40 years of Dragon Slayer: Remakes, localizations, and unofficial translations
Dragon Slayer is 40 years old, and still, much of it remains unavailable to legally play in a language other than Japanese.
September marks 40 years of Nihon Falcom’s Dragon Slayer series, which had its original run ended with creator Yoshio Kiya’s exit from the company, but continues to exist to this day through subseries and spin-offs. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Dragon Slayer games, the growth of the series, officially and unofficially, on a worldwide scale, and the legacy of Falcom’s contribution to role-playing games. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.
We are, admittedly, in a much better place with accessing Falcom’s rich past than we used to be. Check out Steam, or GOG, or any of those digital marketplaces, and decades of Falcom’s games are not only on sale, but often discounted, too. There have been remakes of games of theirs from the 80s and 90s, and even some re-releases of those that haven’t received that treatment yet — in some cases, making decades-old games available worldwide for the first time ever in the process.
And yet, we’ve still got so far left to go on this front. For one, the original Dragon Slayer is still nowhere to be found. Whether it’s a curio at this point or not is kind of besides the point: it is simply not available in North America through any legal channels. Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II saw its first-ever North American release earlier in late-2023 — along with its major expansion in 2024 — but only in their original PC-88 forms, not with any of the bells and whistles given to the game for its Saturn remake from roughly a decade later. Sorcerian is finally somewhere besides MS-DOS, but only in Japanese. The original The Legend of Heroes game is on a platform in North America for the first time since the days of the Turbografx-CD, but it, too, remains in Japanese only. Legacy of the Wizard being available in multiple forms — and playable out of the box in both of them despite the language barrier — is a real rarity as far as Dragon Slayer games go.
Lord Monarch is available, in one if its later remake forms for Windows known as Lord Monarch Online, as a free download from Falcom’s website. That’s not exactly a well-publicized fact, and it’s hosted on their .jp address, to boot. And not only is The Legend of Xanadu not available anywhere, but we can’t expect D4 and EggConsole to give us anything there, either. The Legend of Xanadu and its sequel were a rare thing from Falcom, games built from the ground up to be console exclusives, and EggConsole, to this point, has dealt solely with older Japanese computer games. Despite the name, the PC Engine CD doesn’t qualify.
And even if The Legend of Xanadu were to be made available, it’s entirely in Japanese, and, unlike the original Xanadu, requires an understanding of the language to be able to play it correctly. It has decision trees and tons of NPCs to speak with and so on down the line — which all makes sense, given this was a role-playing game released in 1994, 10 years into Dragon Slayer’s existence. Games had come a long way by then — Final Fantasy VI released in Japan in April, 1994, for instance, whereas the original Xanadu predated Final Fantasy itself by years, plural. At this point, former Falcom employees, after founding Quintet, had already produced Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, with Terranigma not far behind — those are three action RPGs that absolutely require following directions and the text for both the narrative and the game’s themes. You wouldn’t get as much out of them if you played them untranslated, and The Legend of Xanadu is no different in that regard.
This is something of an ongoing problem with Falcom’s earlier works, and Dragon Slayer titles, especially. We don’t need translations of Dragon Slayer or Xanadu in order to play and understand them, especially since, for whatever reason, so much of the text that is within them happens to be in English already. Dragon Slayer isn’t available, though, and Xanadu only recently so. Legacy of the Wizard is available in both its MSX2 and Famicom forms in the present, and also doesn’t require a translation, but it’s the only one of the post-Xanadu titles this is true for. Sorcerian is going to be a confusing mess without a localized version. The Legend of Heroes will be as playable as the original Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy in its current EggConsole form. The Legend of Xanadu isn’t available, nor is it translated, and neither is Dragon Slayer III: Romancia, which requires following very careful directions and completing the game within 30 minutes, or else you need to start over. Its comparatively less restrictive Famicom port isn’t available, either.
There are groups working in an unofficial capacity on these issues, which is welcome, but it also only solves the issue for the sickos who pay attention and seek out these sorts of things (I am one such sicko.) You can play an unofficially translated version of the Mega Drive’s port of Sorcerian by patching the ROM and emulating it. You can also emulate the MS-DOS release that’s in English through DOS-box, but you can’t purchase it, as it’s not one of the many DOS games to be found on GOG or Steam. Romancia has been unofficially translated in its Famicom form. The Legend of Xanadu’s unofficial translation remains in as much flux today as every other time I’ve mentioned it in the past few years — a group started working on it, and got to the point where they were hosting auditions for dubbing the voice acting, and then… nothing. Given these are, as many games with voice acting at the time were, titles where there were cutscenes but no dialogue boxes or subtitles for the cutscenes, the dubbing is necessary. And also apparently a barrier of some kind that’s been yet to be overcome. This isn’t a criticism, mind you, but a recognition of the reality of having to rely on unofficial work to be done to plug a gap opened up by the people who could solve the problem in an official capacity.
