A classic Sega Saturn action game by legendary developer Treasure now can be played to completion in English thanks to fan translators who uploaded a finished patch for Silhouette Mirage on Wednesday.

It's essentially finished, that is — labeled "version 0.999," the patch's readme file acknowledges two known issues:

• Centering of "Insufficient RAM" text
• "Continue" screen sprites are untranslated

Those issues likely weren't seen as important enough to block release now that the team — led by Rasputin3000 and including soniccd123 and Malenko — has finished hacking in a translation of the story and the shop text in the seventh area of the game.

“This is going to be treated the ‘release’ version as we currently do not have the skill set to decompress then continue screen sprites or center the ‘insufficient RAM’ text,” Rasputin3000 said in Shiro’s Discord server. “Neither of these lingering issues impact one’s ability to play the game to completion though (they are effectively polish).”

The patch, which can be downloaded from its Resources page on SegaXtreme, uses Knight0fDragon's Sega Saturn Patcher utility. It needs a special 2.0 version of the patcher utility, which is bundled in the zip file with the patch.

The Silhouette Mirage patch has been confirmed to work on real hardware using Fenrir/Fenrir Duo, Phoebe and Satiator, as well as via emulation using Bizhawk, Mednafen and Yaba Sanshiro.

The patch's readme file includes three important notes:

• Patch will work with all Saturn versions of the game. This includes: v1.001 (Demo), v1.003 (Release), V1.100 (Rev. A)
• "+ Region Free Patch" must be UNSELECTED when patching in SSP otherwise the game will crash on boot.
• If the game is having difficulty loading on Fenrir ODE, then try patching with "Separate Track Files (if applicable)" SELECTED in SSP.

While the patch's Nov. 1 release date missed the team's initial completion estimate of late October by a single day, it's still remarkable speed considering they began the project just about four months ago in July.

An extra day or two's wait was nothing for Saturn fans who have waited 26 years to play Silhouette Mirage in English after it released on the console exclusively in Japan on Sept. 11, 1997. It was ported to the PlayStation the following July, and North American PlayStation owners got an English localization of it in January 2000.

But the better version was the Saturn original, arguably, which featured additional graphical effects that the PlayStation didn't. Not only that, but the English localization from Working Designs also inflated the cost of everything in the game's shop, which succeeded less in increasing the challenge and more in increasing the frustration and tedium players experienced.

Rasputin3000's team used Working Designs' script for their patch but didn't bring over the shop cost changes, leaving the original design intact and more accessible than ever.

They've said that they plan on creating a retranslation in a new patch, too, once they'd finished the patch that uses Working Designs' translation.

"I have already had the script retranslated and will be releasing a relocalization patch probably a few months after this patch drops," Rasputin3000 said in a post on SegaXtreme last month.

He said on Discord that he tapped a translator named Wiredcrackpot, who was behind the Radirgy fan translation on Dreamcast. “Inserting the new text should be a breeze as I won’t need to make any significant changes to the current textbox layouts (just need to find the will to do it haha),” Rasputin3000 said.

This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!

Star Ocean The Second Story R (a shiny new remake of the second Star Ocean game) comes out today, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to examine its translation history.

Star Ocean: The Second Story is the second game in the series, but the first of the series to be released in North America, coming out in 1999. Now, if you know anything about the state of the video game localization industry during that period, you'll know that the process was often fraught. We may not know what exact challenges the Star Ocean 2 translation team faced, but some anecdotes from other translators of the time period include: using a GameShark to extract text because no one would give them the files, handwriting translations on printouts of code, and getting raw dumps of machine code and having to run a search to find the text. So as you might guess, Star Ocean: The Second Story's translation was...not the best. It's often overly literal, there are at least two instances of fragmented sentences just within the first half an hour or so, and some of the shop text is nigh incomprehensible.

Thankfully, when the game was rereleased on PSP as Star Ocean: Second Evolution, it received a completely new translation that fixed all of these issues. And this is the translation that Star Ocean The Second Story R appears to be using.

But just what is it that makes the PSP translation so much better? Let's take a look.

Though Baba Is You (@babaisyou) ships with its UI translated into a variety of languages, including both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, the rest of the game is widely understood to be unlocalizable. The mechanics of Baba Is You are, after all, driven by the slippery, edge-casey semantics of the English language. For any other written language to serve the same purpose as English in Baba Is You, the meanings of the words in its vocabulary would have to match their counterparts in English vocabulary 1:1, at which point it would entirely cease to be a separate language—it would simply be a cipher of English.

And yet, it almost doesn’t matter. The English words that define so much of the gameplay mechanics of Baba Is You fit a grammar that is not English, exactly—the word “HAS”, for example, has a very specific meaning ingame very different from how I am using it in this sentence—and exploring the nuances of this grammar in the context of solving puzzles is one of the great joys of the game. That’s one of the reasons why this game is nonetheless beloved in many non-English speaking countries, where the ingame shaky-text animated sprites for “SHIFT” and “EMPTY” might as well just be a triangle and a circle respectively.

