Nintendo loves finding ways to have fans pay new money for games they already own, but with Fire Emblem, the company has largely moved forward, not back. “I’m just the kind of crazy person,” he told me, “where it's like ‘Why bother wasting time on practice when you can just jump straight into the 20-foot deep end and paddle for dear life and hope you come out the other end with at least one of your limbs still attached?’”Īnd yet, the ravenous clamoring and celebration for Fire Emblem is, itself, a little strange. He was an unlikely savior Brittain had never translated a video game before, let alone one that would eventually produce a script that would include more than 66,000 words.
The head of Project Exile, modder Christo “Cirosan” Brittain, is probably best known for the popular “full dialogue” mod for Fallout 4 that let players to see everything their character would say. “Where were you when the curse was broken?” responded one fan. A group of modders-a collaboration spread across the United States, France, and Austria-released something they’d worked on for nearly a year: Project Exile, an endeavor built on top of a graveyard full of past failures, but whose success could not exist without the stunted efforts of those who came before it.
In late May, as most of the world geared up for a week of glitzy E3 announcements about the future of games, history slotted into place. It’s where translation attempts go to die. The game was built on indecipherable “spaghetti code” where moving one piece can result in the game imploding for no logical reason there isn’t enough space to fit English translations without crashing the game, which means you’d have to hack it and force it to accept more one chapter in particular-the dreaded chapter five-was coded in such a perplexing way it lead to the whole “translation patch killer” branding. But in reality, translating Thracia 776 is a specifically daunting and unique challenge. The fifth in the series, it was released for the Super Famicom (what the SNES was called in Japan) in 1999, and like the others, it’s a tactical RPG set in a fantasy world of politics and prophecies.
“I never really officially told anyone I gave up,” admitted Kirb, a renowned Fire Emblem hacker, and one of the most recent to declare Thracia 776 their white whale, “because I didn’t want to feel like I betrayed the people that were waiting patiently for it to progress.”Īt first blush, Thracia 776 isn’t that different from other Fire Emblem games.
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