Last month, you may remember us reporting that feature phone preservationists over at the Keitai Wiki Discord had managed to rescue the Monster Hunter spin-off, Monster Hunter i, from digital oblivion.
Well, it appears that, since then, Monster Hunter fans have wasted absolutely no time in capitalizing on the amazing discovery, recently finishing a complete translation of the obscure entry into English to make it more accessible for new players.
The fan translation is the work of the Spanish software engineer named Grender and an individual named Yuwika, according to a blog post on the Monster Hunter old school forums, and was started almost immediately after the game was preserved.
Yuwika handled the localization of all NPC dialogue, while Grender worked on translating the remaining text, with both combing through thousands and thousands of lines of in-game text, to make the game more legible to Western players and remove the need to learn an entirely new language to begin making progress.
Interestingly, this isn't all they've needed to do either, with Grender also having announced they have had to create a new replacement server for the title, to solve some (but not all) of the issues that have resulted from the game needing a connection to load in new assets.
Just to give you a quick recap of the game, in case you're unfamiliar with how its memory is handled, it essentially uses a server connection to work around the storage limitations of many of the feature phone devices of the time.
This meant that players in the past would have to constantly be connected to Capcom's network servers to download and access new weapon and armor models, textures, and animations. As a result, Grender has had to build an entirely new server to act as a replacement for Capcom's servers, which are now long dead, and also work on replacing some of the missing textures, animations, and models that weren't present in the version of the game that was previously dumped.
As he states, members of the community are currently using assets from the PS2 game Monster Hunter G as a reference to recreate some of these missing assets, but the best possible outcome would be for someone to recover more phones with the original game's files intact, to try and fill in these blanks.
Grender's translation patch is now available as an open-source project on GitHub to download and is also being offered as part of Yuvi's Keitai World launcher.
You can join the Keitai Wiki Discord for more information on how to play, and to learn more about preservation efforts like this one.