Drift King Shutokou Battle '97: Tsuchiya Keiichi & Bandou Masaaki English translation
ＤＲＩＦＴ ＫＩＮＧ 首都高バトル’９７ ～土屋圭市＆板東正明～ · Tokyo Highway Battle '97
Malenko's English localization of Genki's Saturn street racer, with translated garage, parts and menus, subtitled driver videos and English rival dialogue.
What's translated
Malenko spent mid-2022 translating this surprisingly text-heavy racer. The patch covers the menus and save screens, the whole garage with its tuning parts and their descriptions, the course screens and the rival lines before and after races. The live-action videos with Keiichi Tsuchiya and Masaaki Bandoh now carry English subtitles, based on a translation of the spoken dialogue by Lacquerware, and the title screen was redone as Tokyo Highway Battle '97.
The localization is a playful one: one of the rivals is rewritten as a joke character, so don't expect a strictly literal script.
Versions
The complete patch came out in July 2022. Version 1.01 fixed typos and some rival lines and adjusted the subtitles of one video, and the final 1.02 in October 2022 removed leftover course descriptions, corrected two translations and redrew some graphics.
Playing it
The patch is applied to your own copy of the Japanese Saturn disc, following the instructions in the creator's SegaXtreme thread. On emulators the creator suggests turning off VDP1 overlays if the video subtitles look wrong.
Credits
Translation and hacking by Malenko, with compression tools by Nanash1, video dialogue translation by Lacquerware and help from Shadowmask, TrekkiesUnite118, Knight0fDragon, Danthrax and others at SegaXtreme.