Technosoft is famous for the Thunder Force series and titles like Hyper Duel and Herzog Zwei, but the company also dabbled in other genres – and its 1995 PS1 and Saturn pinball title, Kyuutenkai, is something of a hidden gem in its library.
Also known as Fantastic Pinball, the game was never released outside of Japan – but it has now been given an English translation thanks to ShivaSaturn.
As spotted by Sega Saturn Shiro, ShivaSaturn posted on SegaXtreme about the patch, which is the modder's first effort at video game translation:
"I read and speak a little bit of Japanese with some formal education, but most of my recent progress in understanding the language has come from playing untranslated Sega Saturn games and reading Japanese gaming magazines from the 90’s with a translator app for help."
One of the big obstacles in translating Kyuutenkai stems from the fact that its text is made using compressed sprite art – and for this reason, ShivaSaturn had to turn to Claude AI for assistance, something that is becoming more and more common in the realm of fan translations, much to the consternation of many in the community.
ShivaSaturn explains the reasoning for using AI like so:
"I’m a game programmer by day. I sympathize with the negative sentiment around LLM development and its real world effects. Recently, however, I realized I had no choice but to learn the Claude tools to protect my own livelihood and I thought that hacking Saturn games and hardware would be a fun place to test Claude’s capabilities.
I tried to produce a high quality faithful translation and didn’t rely solely on machine translated text."
If you'd like an in-depth breakdown of how ShivaSaturn tackled this project, head over here.