A new fan patch was published earlier this month for the Japanese-exclusive title Prisoner, giving players an exciting opportunity to play the action-adventure RPG in English for the very first time.
Released in 1999, Prisoner is one of only a small handful of titles that were developed by the Japanese developer Feycraft before it went out of business in the year 2000. It was published by Mainichi Communications and saw players take a control of young boy named Fry, who has been looking after his sick parent, Gernack, in a small village located in a subterranean world known as the Golden Dawn.
It features a top-down perspective, with players having to navigate across a series of interconnected rooms that occasionally have NPCs you can befriend for information within them, or a group of monsters to do battle against in real-time. The ultimate aim of the game is to somehow escape from this underground world, with the amount of allies you collect reportedly having an impact on the ending you receive.
The English patch is the work of ChapuTranslations, who previously translated the 1996 Gust Co., Ltd.' adventure title Welcome House 2: Keaton and His Uncle back in 2024. In the description for the patch, they describe the game as a "passion project" with a "superb" story that ultimately "deserves more recognition".
As they state, all of the in-game text has been translated from Japanese into English by a human, and is fully playable from beginning to end, though there are some minor text-based glitches — most of which can be avoided by advancing the dialog using triangle or circle on your controller.
The creator also says they intend to update the patch based on the feedback they receive, so if you spot any errors be sure to pass on your feedback.
You can download the patch now from the RomHack Plaza.