instances for that sex.

Something that put this into stark context for me when I was actually playing Alpha (I was mostly fiddling with retroarch's auto-translation functions and Alpha is pretty well-documented on Akurasu) is that even stuff that we've been taking as basic information for years was never translated properly in the first place.
For example, there are four personality types, which are as follows:
真面目で正義が強 commonly translated as "hot-blooded" or "serious"
沈着冷静で頭脳明晰 commonly translated as "calm" or "cold genius"
内気で心優しい commonly translated as "weird"
陰気で楽天家 commonly translated as "gloomy"

The actual text is vastly more descriptive:
真面目で正義が強 is "Serious/honest/sincere, with a strong sense of justice/righteousness"
沈着冷静で頭脳明晰 is a combination of two four-kanji compounds (yojijukugo), meaning "Calm, cool, and collected" and "being clearheaded, having a keen/sharp/brilliant mind" respectively
内気で心優しい is "shy/timid/bashful and kind/tenderhearted/compassionate"
陰気で楽天家 is "gloomy, and/but optimistic/easygoing"

This pretty radically changes the meaning (to be fair, the 'shy' one does actually just have a lot of weird dialogue in battle) and it goes to show the degree to which, as a loose and fragmentary community, the SRW community has completely failed to actually fact check anything for ages. While it's common to simply use the first word as a shorthand, the personality types were frequently presented as an entire translation, which is obviously incorrect.

Spoiler: Bonus nerd details that are off-topic

Incidentally, as far as I'm aware, during the leadup to Alpha 2, Banpresto ran a poll for which protagonist pairing and personalities people picked, which lead to Kusuha being selected as the protagonist (Gloomy) and Bullet as the Significant Other (Serious), with a second question asking about if they went Super or Real. What's interesting about this is that Gloomy Super Kusuha won, which is not her default setting: if you simply select her portrait, Alpha will autofill Shy personality and Real pilot type. This caused a knockon effect in OGs, as some of the Alpha pilots in OGs have had their default personalities and unit types shuffled around:

Name	Alpha Default	@2-3/OGs Canon
Kusuha (F)	Shy+Real	Gloomy+Super
Bullet (M)	Serious+Super	Serious+Real*
Ryoto (M)	Shy+Real	Gloomy+Real
Yuuki (M)	Cold+Real	Cold+Real
Tasuku (M)	Gloomy+Super	Shy+Super
Rio (F)	Serious+Super	Serious+Real**
Leona (F)	Cold+Real	Cold+Real
Carla (F)	Gloomy+Super	Shy+Real

*Bullet's mainstay ride until halfway through OG2 is the Huckebein Mk-II, the Real protagonist unit from Alpha, but his stats are much better suited to piloting a Super, and he upgrades to one full-time from OG2 onwards, mirroring Alpha 2's introduction of the Celestial Directions units. KohRyuJin is much faster and more fragile than a standard Super, but has attack-negating abilities (which is good because Bullet has Real pilot defensive stats).
**Rio's stats are more suited to using a Super in OG1, but there are much better pilots to give your Supers to, and her canonical unit is a Gespenst Mk-II-TT. In OG2 and onwards, she pilots Huckebein variations (not very well, sadly; making the Huckebein Gunner a single-seater arguably nerfed her by taking away the only thing she was good for, which was being Ryoto's SP battery).

As you can see, the "Gloomy" and "Shy" personality types typically got switched around from their Alpha defaults to OGs, which preserves the original idea where there was a preset for each personality type in each sex; what wasn't preserved was an equal split of pilot type.

 

[Lithlad]

Maten Densetsu: Senritsu no Ooparts is my #1, for sure in terms of feeling like it will most likely never happen.
View attachment 44645

I hadn't heard of Maten Densetsu before, but I just checked it out and the game looks fucking dope, so I'll join you praying for a translation.

 

[rematche]

The main PS2 Super Robot Wars titles, Impact, Alpha 2, Alpha 3, MX, and Z. MX being potentially one of the longest JRPGs ever made does not help it's likelihood of getting a fan patch at all. I feel like Z or Alpha 3 are the ones most likely to get TLs since other entries in the Alpha and Z series' respectively have gotten fan patches but I'm not sure.

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yep. but no to this:

this is an awesome rare srw game. it's a beat em up.

Post automatically merged: Mar 22, 2025

Ashita no Joe: Masshiro ni Moe Tsukiro!
I can only hope that with the manga getting an official translation, Ashita no Joe gets more English speaking fans and this game finally gets translated, and maybe the gba game too
View attachment 35546

i had to ask, do you also die in this game too when you play joe?

