Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere
Image: Namco

When the flight-sim Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere was released in the West on PlayStation back in the year 2000, it went through a bunch of changes from the Japanese original, with much of the story being jettisoned to reduce the costs of localization.

Because of this, it got some not-so-great reviews at the time, with Official PlayStation Magazine's Dean Evans giving it a 3/10 and arguing that "Namco forgot to include a game to go with" the PC-style flight-sim graphics, while Gamespot's James Mielke elsewhere claimed that it had been "gutted of the few qualities that made it attractive in the first place".

Decades have passed since then and in Namco's absence, many Ace Combat fans have stepped in to try and correct this error, to bring a more complete version to Western players.

First, there was Project Nemo's "The International Edition" in 2016, which added subtitles for all 52 missions from the Japanese version of the game, which were reduced to just 36 in the official version.

And now, over the last month, a new group named Load Word has released an unrelated Ace Combat 3 "complete" translation, which translates the entire game from the ground up again into three separate languages (English, Italian, and Castilian Spanish).

This new translation even converts the various Codex entries available through the in-game search engine, which were previously left untranslated in the original Project Nemo fansub, as well as the game's manual, the bonus AppenDisc (featuring the game's soundtrack, and other additional content), and the Mission 00 VHS (which is now available to watch on YouTube).

If you want to give the new translation a try, you can download it now from Load Word's website. There you will also find instructions on how to patch your game as well as the AppenDisc bonus material.

[source loadwordteam.com, via twitter.com]