Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and the Nintendo DS's anime game treasure trove
Plus: a 486 in your wallet, a PS1 roguelike and an MSX RPG classic.
Hello friends, enemies, and first-time readers! It's a beautiful Sunday (I'm writing this on Saturday but just go with me here), and there are quite a few of you new to ROM after last issue's deep dive into the Pioneer LaserActive. I'm glad that story was such a hit — it was a real pleasure to put together, and I was hoping people would find the absolutely wild amount of effort that went into that project as absorbing as I did.
We'll have to check back in with emudev Nemesis's progress on the PC Engine LaserActive PAC, as well as the work being done to dump the system's whole game library, in a future issue. But this week, we're keeping things a bit lighter.
I've been in a real DS mood lately thinking about the vein of early 2000s licensed games that were common on the platform — particularly adaptations of anime that were only ever released in Japan and thus tantalizingly out of reach. The new fan translation of the PS2 Cowboy Bebop game, as featured last issue, has had this particular era of anime games on my mind.
Today we take it for granted that any game based on a popular series like Jujutsu Kaisen or My Hero Academia will get translated. It's a shame they tend to be samey arena fighters; I can't say I'm very intereted in playing them now. But my god, how thrilled would I have been 20 years ago if every anime I discovered via Hong Kong bootleg DVD sets or torrented .wmvs had an easily accessible game that let me dive into that world? Outside Dragon Ball Z, those were few and far between.
Other than Cowboy Bebop, no game exemplifies this for me more than Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, released for the DS around the same time as the anime series in 2007. God I loved Gurren Lagann; the boundless energy and melodrama of it, the stakes escalating from a hole in the ground to an intergalactic battle for the soul of humanity. There's probably a four hour YouTube essay out there you can watch about how it swallops up mecha tropes whole and makes them brilliant with raw enthusiasm, so I'm not going to try to give you the hard sell on why it's one of the greatest animated works of the 21st century (it is tho).
Anyway, as deeply in love with the show as I was in 2008, I wanted to experience every little thing surrounding it that I could, and kept hoping against hope that the game — and its exclusive OVA episode(!!!) — would break out of Japan. Turns out it would take a full 12 years, until a fan translation in 2019. Now I'm finally getting around to reliving Gurren Lagann through the DS's dual screens, so this issue is going to be a mini celebration of the folks who made that possible, and the unique era when the low cost of development (and huge userbase of Nintendo's handheld) inspired a bounty of anime games just a few years before the medium went internationally mega-mainstream.
Later this issue we've got a quick spotlight on a new FPGA DOS PC core, a meaty update for Switch emulation, and a full-to-bursting Translation Station thanks to a couple last minute arrivals on Saturday. But first: Here's a super quick look at some neato projects I've had my eye on the last two weeks.
A browser-based tool for converting and patching ROM files, with more functionality to come:
A slick GUI for DS emulators:
LeviChen1126
A new Game Boy-like handheld. I know, I know, there's a bajillion of 'em — but this one is open source and runs on a more powerful FPGA than the Analogue Pocket!
Okily dokily, let's dive into this issue.
The Big Two
1. My DS is the DS that will pierce the heavens (of 2000s tie-in games)
"Creative" and "experimental" are two words I do not associate with licensed games, but I do associate them with the Nintendo DS, which saw more than 3,000 games over the span of a decade, some of them fantastically weird. Its modest hardware was suitable for lavish 2D games or simplistic 3D ones, its cartridges big enough to hold a few flashy video clips or a visual novel's mountain of text. And its killer sales in Japan made it the obvious platform for a fresh wave of anime games in the early 2000s, just like the Famicom had once been for '80s series like Dragon Ball and Fist of the North Star.
In my mind 2007 is not nearly so far away as I must admit it truly is; my love for Gurren Lagann and the impact it had on me don't feel like they happened almost half my life ago, but the more analytical side of my brain can easily see it in the design of the DS game I've been playing for the last week. In 2007, three years after the likes of Half-Life 2 and at the dawn of the Japanese game's industry's coming decade-long slump in the transition to HD game development, designers were still figuring things out in a obvious and experimental ways.
It's funny to play a game now that I once would've been over the moon to get my hands on and think, eh, it's kinda bad. But the interesting kind of bad; you can't say about many of today's anime tie-in games, but you definitely can say it about a whole lot of DS games.
Rather than cramming Gurren Lagann into a rigid genre — a 2D fighting game or an RPG, say — the Konami of 2007, which picked up the Gurren Lagann license, decided to marry a simplistic visual novel retelling of the anime with a 3D arena battling system where you trigger attacks by performing random, nonsensical minigames. Want to deliver Gurren Lagann's powerful Thunder Kick? Quick! Use the stylus to drag the purple wire to the purple socket and the yellow wire to the yellow socket.
