The story of how Sakura Wars GB's english patch came to be goes back to the summer of 2021. I had just finished my work on Sakura Wars Columns 2, and had recently joined the Bulk Slash localization team. In its various lulls, I was looking around in my spare time for more games in the Sakura Wars franchise to translate in order to make the series more popular in the west. While I of course wanted to do the 2nd game in the main series, that would have been a titanic effort requiring numerous programmers and translators, neither of which I was up to the task.

With consultation by the person who would become our graphics editor, comicmaster138, I was informed of the existence of a spin-off title on the Gameboy Color. At first, I knew almost nothing about it. There were no playthroughs on American Youtube, and documentation was very sparse. The only thing of note that people had to say about it was the fact that it was a Sega game made on a Nintendo platform. In my mind, I was thinking to myself that this would be a nice small side project to have ready for the series’ 25th anniversary. After all, this was just a measly Gameboy Color game, how bad could it be? 

In summer of 2021, I was approached by 2 hackers from the Gameboy community who had seen my help wanted ad on romhacking.net. First a person named Pennywise who later on shifted the project over to a man named Dan Jia. Dan had the programming background to begin combing through the shockingly large 4MB rom and helped to kickstart the project by extracting a font sheet. Having hundreds of kanji, we had to rely on the help of people such as snowyaria and natsume38 to identify the kanji from pictures to actual text dan could then use to spit out a useable script for the team to work on. Without those two, I would never have been able to begin translating the game as I have virtually no ability to read Japanese on my own.

That was when Dan dropped a massive bomb on the project. The script that he was able to extract from the game was an excel sheet that had over 20,000 lines of dialogue to translate and localize. For context, Columns 2 was a straightforward narrative at around 6000 lines, while the original Sakura Wars had around 30,000. Unfortunately snowyaria and natsume38 both had other projects to attend to, so I was left with a referral to a person named neko who had played this game as a child. Even with neko’s help though, my most optimistic estimates judged this at a 6 month project at minimum. There were nights I spent 3 hours sitting at my computer copying and pasting the lines into the deepl translator and agonizing over the best way to rewrite the sometimes garbled message that machine would give me, only to end up with 250 completed lines for my troubles. To make matters worse, while I could handle most of the common lines of dialogue such as a character saying “hello, Cadet” or dialogue branches asking what their favorite food was, I had little hope of tackling the more complex stories on my lonesome. This meant I had to do what I do best and get back to networking to find more help. The project sort of sputtered into a standstill as the team had to split their time between real life responsibilities while I went off to find more volunteers. 

One day in early August, I was browsing Youtube and stumbled upon a newly posted video. It was a 2 hour video essay on the original Sakura Wars by a man and channel called Mattobii. In it, Matto mentioned that during the pandemic, he played not only the 6 mainline games in the franchise, but nearly every spin-off he could get his hands on, including GB. I thought this could be the person I was looking for as he was one of the only people in the West to have actually played this game. Reaching out to him on Twitter, he was more than happy to jump in and give the translation a much-needed shot in the arm. Being the most knowledgeable western expert of this game that I could find, the lines of dialogue shot by quick. We had a system where we translate various chunks of text divided by the thousands. I would take care of dialogue lines 0-1000 while matto might take care of 2000-2999 for example. I could handle 75% of the dialogue with my skills, and matto was able to help clarify certain confusing scenarios so that I could actually know what the text was talking about. With this workflow, we managed to get the initial first draft to go from 5% to 100% completion in just over 2 months. Conveniently, he had tons of footage on hand from his upcoming Sakura Wars 2 video that gave us a lot of reference material this game ended up calling back to.

Localization is an arduous, but fun process when you’re doing this as a fan work. I had more freedom to write whatever I wanted to make the text make more sense to a western audience. While I’m no Victor Ireland in terms of “artistic license”, throwing in occasional references into lines of throwaway text was always hilarious to me. For example, when asking Iris about her favorite food which are pancakes, the player can choose to say that they’ll make her get fat as one of the dialogue options. In the player’s own words, he’ll say “Bread makes you fat.” One can never have too many Scott Pilgrim references.

Similarly, we had fun with renaming the minigames. The titles they originally had in Japanese would have made 0 sense to an English speaker. It was when I watched gameplay of Sakura’s minigame that I realized it sort of resembled a baseball game. Then I saw that Maria’s minigame was a shooting gallery. That’s when it hit me that we could name them after various other SEGA titles of the time such as Sega Rally and The House of the Dead. 

