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Update: Since the article's publication yesterday (Tuesday, July 21st), we've changed the original headline and updated the following article to highlight the "misunderstanding" between the two teams and added more detail on Wado translation efforts.
It seems to be an increasingly common thing in the retro space lately to see an exciting announcement, only to find out that there was some hidden catch that you weren't originally aware of, hiding just a few clicks away.
Yesterday, for instance, romhack.ing, suggested that Quintet and Shade's 1999 PS1 action RPG Brightis had received an English fan translation. On the surface, this sounded like great news for fans of Quintet's back catalogue. Brightis, after all, was never released outside of Japan and is the last true action RPG developed by Quintet, making it a significant title in the company's library of games.
However, it quickly became clear after it was posted that there was some uncertainty about the circumstances in which the game was translated, with the project lead of a previous fan translation project, Dick Debonair, coming out to say that it is a fork of their own incomplete project and "does not represent" the team's "complete efforts."
In response to this news, romhack.ing updated the patch from 1.0 to 0.01, while Dick Debonair reached out to Wado directly on GitHub to say that though they "appreciate the effort" they've "taken to compile the work," the patch has "a large amount of work still left to do: Namely in the quality of the translation..."
Because of this, we, too, suggested it might be best to stay away from the translation for now, but it appears there may now be another twist to the tale, with Wado having since replied to the original fan translation team, giving the team a deeper look into their process, and calling the situation a "misunderstanding" in an email to Time Extension.
In a thread, highlighted to us by Wado, the developer told Dick Debonair, "I used your tooling for unpacking early on, and wrote my own insertion and repacking pipeline once I understood how unforgiving the archives are... I'm a low-level C/C++ programmer by training, but this was my first romhack, and your repo taught me a lot."
As for the fan translation itself, it appears Wado hasn't just used what was already there, but has essentially "re-translated the game from Japanese from scratch", using the original team's English as a reference while mining the text.
"The register is deliberately a little archaic, which felt right for the world," Wado told Debonair on the GitHub repo for the patch. "So the prose in this build is all mine, mistakes included, and none of the bugs in it can be blamed on your patches, since none of your patch code ships in it. Item names are the main place your work survives directly; most of them read right to me, so I kept them.
"One deliberate change I can remember: Moonflower became Nightvigil, because the kana allowed it and I liked it better. The rendering is new as well: the game only knew fixed-grid full-width glyphs, so I wrote a proportional ASCII renderer and hooked it into each of the text engines, which is where most of the formatting differences from the older patches come from."
They told Debonair, "No offence was ever intended in releasing this. I wanted to play this odd, lovely game in English, wanted others in the West to be able to, and wanted to see if I could pull it off. Your team made that possible, which is why you're credited in the README and in the patch itself."
In Debonair's reply to Wado, they admitted the project "definitely caused quite a bit of confusion," especially since their team had recently revived their own translation efforts project "just this month" and seemed to come to a mutual understanding. Debonair, for example, invited Wado to be a part of their team, so that "we can make the best possible English release," stating that if they decided not to accept, "our release will be an addendum to yours; we don't want to get rid of or obscure the effort you've made."
In other words, it seems this story has a happy ending for Brightis fans. You can find Wado's fan translation here.