Quintet's classic SNES RPG Illusion of Gaia (also known as Illusion Of Time) has just received a new fan translation 30 years after it launched in North America.
Like so many RPG localisations of the period, the English script was pretty awkward – but thankfully, a fan by the name of L Thammy has taken the Japanese dialogue and given it another pass, resulting in a translation that's far closer to the original and reads better, too (thanks, Retro Dodo).
"In September of 1994, Illusion of Gaia made its North American debut," reads the project page for this new translation. "The story was notable for being much darker than the other RPGs Nintendo was allowing at the time. Despite a softening of the themes, the plot went to dark and intriguing places and left players with much to think about. Unfortunately, the localization was also often incomprehensible, with transitions between first and third person narrative that were difficult to follow."
A demo of this "30th Anniversary edition" is available on GitHub if you'd like to give it a spin. It includes the new translation up to the game's South Cape location.
"In addition, the patch decompresses all the assets in the game while providing an expanded ROM with available space," adds the GitHub page description. "As a result, loading times are extremely fast! A handful of ASM patches are used to modify the loading process to support faster screen transitions by completely bypassing the decompression steps."
Known in Japan as Gaia Gensōki, Illusion Of Gaia forms part of a loose trilogy which also includes Soul Blazer and Terranigma.