 

[downloadingshit]

All Medarot games. Got hooked on the GBA RPG as a kid and never found something like it ever again.

Currently I know 1 and 3 are translated with 4 being worked on as of now.
Their Github is here

 

[starman271]

Any Super Robot Wars game. This isn't so much 'never translated' but more 'never translated well', as the fan translation efforts have mostly been shitshows (the only ones that are really halfway decent are AGTP's SRW 3 and Alpha Gaiden patches) and the official localizations are actually awful, frequently entirely mistranslating text or adding text where there isn't any. The fan-translated A Portable, J, and OGs are just as bad if not worse, with OGs in particular choosing to grandfather in a mistranslation from A Portable for no particular reason other than it was the same lead editor and arbitrarily changing dialogue, adding anachronistic memes, and having some technical issues that aren't present in the unpatched game (notably involving text overflowing from a box when set to autoadvance). I actually wrote a review about this on romhacking.net for the patch which resulted in my info getting passed to the patch team and caused me to cop some harassment and closed-door pork-barreling.

Alpha in particular suffers here because it leans heavily into the Visual Novel style they experimented with in SRW Gaiden. You have two sexes and four personality types to choose from when you make the Protagonist and their Significant Other; each possible combination has somewhat different dialogue, reflecting their different personalities, and this does not just apply to in-battle lines; their actual visual novel dialogue is different, sometimes radically. Both previous attempts at translating Alpha that I'm aware of (both AGTP's abortive, forever-hibernating version, and a more recent attempt headed by the crew that did J, A Portable, and OGs) indicated they had no interest in actually translating most of this dialogue, and instead were planning to simply reuse the same dialogue in all instances for that sex.

Something that put this into stark context for me when I was actually playing Alpha (I was mostly fiddling with retroarch's auto-translation functions and Alpha is pretty well-documented on Akurasu) is that even stuff that we've been taking as basic information for years was never translated properly in the first place.
For example, there are four personality types, which are as follows:
真面目で正義が強 commonly translated as "hot-blooded" or "serious"
沈着冷静で頭脳明晰 commonly translated as "calm" or "cold genius"
内気で心優しい commonly translated as "weird"
陰気で楽天家 commonly translated as "gloomy"

The actual text is vastly more descriptive:
真面目で正義が強 is "Serious/honest/sincere, with a strong sense of justice/righteousness"
沈着冷静で頭脳明晰 is a combination of two four-kanji compounds (yojijukugo), meaning "Calm, cool, and collected" and "being clearheaded, having a keen/sharp/brilliant mind" respectively
内気で心優しい is "shy/timid/bashful and kind/tenderhearted/compassionate"
陰気で楽天家 is "gloomy, and/but optimistic/easygoing"

This pretty radically changes the meaning (to be fair, the 'shy' one does actually just have a lot of weird dialogue in battle) and it goes to show the degree to which, as a loose and fragmentary community, the SRW community has completely failed to actually fact check anything for ages. While it's common to simply use the first word as a shorthand, the personality types were frequently presented as an entire translation, which is obviously incorrect.

Spoiler: Bonus nerd details that are off-topic

Incidentally, as far as I'm aware, during the leadup to Alpha 2, Banpresto ran a poll for which protagonist pairing and personalities people picked, which lead to Kusuha being selected as the protagonist (Gloomy) and Bullet as the Significant Other (Serious), with a second question asking about if they went Super or Real. What's interesting about this is that Gloomy Super Kusuha won, which is not her default setting: if you simply select her portrait, Alpha will autofill Shy personality and Real pilot type. This caused a knockon effect in OGs, as some of the Alpha pilots in OGs have had their default personalities and unit types shuffled around:

Name	Alpha Default	@2-3/OGs Canon
Kusuha (F)	Shy+Real	Gloomy+Super
Bullet (M)	Serious+Super	Serious+Real*
Ryoto (M)	Shy+Real	Gloomy+Real
Yuuki (M)	Cold+Real	Cold+Real
Tasuku (M)	Gloomy+Super	Shy+Super
Rio (F)	Serious+Super	Serious+Real**
Leona (F)	Cold+Real	Cold+Real
Carla (F)	Gloomy+Super	Shy+Real

*Bullet's mainstay ride until halfway through OG2 is the Huckebein Mk-II, the Real protagonist unit from Alpha, but his stats are much better suited to piloting a Super, and he upgrades to one full-time from OG2 onwards, mirroring Alpha 2's introduction of the Celestial Directions units. KohRyuJin is much faster and more fragile than a standard Super, but has attack-negating abilities (which is good because Bullet has Real pilot defensive stats).
**Rio's stats are more suited to using a Super in OG1, but there are much better pilots to give your Supers to, and her canonical unit is a Gespenst Mk-II-TT. In OG2 and onwards, she pilots Huckebein variations (not very well, sadly; making the Huckebein Gunner a single-seater arguably nerfed her by taking away the only thing she was good for, which was being Ryoto's SP battery).