So, what’s to be done here? Falcom isn’t opposed to re-releasing Dragon Slayer games, that much is clear: they’ve even got a box set available in Japan that collects the entire series together. Originally released as Dragon Slayer Chronicle in 2012, it’s back again, and includes three versions of Dragon Slayer, the PC-88 version of Xanadu and its expansion, two computer versions of Romancia, the MSX2 edition of Dragon Slayer IV/Legacy of the Wizard, Sorcerian for the PC-88, PC-98 versions of the first two The Legend of Heroes games that came under the Dragon Slayer banner, the PC-98 editions of Lord Monarch and Advanced Lord Monarch, and then both The Legend of Xanadu titles, in their lone PC Engine CD form. That’s a massive and complete set, and they come with manuals and box art, for under $100.
The problem is that this is entirely in Japanese: Falcom hasn’t bothered to localize it, in this or its previous form, and has not contracted with any other publisher to handle that for them, either. Which is a shame, because I’m not the only one who would fork over $100 the second I was able to in order to get a hold of this collection, and finally have all of these games localized. They could, though! It would be considerable work, but not to the level of a single Trails game: The Legend of Xanadu might be 40 hours long, but it’s not stuffed with nearly 1.9 million characters that need to be translated into English, either.
Failing localization, Falcom could finally commit to remaking Dragon Slayer games on an international level, as they’ve done for Ys for years now, and as they’re about to start doing with Trails, when Trails in the Sky the 1st launches worldwide in 2025, using the same engine the current Trails subseries runs on. Something like Dragon Slayer or Xanadu would merely need the Brandish: The Dark Revenant treatment, where it’s still very clearly Brandish, top down and all, just graphically enhanced and cleaned up a bit for modern sensibilities. The same goes for Legacy of the Wizard, which still works as a pathfinder in the present: making sure some of what was in the manual is in-game, and that the bugs are cleaned up and presentation reworked, is really all that’s necessary.
There has to be a 2D-HD equivalent Falcom can bust out for remakes of The Legend of Heroes and its sequel, or maybe The Legend of Xanadu will get remade using whatever engine Ys is powered by, just like when Ys remakes were tied to not their original form, but to whatever the current game in the series was like. If the originals were also all available in a playable form, remakes would be a perfect solution, but even as an imperfect one — we’re probably not living in a world where Falcom uses resources to localize 30- and 40-year-old games that are only going to attract so much attention outside of Japan when they could instead remake them and bring them up to modern expectations — it would be welcome at this point.
Falcom needs to do something, though, because Dragon Slayer — despite being the series that launched them in this direction where they’re a role-playing studio, despite being what made them into Falcom, one of the undisputable pillars of Japanese video role-playing games alongside Square and Enix — has been largely ignored since Yoshio Kiya left the company in the early 90s. The end of Trails is coming, though, and sooner than you might expect — Falcom is on the record saying as much. Maybe, as development shifts toward the next big thing for Falcom to pair up with Ys, there will be time and energy to devote to reviving Dragon Slayer. We’ve all waited this long for it to happen — what’s a few more years on that front? Hey, maybe in between we’ll see more unofficially translated games from the series to tide us over.
Until then, get into emulation if you aren’t already there. Look for the unofficial translations that already exist. Give Dragon Slayer and Xanadu a whirl in their Sega Saturn forms. Learn Japanese so you can play The Legend of Xanadu, or, maybe more realistically, open up a spoiler-free guide and make sure you’ve got Google Lens ready to go on your phone as necessary. There isn’t much of an alternative to these choices at this point, besides to not play at all, and that doesn’t sound like something I can just roll with at this point. Help us out, Falcom, and revive Dragon Slayer in the way a series of its magnitude deserves.
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Yeah, it's strange that we seem to get overloaded with some Japanese works, but then there are these glaring gaps that often leave out badly needed context. My favorite is the "villainess" genre popular in manga and anime, which are ALL riffs on the Angelique dating sim series. Western viewers wouldn't know that, though, because the series has never been translated at all.
I think things are coming to a head, though. There was ENORMOUS backlash over how that last direct had some beyond-tired western "dating sim", while Japan got Tokimeki. Nobody wants the lame parodies anymore, they want the real thing, and it's becoming increasingly bizarre that is isn't happening.
I also think that we've hit a bit of a crossroads. The trend in localization now is to practically rewrite works in ways that would make Vic Ireland blush, but it just doesn't seem like that's sustainable. Even aside from the endless online wrangling over it, that's going to be such a long and slow process that it likely isn't economically viable for smaller works like a Falcom SRPG. They already have massive delays as it is, ruining any momentum they already have.
(Also, the heavy changes are going to be alienating to exactly the audience that would be interested in the first place. The blunt fact is that if they wanted a western-written game, they would simply buy one, there's millions to choose from. Heavy Japanese cultural influences are usually seen as a feature, not a bug, and I think localizers often miss that.)
That's going to inevitably cause decision-makers to consider machine translation, but that has the opposite problem: it doesn't understand where localization actually IS necessary, leading to a garbled mess. It requires heavy editing, but then you're just back to the same problem.
I feel like the solution is to take a light hand, and to lean more towards the meat-and-potatoes translation instead of a flashy localization. Faster, cheaper, and the actual audience for these works would almost certainly prefer it. But I fear that it'll just end up being ChatGPT, leaving nobody satisfied at all.