Friday, April 16, 2010

The Lady Sword Translation is almost complete

This time I'm going to talk about something a little different.

Way way back there was a Japan-only game for the PC-Engine, a system we in other parts of the world know as the Turbografx-16. Lady Sword was its name and it was developed by a company known as Games Express. Never heard of them? They're behind the fighting game known as Strip Fighter 2. Yes that's right Strip Fighter 2. As you can imagine these guys weren't exactly known for their quality games.

To put it bluntly they developed games where you were rewarded with soft-core porn as you progressed. Strip Fighter 2 was nothing more than a shameless piece of garbage that was awful to the point of hilarity. Lady Sword on the other hand...well it's about the same thing. Still it offered some uh... interesting content that was more than just badly rendered 8-bit naked pictures.

The deal with Lady Sword is that it is a first-person dungeon crawler. It's very basic as there's only one party member and battle strategies are limited to fight, defend, do some move that has a 1% chance of success, or run. The goal is to navigate a series of mazes to further the storyline, kill the final boss, and immerse yourself in the bizarre happenings.

The strangest thing about this game is a disembodied female head that appears every now and again to offer advice, chat about the weather, and well honestly I have no idea. At first it's seems like a normal enough thing with all the magic floating heads we're used to in fictional media but after the first stage things change. This floating head starts changing into more grotesque forms, bits of skin fall off, sometimes she's wrapped in bandages, maybe her brain is exposed for no particular reason, oh and she gets new hairstyles. It's quite disturbing and guess what? A couple guys are actually putting forth the effort to translate this insanity and yours truly is going to be one of the first beta-testers who will finally discover just what that bleeding floating head was babbling about.

Chances are good that you don't care about any of this and I don't blame you. I did a google search recently and turned up a couple pages worth of actual content about the game.

The translation page itself.
An angelfire site documenting my playthrough of the game(warning contains language and idiocy)

There's also a couple videos floating around on youtube I think but otherwise that's about the extent of people actually talking about the game. Maybe there's some thread in an obscure forum I missed somewhere but otherwise this is all I could find.

Regardless I'm looking forward to giving this game another run through and hopefully more people will take an interest in it because while it isn't a good game by any stretch of the imagination it is certainly something else.

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