That hasn’t stopped modder LeavingLeaves from trying to translate the game’s sprites into Simplified Chinese, however, and the results are striking and gorgeous. What’s remarkable is how the modder sacrifices intelligibility for precision in their translation—unlike the game’s official Simplified Chinese translation, which is comprised of common words in modern vernacular, this tileset uses a lot of obscure, even occasionally archaic characters to match as closely as possible what the words actually do ingame.

The character used for BABA, for example, is 皅, pronounced “ba”—a character so obscure I had great difficulty typing it in this sentence: handwriting IMEs do not include it in the list of modern words their OCR algorithms scan for, and pinyin IMEs bury it deep in the list of possible results. Compare this with the 巴used in the official localized UI, another dephoneticization of “ba ba” which is so common a five year old could read it—and consequently could mean any of a bajillion things not suggested by the English “Baba”. The translation in the mod is less ambiguous, but also impenetrable to anyone who is not a student of ancient Chinese poetry.

为 (為 in Traditional Chinese) for IS, as well—oh man, this deserves extra attention, since IS is the most important word tile in the game. Look, 是 is right there, it’s very common and remarkably close, it’s more than good enough—in fact, the official Chinese name for this game is 巴巴是你, a literal translation of “Baba Is You” that leaves no ambiguity. But this translator went above and beyond to use 为 instead, to go the extra mile to capture the smallest nuances of the English word “is”. You see, the only difference between 是 and “is” is that 是 is a mere statement of identity: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a wrestler and 巨石强森是个摔角手, but while you can say Dwayne Johnson is Black Adam in the 2022 Black Adam movie, it is factually incorrect to say 巨石强森是黑亚当. That’s where you need other identity verbs, like 当 or 为.

90% of the time, 为 more accurately describes what the IS tile actually does ingame than even the English word “is”—it leaves no confusion as to why a line of tiles that spells 墙为钥 (WALL IS KEY) immediately transforms every wall in the level into a key. But in one very important edge case, the titular BABA IS YOU, 为 is a poorer translation than 是, because it makes inscrutable one of the game’s most memorable failure conditions: ego death. You see, if you break all of the IS YOU clauses that exist in each level—usually a single instance of BABA IS YOU—the game suddenly ends, cutting out the music with an ominous ambient droning noise. This is not death, per se. Baba—or whatever you replaced BABA with—is still alive, right where you left them. It is simply not true anymore that Baba is you. And, in fact, nothing is you. If nothing is you, you don’t exist. Simple to explain in English, relatively straightfoward with 是, nonsensical with 为, and maddeningly impossible to explain in any other language that frames the act of existing (and the absence of a statement of existence) in a different way.

At the same time, in describing better what IS actually does in terms of the game mechanics, 为 completely changes what IS means. Translated back into English, this mod becomes more like BABA AS YOU, or BABA BECOMES YOU. That’s just as thought-provoking about the relationship between ingame avatar and player, and almost as existentially terrifying, as the mechanic of ego death.

I am positive the translator knew this, and went with 为 anyway. That’s emblematic of the quirkily maximalist approach to this mod.

What does this mod gain from such a novel localization strategy? Well, for one, it succinctly compresses each tile into a single Chinese character—something the shitty Chinese knockoffs of Baba Is You fail to do—which is important, because multiple Chinese characters crammed into a square are at best hard to read, and at worst ambiguous (many Chinese characters are comprised of two to four other Chinese characters adjacent to each other in a square). But even more important is how it preserves Baba Is You’s thematic tone.

The characters are calligraphed in the same messy, handwritten stop-motion style as the original English, creating an effect that conveys whimsy and improvisational playfulness in as culturally familiar a manner to Chinese players as it does to Western ones. But the words themselves, a mix of casual, conversational vernacular characters in the less than a century old written language of Simplified Chinese and the ancient and inscrutable vocabulary of Classical Chinese, carry tremendous gravitas, appropriate to the events of awe-inspiring, cosmic scale that transpire in the game’s later puzzles as a consequence of their open-ended semantics.

Aligned in neat rows and columns like a Buddhist sutra, these simple and unbelievably concise sentences define and alter the very laws of the game’s universe. They feel like magic spells because they are magic spells. A game that already plays like reading ancient Chinese poetry feels now is, itself, transformed into Chinese poetry.

Though Baba Is You (@babaisyou) ships with its UI translated into a variety of languages, including both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, the rest of the game is widely understood to be unlocalizable. The mechanics of Baba Is You are, after all, driven by the slippery, edge-casey semantics of the English language. For any other written language to serve the same purpose as English in Baba Is You, the meanings of the words in its vocabulary would have to match their counterparts in English vocabulary 1:1, at which point it would entirely cease to be a separate language—it would simply be a cipher of English.

