Today's little retro gaming article (just on my NeoCities, no big feature article on my regular site this time) is about the newly released English translation of The Legend of Xanadu, Falcom's 1994 PC Engine RPG, which has finally become accessible to English-speaking players after nearly 15 years of work.
Just a little look beyond the release announcement and explore the people and effort behind it, particularly John Brandwood (Elmer) and SamIam, who've spent literal years working through the game's technical challenges, translating its enormous amount of dialogue, and even attempting a full English voice dub at one point.
I dug through some of their old development discussions and found a few interesting comments from years ago, including one from 2018 where SamIam insisted the project was never dead, despite the long periods of silence. There's also a little about Falcom's history, the original game's development and why projects like this are such an important part of game preservation. Really enjoyed learning more about this one! Hope this is the right space to share it :)
I'm subscribed to your posts, so don't stop or the herculean effort I exerted to click that little bell on your profile will have been wasted.
I won't ever let any effort like that go to waste. Thanks for confirmation. Now that two of you have said I've got the all-clear to keep on inundating this space with my articles ...well, you have been warned :P