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An old Japanese-exclusive Sega Mega CD title inspired by popular magical girl shows of the '70s and '80s has just received an English fan translation, courtesy of Stargood Translations (h/t: Read Only Memo).
Mahou no Shoujo: Silky Lip was released in 1992 and is an adventure game with RPG elements (an overworld, stats, and turn-based battles), which features anime-inspired pixel art, voice acting, and an episodic structure (complete with opening and ending theme songs), similar to many of the anime shows that inspired it. Because of this, at least one Japanese critic and author has claimed in the past that it foreshadowed future anime-themed titles, such as the Sega Saturn title Sakura Wars, which also incorporated episodes and musical numbers into its story structure.
Mahou no Shoujo: Silky Lip follows the adventures of a clumsy magical apprentice named Lip, who is selected as a candidate to become the next queen of her realm. Sent to the human world for training, she will have to learn human customs, navigate new relationships, and compete against her arrogant rival, the aristocratic mage Isabella, with the goal of winning enough assessment points to secure the throne. In addition to the RPG elements mentioned above, one of the game's more interesting mechanics is an emotion-based dialogue system that allows players to choose Lip's reaction to certain actions (Happy, Angry, Sad). These choices will affect Lip's emotional state and ultimately determine which outcome players will receive.
Originally developed by Riot, an in-house label of Telenet Japan, it will likely already be familiar to some of our readers as one of the titles featured in the Japanese release of the Sega Mega Drive II Mini, but is reportedly "bogged down by many needless design deficiencies," as outlined in Stargood Translations' in-depth readme.txt for the patch. This apparently includes a not-great interface and somewhat clunky movement and interactions.
As a result, the team at Stargood Translations (Supper - hacking & translation, cccmar - editing & testing, Oddoai-sama - testing) hasn't just translated the game, but has also attempted to "work out the worst of the kinks so it's easier to just enjoy the story."
It's now possible to advance through text quicker; an icon has been added to indicate whenever a talk or look interaction is possible; a faster walking speed has been introduced; and "The use of the A Button to trigger interactions on the overworld has been heavily overhauled to reduce overall clunkiness."
Speaking about the quality of the game, the hacker and translator Supper said, "This isn't a game anyone would mistake for a lost classic," and is likely to provoke questions like, "Dude, seriously? Why would you pick THIS?"
In response, Supper wrote, "I've been trying to put together a Mega CD translation project for a long time — since before I was even working on PC-Engine CD games, and that's been quite a while now — and you have to understand that not only does the Mega CD simply not have a lot of Japanese games, most of the ones anybody actually wants to play got an official international release of some kind.
They continued, "Silky Lip was not my first or even my second choice for a Mega CD project, but in the end, it was the one that actually came together. It's not all that long, and the internal structure is about as simple as a Mega CD game can get, so it was clearly something I could crank out myself, which was apparently what it was going to take to actually get a damn project done."
If you want to try the patch, you can download it here.