Your mech constantly runs forward and you steer towards enemies with clunky tank controls, smacking the buttons for attacks whenever they come within range. The battles are frequently tedious, asking you to survive for too long and repeating the same animations and voice clips over and over again. I'd love for there to be a great Gurren Lagann game, and yet I still somehow want to play more of this one, because each attack I earn comes with a new strange or surprising minigame, and I know how this series escalates. What kind of wackiness is waiting for me by the time I'm in outer space, fighting in a mech the size of a planet? How do you adapt that to a few taps of a stylus?
Even if anime games of the era rarely made their way outside Japan, they clearly found an audience eager to feel a closer connection to their favorite worlds and characters. And for that reason I think it's sweet that there's a group wholly dedicated to giving these games some love, as featured in a recent ROM for their translation of Mushishi: Amefuru Sato.
Over the last six years, the Anime Game Translations team has worked at an impressive pace, releasing patches for fourteen games:
- Ore ga Omae o Mamoru
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angel Raising Project
- Soul Eater: Medusa's Plot
- Soul Eater: Monotone Princess
- Soul Eater: Battle Resonance
- Vampire Knight DS
- Bakemonogatari Portable
- Spice and Wolf: The Wind that Spans the Sea
- Spice and Wolf: My Year With Holo
- L - the ProLogue to Death Note: Spiraling Trap
- Death Note: Kira Game
- Naruto RPG 2: Chidori vs. Rasengan
- Mushishi: Amefuru Sato
While there are a few other consoles on that list, the vast majority of the games are for the Nintendo DS, as is AGT's next project: Death Note: Successors to L. And they're all, obviously, anime games, a singular focus rare in fan translation groups (the Falcom-focused Geofront are another that comes to mind).
As many games as they've tackled, there are far more waiting in the wings; a quick perusal of Japan-exclusive DS games reveals the obvious (Bleach, Digimon, Fairy Tail, Urusei Yatsura) to the more obscure (Beet the Vandel Buster, Harobots).
None of these are my series, but I bet more than a few of them are more creative than their cover art would imply. It's rad that even after half a decade there's a prolific group still dedicated to bringing more of these very specific, occassionally surprising games to new players.
Maybe we'll see the same for the PSP someday, too — or the entire Super Robot Wars series while I'm dreaming. I hear 2011's Z II has the whole damn Gurren Lagann story in it...
2. Is that a 486 in your pocket or did you just really Myst me?
There's a galaxy of FPGA development out there that orbits around the periphery of the mass-dense MiSTer project, and I appreciate when they have catchy names of their own. Case in point: the Tang console, a teensy board you can pick up for even cheaper than a MiSTer Pi. It's not as potent, but when has that stopped hobby devs from having a great time figuring out what a piece of hardware can do? Enter Nand2Mario, who's released NES, SNES, GBA, and now the 486 PC cores for the Tang.
486Tang is a port of the MiSTer project 486 core, but with a lot of custom work like swapping memory allocations so that DDR3 serves as a framebuffer and SDRAM serves as main memory, running at 2x the system clock. And then came the optimization.
"With simulation help, the core ran on Tang Console—just not fast," Nand2Mario wrote. "The Gowin GW5A isn’t a particularly fast FPGA. Initial benchmarks put it around a 25 MHz 80386."
You can hit the blog linked above for more details on the optimization work, but I liked these closing thoughts from Nan2Mario as they shipped the v0.1 release of 486Tang:
"Clock speed scaling. I appreciate the lure of the megahertz race now. Scaling the whole system clock was the most effective lever—more so than extra caches or deeper pipelines at this stage. Up to ~200–300 MHz, CPU, memory, and I/O can often scale together. After that, memory latency dominates, caches grow deeper, and once clock speeds stop increasing, multiprocessing takes over—the story of the 2000s.
x86 vs. ARM. Working with ao486 deepened my respect for x86’s complexity. John Crawford’s 1990 paper “The i486 CPU: Executing Instructions in One Clock Cycle” is a great read; it argues convincingly against scrapping x86 for a new RISC ISA given the software base (10K+ apps then). Compatibility was the right bet, but the baggage is real. By contrast, last year’s ARM7‑based GBATang felt refreshingly simple: fixed‑length 32‑bit instructions, saner addressing, and competitive performance. You can’t have your cake and eat it."
Currently Nand2Mario recommends DOS games from 1993 and earlier on the core that would run on the lower-end i486SX, but perhaps we'll see its performance ratchet up to Cyrix levels someday?
You can find the core on Github if you have a Tang handy.
Patching In
Eden v0.0.3 keeps Switch emulation goin' – A new update to the Yuzu successor includes a range of little improvements. Some highlights: Fixed FMV greenscreens on all platforms, hardware-accelerated video decoding for h264, VP8, and VP9 on all supported GPUs and platforms, fixed Player 2 controller disconnect in DKC Tropical Freeze, implemented firmware profile editor, MSAA improvements, fixed black square issues in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Tears of the Kingdom. There's also now an integrated update checker on desktop and an "improved migration frontend" for importing your setup from other forks like Citron. Also, it's now (free) on the Google Play Store!
