Battle Master
Image: System Vision

We've seen many great SNES fan translations over the years, and it appears that another has just been released, with the 1993 fighting game Battle Master: Kyūkyoku no Senshitachi finally being available to play in English, 32 years after its release.

Battle Master: Kyūkyoku no Senshitachi was developed by the small Japanese developer System Vision, which is probably best known for working on the 1991 SNES and Sega Mega Drive / Genesis title Power Athlete (otherwise known as Deadly Moves and Power Moves outside of Japan), ports of Samurai Shodown, and the 1996 Neo Geo arcade game Ragnagard.

It was reportedly developed, according to a 2017 interview with its planner and character designer Akihiro Takanami (Hiroaki Fujimoto), on account of the company's dissatisfaction with its work on Power Athlete, and was put together by an inexperienced group who often worked across multiple disciplines to help Takanami realize his goal of making the fighting game he'd always "dreamed of".

As you can probably tell from the footage below, it references the SNES version of Street Fighter II quite extensively, with many of the moves being pretty much exact copies of those previously seen in the classic Capcom fighting game.

Nevertheless, we imagine there will be a lot of players out there who will be willing to give it a go, either out of novelty or the fact that they can now finally understand the story cutscenes, with the release of this new patch.

The new translation is the work of FlashPV (who handled the production), alongside the hacker Manz, the translators Tom and TheMajinZenki, and the editor Yoda07.

It is available to download from the ROM hacking website romhack.ing.

[source romhack.ing]