The final month of development was focused on graphics and editing. Comicmaster and Neko worked to make custom artwork for graphical elements such as the title screen and the minigames. As we were finishing up the first draft of the translated script, the team had one last major member to add.

Around that time, comicmaster had posted a short video showcasing the project online, and in the comments was a person named The Opponent who really wanted in. He had experience in editing and proof reading Japanese to English works and was a big fan of the series, so of course we let him into the crew. He and I started proof reading and making any necessary edits.

In the end, I’m very proud of what our team was able to accomplish in an extremely short amount of time. This game is the hardest in the series to play because of how the LIPS timed dialogue choices are presented in random order. No GameFAQs guide could even come close to making a thorough walkthrough as every playthrough is different from each other. In addition, the team restored a lot of cut content. Entire scenes had their voice acting brought back, one for each specific ending you had with one of the girls. A new cursor locked behind an unreleased Gameboy peripheral was added in as a reward. All of this work was done to help improve the user experience, and I hope it shows when you the player gives it a go. 

This game is designed for multiple playthroughs, so let me give you a few tips on how to play this game. 
* Like Ayame says in Sakura Wars 1, the man who chases two hares catches neither. Decide on one girl you want to focus on whether it be someone like Sakura, Maria, or Sumire (best girl). Spreading your attention with too many girls will make certain you end up without enough affection points to unlock their more interesting subplots near the end of the game.
* Feel free to sacrifice one person’s training sessions with naps to recover your stamina. I always skipped out on Iris’ training sessions cause I cared the least about her.
* Battles are very difficult. Unless you spent weeks doing something like reading the book Maria gave you, don’t bother charging your special meter. Finishing the book unlocks her special move for you to use in battles. Focus more on moving your Koubu into position, defense, and using normal attacks.
* I FULLY CONDONE SAVE SCUMMING. Occasionally the girl you want to talk to has nothing interesting to say and will essentially go “Hi, bye.” Therefore wasting your free time. Alongside how battles are extremely RNG heavy, save states are the only way to guarantee a “good” ending.
* I’m not saying to go into the showers, but you might find a character in there that you would never expect. 

Working on this game made me an even bigger fan of the series than I already was. The game essentially condenses the series’ strongest aspects into a fun bite-sized adventure. There’s no grand narrative, but it instead doubles down on fleshing out the members of the Flower Division. The characters are what gives this series life. They have their interests, and they have conversations that follow their own unique cadence. It made me gain a new appreciation for Maria, who was clearly the writer’s favorite. 

My biggest hope for this translation project is that it furthers expands the Western fanbase for Sakura Wars. On social media, I had no idea how much attention the announcements for this project would get. People came out of the woodwork to show their excitement for this tiny little game I had thought would be rather obscure. Perhaps it’s due to the insane popularity of the Gameboy modding scene. I got tons of newcomers telling me how they picked this game up in their collections years ago and always wanted to try it out. This entire side of the community I never knew about beforehand shouted praises of this game’s art style. I’m eternally grateful for their support. 

If you enjoyed this patch, please share our work with everyone you can. It’s my dream to get Sakura Wars the popularity it deserves, equal to its popularity in Japan.

# PATCHING INSTRUCTIONS
Apply the .ips or .bps patch using https://www.romhacking.net/patch/. Alternatively, in the download, there should be a link to a Gameboy ROM Patcher, for the .ips file, if on Windows. Make the program select a Sakura Wars GB Japanese ROM that definitely wasn’t just downloaded off the internet, and then select the patch files. Virtually a drag a drop process.

# Credits
* ComicMaster138 - Lead Graphics desginer
* Burntends - Localization Director
* MattoBii - Lead Translator
* Dan Jia - Programmer
* The Opponent - Editor, Tester
* Neko - Graphics designer
* Other translators: Snowyaria, Natsume38
* Various assistance: starblade86, kori-maru
* Special thanks: Gamesack, Retro Ali, RetroRGB, The Sakura Wars 1 translation team

# Misc rom details
While patching, you will be prompted for a rom. The patcher should then mention some of the below details. Use these codes to verify you have the correct rom, and you can re-upload the patched rom to verify that the output is correct.

Required rom:
* CRC32: ef503d50
* MD5: 70883b45a97984cb033c2b95028bef65
* SHA-1: 4e30a9b06b5048449057376c8f37b3f687fabd18

Patched rom:
* CRC32: 47932a54
* MD5: ce604c67bf2806f5a6f736ba168ed271
* SHA-1: 1b6b104484263c2fba093e2df1f5c9c5a1cd4e9e