Duckstation touches up Parasite Eve 2, RE2, and more – Some small updates to Duckstation's game database improve compatibility in a few cases: they've cleared up a visual glitch in Parasite Eve 2, stopped a crash in RE2 during door transitions, fixed cropping in Tomb Riader 4 and 5, stopped FMV breaking in Chrono Cross and Star Ocean 2, and fixed a graphical glitch causing gaps in the geometry of Alien Resurrection.
Cemu now comes in portable and installer forms for Windows – The Wii U emulator was previously only available as a portable executable, but now a fancy pants new NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) installer comes with the following advantages: Start menu entry, Wii U ROM files assigned to open with Cemu, listed in Apps and Programs so it can be cleanly uninstalled, application path in AppData\Local.
PPSSPP gets AMD FSR upscaling – This isn't quite as exciting as it sounds as it's not the cutting-edge machine learning tech of FSR4, but it should still offer a slightly better image quality upscaling result than the emulator did before.
Core Report
Super Cassette Vision, perfected? – MiSTer contributor ReverendGumby posts that the latest core update "completes my deep dive into reverse-engineering the Epoch TV-1 video chip. ... The core now produces VRAM (sprite pattern) bus address patterns that match those measured on actual HW. Graphical glitches seen in some games are also reproduced with high accuracy: for example, portions of sprites drop out when the CPU accesses VRAM during sprite rendering. All known display issues are now resolved."
X68000 joysticks – The latest unstable nightly build of the Sharp X68000 computer core adds support for multiple input methods: Magical 6 controller, Double-DPad, and CyberStick
Translation Station
PopoRogue makes it out of the dungeon – The long-running manga-turned-RPG series Popolocrois has featured in the Translation Station in the past, and this time it's back with a PS1 roguelike entry from 1998, which takes place after the original Popolocrois and a subsequent anime series, as I understand it. "PopoRogue is a departure from the previous PopoloCrois game, incorporating dungeon crawler elements to the mix," writes the translation team on Romhacking.net. "Dungeons are made of winding hallways where enemies are visible and will block your paths and chase you down. Your party is made up of mercenaries for hire that you find and recruit as you explore the world." I quite like the pastel-like color palette here; reminds me a bit of Magical Vacation.
MSX horror RPG gets a new translation for its timeless pixel art – Over on MSX Translations, a site now hosting two dozen completed translations of old Japanese PC games, there's a fresh 1.0 patch for Illusion City. Don't let the 2023 date on the video below fool you; at the time work on a "complete" translation was underway, but the patch wasn't completed, if you follow. So what's the deal with Illusion City? Well, the great Kimimi wrote about it on PC Gamer just a couple months ago, highlighting the amazing pixel art that brought this game to life even back in 1991 across a whopping eight megabytes of floppy storage:
"Walking around Illusion City's near-future Hong Kong feels a lot like experiencing someone's custom Shadowrun campaign, Micro Cabin filling the generous amount of storage space with shady corporations to overcome and plenty of demons to kill. Magic and machine guns are equally useful in this stylish RPG's turn-based battles, and a tightly-written plot ensures the antagonists always feel as directly involved in the story as—and one step ahead of—the likeable main cast." Shout out to Aeana for spotting the translation finally being finished!
HAL's Revival! Eggerland for PC gets all cleaned up – I can't say I know much about this series, other than it encompasses Adventures of Lolo or vice versa? Which one is Macross and which one is Robotech? ANYWAY this is an odd entry in that it's for PC. Here's the patch details from hacker/translator Zhuguli232: "This is the full English translation of Japan-only game Fukkatsu! Eggerland, an entry in HAL Laboratory's Eggerland / Adventures of Lolo series. While the game itself is mostly in English, the dialogues in settings, saving game/map, and hidden help mode dialogues are still in Japanese, and the ending English texts are written poorly. This translation includes:
- New English title logo
- Hidden help mode English dialogues
- Better English in ending texts
- Saving game and map"
Spelunker II: Yūja e no Chōsen, not to be confused with Spelunker II: 23 no Kagi, now playable in English – Spelunker, one of the influences for Derek Yu's Spelunky, is a cave exploration game first released on the Atari in 1983. It bizarrely got two totally different sequels named Spelunker II for the arcade and the Famicom, this one being the latter. It was first fan translated way back in 2003, but prodigious hacker translator has gone back over it with the help of translator Paul Jensen, saying the original "wasn't the greatest of translations" and promises this patch to be "much better all around."
Dragon Ball Z - The Legend for Saturn snuck past me – No matter how many DBZ fighting games I think I know about, there are always more. Here's one I'd never heard of, released only in Japan and in French in Europe. Well, now it's in English, too!
Good pixels
In the last couple weeks, romhacker Adam has released colorized "DX" ports of Final Fantasy Legend, Legend II, Legend III, and Final Fantasy Adventure. Let's look at em!
Plus a few older colorization hacks from Romhack.ing:
