Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation
A knight is trying to shake off the soldiers behind him. Yuna is calling for her mother, and the queen is trying to keep her calm. That flying chase is one of the first scenes you can now follow in English in Albert Odyssey 2: Jashin no Taidou (Sign of the Devil).
Sunsoft released this tactical RPG for the Super Famicom in Japan on December 22, 1994. Originally titled アルバートオデッセイ2 邪神の胎動, it follows Albert Odyssey and predates the Saturn’s Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldean. Town exploration gives way to battles where movement, positioning, and hit chances matter, followed by close-up attack animations. More than three decades later, Retro Replay is releasing an English translation beta for players to explore.
Hundreds of hours, from the script to the screen
This has been a big project, representing hundreds of combined hours of translation work, English editing, ROM engineering, graphics work, and testing. The script needed a readable English voice, and the game needed enough room to display it. Shops, battle captions, names, and small text baked into graphics all brought their own problems.
The English received another pass for natural American phrasing after the full extracted script had been translated. We kept character differences and the humor in the original, while smoothing stiff sentences and awkward exchanges. The later speaker-label work preserves that approved wording and restores names where the Japanese script supplies them.
- English dialogue throughout the story, from the opening recap to the ending, including town conversations and optional exchanges.
- English menus and system messages to help you shop, equip your party, save your progress, and find your way through the game.
- A second editing pass for clear, natural American English, with character voices and the original humor kept intact.
- Restored speaker names so you can follow who is talking, with room for both the name and the dialogue.
- Translated item and equipment names, effects, skills, terrain labels, status conditions, shop prompts, save/load text, and other system messages.
- Wider shop and equipment layouts, readable comparison fields, longer-name handling, and reflowed attack and ability captions.
- English name entry, mixed-case dialogue, punctuation, and an English SIGN OF THE DEVIL subtitle beneath the preserved Japanese title artwork.
- A translated MISS! graphic, repaired battle panels, and font restoration when moving between combat, towns, and menus. The original damage digits and calculation rules are retained.
- ROM expansion from 2 MiB to 4 MiB and rebuilt text pointers to provide room for the English text. Original staff credits are retained, with a small credit-label typo corrected.
Update, November 12: Beta 2026.11.12a translates the remaining party-summary health and magic headings to HP and MP. Character stats and gameplay are unchanged.
The graphics work you can see
The title screen keeps Sunsoft’s original logo artwork and adds the English subtitle beneath it. The animated menu arrow keeps its seven original frames. English name entry follows, with ABC, numbers, and a readable Done option.
One small battle graphic took more attention than its size suggests. The yellow popup that appeared to be garbled damage was the Japanese miss message. It now reads MISS! in English. Its original number graphics are preserved, so the language change does not alter the damage values.
The battle alphabet now loads through the game’s native font cache. That removed a recurring graphics upload that could clip the recap battle panels. The patch also restores the normal font when town dialogue resumes, keeping capital letters and the speech-box backgrounds intact after combat.
The quieter screens needed attention too. Equipment comparisons have more room, and long labels can wrap instead of being chopped into cryptic abbreviations. The current and new statistics remain visible beside the item you are considering.
Bongo’s groundwork and Sorairo’s checking
This project continues earlier technical work released by Bongo. The inherited archive contains a character table, text-system and compression notes, legacy utilities, and source code. Those are useful foundations. The supplied dump templates contained only one partial English line, so the completed English script, later editing, interface work, and new graphics integration were developed for this release. Bongo is credited for the earlier groundwork, rather than presented as the author of this finished English script.
Special thanks go to 空色 / Sorairo for extensively spot-checking and validating a substantial amount of the translation. That contribution deserves a visible credit alongside the technical work. Retro Replay led the continuation, editing, integration, graphics changes, and playtesting, using Codex-assisted translation and coding tools during development.
The script reaches the ending. Reports still matter.
Human players have played through the game, and the story and menus have been translated through the ending. An RPG can still hide conversations behind story conditions and optional encounters. Not every dialogue branch or gameplay path has been checked for bugs. Some exchanges have not yet been seen during testing, so reports from other players are especially helpful.
Please report leftover Japanese, missing speaker names, text that does not fit, awkward English, damaged graphics, crashes, or scenes that will not advance. Include the patch version, emulator and core or hardware, your location, and what you did immediately before the problem. A screenshot and an ordinary in-game save can make a report much easier to reproduce. Feedback from conversations other players have not reached is especially useful.
Download the Albert Odyssey 2 English translation beta and read the installation notes. The release includes a BPS patch and readme, with no ROM. Apply it to the specified clean, headerless Japanese ROM. After updating, boot the game normally instead of loading an old emulator save state, which may retain an earlier font cache. Reports are welcome in the Retro Replay ROM Hacking forum.
