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One of Nintendo's most absurd and infamous titles, the Famicom Disk System title Time Twist: Rekishi no Katasumi de…, has just received a new fan translation, letting players experience perhaps the most unhinged game to have ever featured the involvement of Shigeru Miyamoto
Released in 1991, Time Twist is considered something of a last hurrah for the Famicom Disk System and was developed through a partnership between Nintendo and Pax Softnica. Written and directed by Keiji Terui, it notably featured music from Star Fox composer Hajime Hirasawa, and was created with the occasional input of Shigeru Miyamoto (though Miyamoto's name was later scrubbed from the final game).
What makes Time Twist so unique as a piece of Nintendo software is that whereas the company has typically tried to shy away from controversial real-world topics, this game instead dives straight in, featuring a story about a boy who, after an eventful encounter with the devil, must then race through real-world historical time periods in order to reunite his body & soul.
There are references to religious witch hunts, the American Civil War and slavery; Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, and the persecution of the Jews; nuclear war; and Jesus Christ, with the game being played out via a series of commands, in the style of popular Japanese adventure games (ADVs) of the time. Likely because of its controversial themes, the game was never released overseas and is rarely acknowledged by Nintendo today. That hasn't stopped people from producing patches for the game, though, to give those outside of Japan an opportunity to experience it for themselves.
Earlier this year, for instance, saw the release of an AI-translated patch from starlight_world, which has now been followed by a 100% human-made patch, created by FCC, Sudgy, and Her-Saki.
"Today, we present to you an English fan translation of Time Twist," reads the announcement post on the website romhack.ing. "Prior translation attempts were done with either Lua scripts or AI. But this translation project is neither! Enjoy the swan song of the FDS and experience the wild historical absurdities that make you ask, 'How did Nintendo develop and publish this?' The less you know about the game, the better. And for Nintendo, they'd rather not have you know about it."
As FCC explains in the readme.txt, Time Twist has long been "an attractive candidate for a translation," but has proved particularly challenging to hack due to the way in which the game handles its text:
"The game's text is bit-packed. Additionally, there's dozens of pointers to account for. A lot of stages write an initial script file before overwriting it with another smaller script file. This smaller file can have pointers to the initial file. All of this had to be accounted for. Because I have prior experience making my own script dumping and insertion utilities, I managed. I used static analysis, some dynamic analysis, and a good amount of dumping and reinserting to see how it broke the game."
As they recount, they personally started work on their project in 2024, but put the project on hold after encountering some issues with some missing pointers. It was only after AI translations began to appear that the project was picked up again, with the intent of finally finishing what they started.
If you fancy giving it a try, you'll need to combine the two FDS disk images into one single image (instructions on how to do that are also in the readme.txt). Worth noting is the patch has also been tested on real hardware, meaning that if you're lucky enough to have a Famicom Disk System on hand, you can play it on there instead of on an emulator.