The long-awaited English fan translation of Princess Crown for the Sega Saturn has stirred up some controversy within the fan translation community. After over a decade of work by fan translators CyberWarriorX and SamIAm, another developer, eadmaster, released a version of the game in English using assets from their original project.
It’s one of the most anticipated translations because it’s a beautiful looking game that is just impenetrable if you don’t speak Japanese. The best we had before was a translation script that you could read along with a walkthrough guide, but that’s not the way most people like to play a game.
It’s not surprising that if you start a project for a game like this and then go no-contact for a decade, people will start to look to see if they can pick up where you left off. There’s this unwritten rule in the fan-translation community that you don’t start working on a game that someone else has already started working on, but what is the time limit on that?
It seems like everyone in this situation could have done a better job of communicating in the first place, and then could have been more gracious to eachother after the fact.