In September of 1994, Illusion of Gaia made its North American debut. Known for being much darker than the other RPGs Nintendo was allowing at the time, it left players with a lot to think about… but unfortunately, the localization was often incomprehensible.
Now, thanks to the efforts of L Thammy, the game has received a new fan translation 30 years after its western release. The GitHub project page for this translation can be found here.
Key points:
- The new translation aims to make the English script more comprehensible and closer to the original Japanese dialogue.
- A demo is available on GitHub, including the translation up to South Cape location.
- In addition, the patch improves load times by decompressing all assets in the game.
Do you remember being confused by the original localization?
Illusion of Gaia is one of those games that holds a magical place in my heart, so much so that just hearing or thinking of the name…even all these years later, still gives me goosebumps.
Such a fantastic game. and such a fantastic story
It was the first rpg-type game I ever played and it awoke a passion in me I still have 30 years on.
I still have the cartridge. Don’t have an SNES to play on anymore (I’d just emulate anyway). But I keep that and ff8 on display, for being formative titles.
FF8 was such an underappreciated title. I think the negative backlash that it got really did a disservice to the entire franchise. . Which is a shame, cause it stands, to this day, as my favorite Final Fantasy.
The SNES and the PS1 were like, the epicenter of amazing, mind blowing RPG games.
The script was a little rough at times for sure, like plenty of the other localized games of its era, but I don’t remember it being especially bad. Terranigma was definitely worse, though, possibly due to not getting a North America release. Would love to see a project tackle that one.
Are SNES load times are a big concern for emulators today?
Not for emulators, but with Everdrives for example it is possible to play it on native hardware and there load times matter. So improving loading times is a great feature
Nintendo takedown in 3…2…1…
The game is not by Nintendo. Also, it’s a patch. They can’t takedown a patch.
And emulation is legal as long as you don’t share copyrighted content, doesn’t prevent Nintendo from going after emulators!
Nintendo mainly goes after Switch emulators, since that’s their current system. Also, their legal angle is that certain emulators circumvent DRM (like cg/wii or switch emulators). Rom patches for 30 year old games should be fine, as long as you don’t distribute copyrighted content.
you sure want to give a lot of faith to a shitty company that hates its customers.
I don’t have faith, I try to unnerstand their actions and tactics. And I dislike nonsensical arguments mainly informed by gut intuitions rather than thinking for a second.
Illusion of Gaia/Time is not a Nintendo IP. No copyrighted material is being distributed. They can’t even legally takedown decompilations of Zelda and Mario. What makes you think they’ll go against a completely and unquestionably legal romhack of a 30 year old Quintet game?
company that hates its customers.
You’re describing every company.
