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Debuting on the MSX2 in 1990, Compile's dungeon-crawling RPG Madou Monogatari is probably best known today for spawning the hugely popular Puyo Puyo series, marking the first appearance of the young magic wielder Arle Nadja. Despite that, though, it actually has its own unique history of remakes, ports, and follow-ups, many of which have never been released outside Japan.
In the past, we've seen fan translations for some of these titles (including the PC-98 version of the game), but the 1998 Sega Saturn entry from Compile and Sega Enterprises sadly wasn't one of the games on this list. That is, until earlier this week at least, when the hacker paul_met and the translator brandnewscooby published a brand-new patch for the Sega Saturn game, taking fans by surprise.
"Puyo Puyo is a series that's very close to my heart," wrote brandnewscooby in the readme.txt for the patch, "And this game was one of my first Saturn imports that I have a lot of fond memories of playing on late nights, sitting way too close to the CRT screen in a dark room. Naturally, when a talented hacker approached me asking if I was interested in working with him on a translation, I was ecstatic."
They continued, "This is a game that came out when Compile was in dire straits (published after their restructuring and acquisition by Sega, along with [Puyo Puyo~n] and [Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon]) and spent years in development hell, where it was scrapped and reworked from the ground up over and over due to staff/writer changes, budget cuts, etc etc... Given that, it's kind of a miracle that we ever got a finished game at all, let alone one with the level of polish this one has. It has its flaws, but if you keep in mind the dedication on the staff's part to see this project through during such a turbulent period, you'll appreciate it a lot more."
As they state, it took around a year to submit a first draft for the patch, due to the script being "on the heftier side" and other projects eating into its development, but it's now here for you to play. Here's some of what's been added to bring the patch to life:
- Added opening video (from promo material).
- Support for 1-byte character encoding.
- Support for DTE.
- Support for tiled VWF.
- Support for colour highlighting.
- Support for translucent shadows (combat mode).
Despite initially starting development as a remake of Madou Monogatari 2 & 3, the Sega Saturn game features a unique scenario from earlier entries in the series and also adopts an isometric perspective for exploration, breaking from the traditional first-person view of earlier games.
You can grab the patch here.