As you can see, the "Gloomy" and "Shy" personality types typically got switched around from their Alpha defaults to OGs, which preserves the original idea where there was a preset for each personality type in each sex; what wasn't preserved was an equal split of pilot type.

see that thing why no one never going to translated any Super Robot Wars game because two reason 1.it is to hard do it because it is super long scripts and you have to be very dedication if you want to do it and finally like all the mod in akurasu discord say learn Japanese and do yourself hance why i have go to Japanese wiki to find information on super robot wars

 

[Guilherme130]

Most of the Super Robot Wars PS3 gallery, mainly 2nd OG

 

[starman271]

Most of the Super Robot Wars PS3 gallery, mainly 2nd OG

Matte there is https://2ndsrwoge.com/ and let me say the hundreds time about srw translation it’s not going happen because it is to hard do it because it is super long scripts and you have to be very dedication if you want to do it and finally like all the mod in akurasu discord say learn Japanese and do yourself hance why you gotta have to learn Japanese to plays these games and yes it is very very niche game series

 

[Guilherme130]

Matte there is https://2ndsrwoge.com/ and let me say the hundreds time about srw translation it’s not going happen because it is to hard do it because it is super long scripts and you have to be very dedication if you want to do it and finally like all the mod in akurasu discord say learn Japanese and do yourself hance why you gotta have to learn Japanese to plays these games and yes it is very very niche game series

Tho that didn't stop some from putting their hard work on translating them anyway

One of the best portable games in the entire franchise just got an english translation a few years ago, even tho it took them almost 9 years or so to finish the patch after releasing their first one, while also being the first EVER to be fan-translated to english (That being J)

Yeah you're right, this is a very niche series, but there's still people who are dedicating themselves to translate these games for more people to play and also understand the story more easily without a language barrier, whether it's good or not (Looking at you, Moon Dwellers)

Tbh I still believe that one today we'll see more of these alongside the official stuff, unless Bamco ever decides to re-release the older OG games in a collection with a better translation

 

[Yousef]

It used to be the GBA ace attorney games but all three are in English now. They’re even in Spanish too.

 

[Exxistance]

SEGAGAGA!!!

A translation of chapter 1 is already done, after five years. Only twenty more years to go!

My friend you're not going to be waiting another 20 years, I can promise you that.

 

[anonymous987123]

A niche Chinese Bootleg for GBC that I came across, it apparently was one of Vast Fame's most popular games, but afaik it doesn't have an English version (or Engrish), the game is called Shawu Story (Shui Hu Shen Shou) https://vfamewiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Shui_Hu_Shen_Shou I'd just like to be able to fully enjoy this game without using a TL app or youtube

 

[Chapu]

PS1
- Wonder Trek
- Planet Dob
- Fox Junction
- Athena: Awakening from the Ordinary Life

I'm currently working on "Wonder Trek". Hang in there.

Also, "Planet DOB" is getting translated too, and "Fox Junction" and "Athena" are on my to-do list.

 

[TortaMexicana]

I can only dream and hope that a brave soul takes on the ginormous task of translating Felyne Village...

 

[longestseason]

I'm currently working on "Wonder Trek". Hang in there.

Also, "Planet DOB" is getting translated too, and "Fox Junction" and "Athena" are on my to-do list.

No way! Please keep me (us) updated!

 

[Username:Required]

One of my big ones in SMT Nine has already been mentioned. That being the case, my other white whale is Xenosaga I+II for DS, particularly since its version of II seems to be a much better/true to the original intention of Episode II than what we got for PS2.

I came here to mention Xenosaga I&II, too. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one waiting with bated breath.

 

[snes9x]

Segagaga
Xenosaga 1 & 2 (DS remake)
SMT: Devil Summoner

 

[AncientBehemoth]

For PCEngine
Last Armageddon
Aurora Quest
Cosmic Fantasy 1-3-4
Gunbuster VOL 1-2
Patlabor.

for SNES
Albert Odyssey 1-2
Dark Kingdom
Elfaria 1-2
Farland Story
Idea no Hi

 

[ptah]

The Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2 remakes on the PSX.