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.
