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.
everyone is quick to takes sides here but to me this just feels like a sad situation all around. i can see why the original translators thought that closing the repo was essentially revoking permission. i can also see why eadmaster saw the GPL license as explicit permission, and that closing the repo meant they weren’t working on it anymore. i hope cooler heads prevail because it would be a loss to the community if anyone involved were to take their ball and leave
