Princess Crown is arguably one of the Sega Saturn's best games, but it sadly never got released outside of Japan, meaning that very few people actually got to play it.
Directed by George Kamitani, who would later found Vanillaware, this 1997 action RPG has had unofficial translation projects attached to it for what feels like forever, but it's only very recently that we've seen any progress on this front.
As we covered here, a translation venture for Princess Crown kicked off all the way back in 2012 thanks to the efforts of SamIAm and Cyber Warrior X. Despite a positive start and repeated assurances that the project was processing well, no playable version of the patch appeared.
Fast forward to 2024 and eadmaster appeared on the scene with a translation effort based on SamIAm and Cyber Warrior X's work. While there has been some drama surrounding this project, eadmaster is clearly pulling ahead when it comes to making Princess Crown playable in English, as he's just released version 0.8 of his patch, which fixes a lot of the issues that were present in the previous release.
As noted by The Sega Guys, this new version not only cleans up some of the text problems but also adds (for the first time) English text to the radial menus, combat and shops. It also deals with some of the annoying soft-lock events.
It's not perfect – there are times when text overruns into multiple boxes, which looks rather unsightly, but it represents a massive stride forward for the project.
Here's what's new in version 0.8:
- all story events, items and names translated
- using a fixed-width/monospaced font, with condensed spaces (not VWF)
- most doorway signs are translated
- all book/scenarios fully tested and crash-free
You can download the patch here.