chris

Der Langrisser: Finally translated

Lester shows Cherie what’s for.

When you hear “Langrisser”, you probably think of nothing at all unless you pay attention to Japanese-language games. Thanks to a small, talented, and dedicated group of translators, that is about to change. A group led by Derrick Sobodash has completely translated the Super Famicom game “Der Langrisser” into English.

First off: Der Langrisser is actually a remake of Langrisser 2. Why should we care? If you ever tried a little-known Strategy RPG for Genesis by the name of Warsong, you have played the first game in the Langrisser series.

Warsong is a tour de force of strategy, and could have been the start of a trend toward larger-scale SRPG battles. Unfortunately, Career Soft was the only company who maintained the trend with their Langrisser games, ending with the fifth entry (for Saturn and PSX). Until now, all except the first were inaccessible to those who don’t know the dark arts of a Far Eastern volcanic archipelago.

For those unfamiliar with the battle system: think Shining Force or Fire Emblem, only each character also has some troops under their control. These troops move independently of their commander, but get a “command” bonus for staying within a set radius of the commander. Top it off with all battles having optional scenes a la Advance Wars, and you have a winner.

In Der Langrisser, you defend castles and villages from enemy forces, hold off entire armies of werewolves and vampires, and you can even choose to defy the Light Goddess and invade the heavenly plane… after betraying every faction in the game.

Of course, you can be a goody two-shoes too, but who would want to do that when you can seize power for yourself and make the entire continent feel your iron grip of terror? It’s all based on the choices you make in the game. There are four significantly different paths through it – pretty darn good for the time – and a whole lot of dialogue.

Oh, Rohga, you kidder.

The amount of dialogue, obviously, was the biggest thing holding back the translation for years. The game has a 800 kilobyte script according to the translators – larger than a lot of books, and larger than the text in most SNES RPGs including FF6 – which has made extracting, translating, and otherwise modifying the ROM a 6-year process. And it’s been edited and mulled over for a long time, so the dialogue is incredibly polished. By which, of course, I mean each character is incredibly well-written, not that all of them speak like refined 18th century Englishmen.

Dialogue, fascinating as it is, isn’t the most interesting part of the translation. Sobodash, the leader of the project, personally designed seven fonts for DL on a copy of Mario Paint using the SNES mouse – with no other way to make it look right on an NTSC screen. The expert on the hacking side, byuu, completely scrapped the old dialogue system and rewrote it in SNES assembly. He also worked on fixing bugs that were in the original and even threw in a feature that was only partially completed.

What does this all mean? The patch is essentially an upgrade to a great game as well as a localization. There’s no way you can afford to miss DL now. Unless you don’t read English… in which case this won’t make much sense to you. Go out and play DL anyways.

Note: Der Langrisser has issues with many SNES emulators. Turning off stereo sound will make it work in ZSNES, but for the full experience only bsnes (coded by the same byuu who worked on this) and SNESGT will work.

[DL Translation site] [Link to the patch download page]

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rainbow
rainbow
16 years ago

that’s great. i love this game very much

delox
delox
16 years ago

how to download it?

EricKei
16 years ago

Go to the page linked above, the Patchers section has links to what you need.

Enjoy ;)

– eric from the DL team

hardcoregamer
hardcoregamer
14 years ago

err…. i know this is unsuspected, but i still wanna download this english version because i love the japanese one even when i dont understand a thing. so…
how does one download this??
there are no url found when i click the link…
plz help.
thanx

putera
putera
14 years ago

is there langrisser’s rom already patched that can i download?

dfgdfgf
dfgdfgf
14 years ago

I agree. This needs to be released prepatched as well. (if they wouldn’t due to legal issues some “shell” gamer should have put it on rapidshare or something the same day)

Using snesgt instead of 9x is no problem. The problem is finding the rom at the exact right size so this stupid ups patcher doesn’t go fail fail fail. I can’t possibly tell you how many sites I dl’d from to get the right rom. I had to wade through oceans of that terrible translated one as well (me thinks the thought in which it said scream unto her and it screamed sex sort of thing)

Good actual work – piss poor follow through. not as many people can enjoy your work if you don’t polish it in the tiniest ways so they can actually be able to enjoy it. I don’t mean to whine I finally got it going but this should have been a LOT easier.

luq
luq
13 years ago

how to play this game, using what?….anyone can provide link for download right emulator for this game PLEASE!!….