And yet, it almost doesn’t matter. The English words that define so much of the gameplay mechanics of Baba Is You fit a grammar that is not English, exactly—the word “HAS”, for example, has a very specific meaning ingame very different from how I am using it in this sentence—and exploring the nuances of this grammar in the context of solving puzzles is one of the great joys of the game. That’s one of the reasons why this game is nonetheless beloved in many non-English speaking countries, where the ingame shaky-text animated sprites for “SHIFT” and “EMPTY” might as well just be a triangle and a circle respectively.

That hasn’t stopped modder LeavingLeaves from trying to translate the game’s sprites into Simplified Chinese, however, and the results are striking and gorgeous. What’s remarkable is how the modder sacrifices intelligibility for precision in their translation—unlike the game’s official Simplified Chinese translation, which is comprised of common words in modern vernacular, this tileset uses a lot of obscure, even occasionally archaic characters to match as closely as possible what the words actually do ingame.

The character used for BABA, for example, is 皅, pronounced “ba”—a character so obscure I had great difficulty typing it in this sentence: handwriting IMEs do not include it in the list of modern words their OCR algorithms scan for, and pinyin IMEs bury it deep in the list of possible results. Compare this with the 巴used in the official localized UI, another dephoneticization of “ba ba” which is so common a five year old could read it—and consequently could mean any of a bajillion things not suggested by the English “Baba”. The translation in the mod is less ambiguous, but also impenetrable to anyone who is not a student of ancient Chinese poetry.

为 (為 in Traditional Chinese) for IS, as well—oh man, this deserves extra attention, since IS is the most important word tile in the game. Look, 是 is right there, it’s very common and remarkably close, it’s more than good enough—in fact, the official Chinese name for this game is 巴巴是你, a literal translation of “Baba Is You” that leaves no ambiguity. But this translator went above and beyond to use 为 instead, to go the extra mile to capture the smallest nuances of the English word “is”. You see, the only difference between 是 and “is” is that 是 is a mere statement of identity: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a wrestler and 巨石强森是个摔角手, but while you can say Dwayne Johnson is Black Adam in the 2022 Black Adam movie, it is factually incorrect to say 巨石强森是黑亚当. That’s where you need other identity verbs, like 当 or 为.

90% of the time, 为 more accurately describes what the IS tile actually does ingame than even the English word “is”—it leaves no confusion as to why a line of tiles that spells 墙为钥 (WALL IS KEY) immediately transforms every wall in the level into a key. But in one very important edge case, the titular BABA IS YOU, 为 is a poorer translation than 是, because it makes inscrutable one of the game’s most memorable failure conditions: ego death. You see, if you break all of the IS YOU clauses that exist in each level—usually a single instance of BABA IS YOU—the game suddenly ends, cutting out the music with an ominous ambient droning noise. This is not death, per se. Baba—or whatever you replaced BABA with—is still alive, right where you left them. It is simply not true anymore that Baba is you. And, in fact, nothing is you. If nothing is you, you don’t exist. Simple to explain in English, relatively straightfoward with 是, nonsensical with 为, and maddeningly impossible to explain in any other language that frames the act of existing (and the absence of a statement of existence) in a different way.

At the same time, in describing better what IS actually does in terms of the game mechanics, 为 completely changes what IS means. Translated back into English, this mod becomes more like BABA AS YOU, or BABA BECOMES YOU. That’s just as thought-provoking about the relationship between ingame avatar and player, and almost as existentially terrifying, as the mechanic of ego death.

I am positive the translator knew this, and went with 为 anyway. That’s emblematic of the quirkily maximalist approach to this mod.

What does this mod gain from such a novel localization strategy? Well, for one, it succinctly compresses each tile into a single Chinese character—something the shitty Chinese knockoffs of Baba Is You fail to do—which is important, because multiple Chinese characters crammed into a square are at best hard to read, and at worst ambiguous (many Chinese characters are comprised of two to four other Chinese characters adjacent to each other in a square). But even more important is how it preserves Baba Is You’s thematic tone.

The characters are calligraphed in the same messy, handwritten stop-motion style as the original English, creating an effect that conveys whimsy and improvisational playfulness in as culturally familiar a manner to Chinese players as it does to Western ones. But the words themselves, a mix of casual, conversational vernacular characters in the less than a century old written language of Simplified Chinese and the ancient and inscrutable vocabulary of Classical Chinese, carry tremendous gravitas, appropriate to the events of awe-inspiring, cosmic scale that transpire in the game’s later puzzles as a consequence of their open-ended semantics.

Aligned in neat rows and columns like a Buddhist sutra, these simple and unbelievably concise sentences define and alter the very laws of the game’s universe. They feel like magic spells because they are magic spells. A game that already plays like reading ancient Chinese poetry feels now is, itself, transformed into Chinese poetry.