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While the Genesis / Mega Drive and SNES were fairly evenly matched in a lot of genres, it's not an exaggeration to say that Nintendo's console had a distinct advantage when it came to RPGs, with a host of amazing titles such as Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Secret of Mana and many, many more.
While the Genesis had some amazing RPGs of its own – Crusader of Centy, Phantasy Star IV and Shining in the Darkness, as well as the tactical RPG Shining Force – it couldn't offer quite as robust a selection.
In the West, that imbalance might have been helped a little had the 1995 RPG Surging Aura made it out of Japan – you can read about why it's so great at Sega-16. Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster has a slightly more lukewarm take on the game, but there's no denying that it would have made a lot of role-playing fans happy had it managed to leave Japan back in the mid-'90s.
Thankfully, we no longer need to lament the lack of localisation for this amazing game, as it has just been translated by retrogamelog / sparkstar.
"This patch allows Surging Aura, originally released only in Japanese, to be played in English and Korean," says the developer. "The game text supports both languages, and the desired language can be selected from the options menu. Depending on the selected language, the patch switches font resources and adjusts some UI handling."
The English translation – which is confirmed to work on real hardware – is based on the script provided by RedComet/Guadozoku, and the patch also includes a Korean translation. Variable Width Font (VWF) has been applied to the English text to make it easier to read, and aspects of the UI have been tinkered with to ensure that longer lines and item descriptions display properly. You can download the patch here.
It seems that creating the translation patch was a little more work than originally anticipated. "I didn’t expect it to take this long, but there were far more small issues than I expected, so it took much longer than planned," says the developer of the translation. "I playtested both the English and Korean translations, but I actually haven’t tested Japanese. I think it should probably be fine."
The patch doesn't just translate the game, either – it fixes a bug that was reportedly present in the original retail release:
"One of the time-consuming issues was a bug where the game would freeze when casting the spell Tufan. This was not a translation issue, and it seems to have existed in the original game as well. Since it was completely unexpected, it took quite a while to analyze. I have fixed this part, so it should not happen again."
There are other gameplay tweaks as well:
"During test play, I actively used the 4x reward and encounter-rate adjustment features, and these also seem to have no issues. The encounter-rate calculation is fairly complicated, so it is hard to explain, but the values are adjusted only roughly, so the feel may vary. Still, I think it will definitely make a difference for level grinding. Internally, the game has no cap for experience, but gold does have a cap. So, as shown in the battle reward, you can end up receiving 9999 G."
The developer's next project is the Saturn RPG Wachenroder. "The major work is complete, but there are quite a few unexpected bugs."