English Translation by Kyence
I never thought I’d see this day. In 2003 Sega of Japan released a remake of the Sega Master System Phantasy Star for the Play Station 2. The full title of the remake is Sega Ages 2500 Phantasy Star Generation 1. It offered beautifully remade graphics and music as well as including new content and a much more developed and detailed story. Unfortunately the planned English version of this release was canceled not long after it’s announcement and I was crushed.
Over the years there has been a lot of talk about translating this game and even though I have known of (and greatly enjoyed) the Phantasy Star Cave I didn’t find about this until I stumbled onto a fellow wordpress blogger at The Sega Source and this Sega Source post.
Thanks to the Kyence an incredibly motivated Phantasy Star fan all of us can now enjoy this release in English.
If you have any interest (and you should 🙂 ) head over to the Phantasy Star Cave for details on a Playstion 2 emulator and the translated Phantasy Star Generation 1.
Below are two screen shots taken from the Phantasy Star Cave showing off the English translation in action.
For those who are familiar with the original Phantasy Star; in one short sentence you can see the staggering differences in this remake. Both in the dialog and the graphics.
I know I’m biased but the game looks great. I feel very fortunate to have one of my all time favorites remade like this. It’s been about 10 years since the Japanese remake came out and I can still hardly believe that this English translation is real. Thank you Kyence!
A little more of this wonderful translation and showing off more depth even from NPCs.
Kyence posted an excellent video shown below. In it he describes what he did and is essentially giving us a behind the scenes look at this project. After watching this video it’s clear that this was a very challenging task for many reasons.
In addition Kyence has an other video called PSG1 Translation – Myau & Odin which was also an enjoyable and insightful watch.
Phantasy Star G1 now in English thanks to Kyence. Thank you!
Phantasy Star G2 maybe in English someday soon?
In addition to this wonderful translation I found out from the Phantasy Star Cave that a translation for Phantasy Star Generation 2 is under way. These are very exciting times 😀
I thought my beloved Phantasy Star adventure was long over… Here’s to a new beginning.
Retro Megabit 
Wow – this is pretty amazing news. I’ve wanted to get those two games, but haven’t to date. Now, I’ll add them to my list of imports to grab (of course, the price on both will go up most likely due to them being out of print and fans clamoring for copies, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I luck out).
Although, truth be told, I absolutely hate dealing with the whole process of ISOs and ripping files and patching like this because I don’t know how to do that stuff (I’m easily annoyed with some forms of technology. I prefer to just buy something or download something and play it right away).
One other issue – I just now poked around the site in a new tab and checked out the PS2 emulator page, but Firefox and my virus scanner warned me off downloading the emulator, saying the site was potentially harmful. Eek. I certainly don’t want anything mucking up my PC, as that happened on another one I had a few years ago and that was NO fun at all to get rid of.
That and I’m hoping the translation has better grammar than the PS Cave page does (I caught a few typos there that made my eyebrow go up). Yeah, I’m THAT picky about grammar in games. Sorry, I had too many good English teachers in my younger days, that’s all.
Anyway, rambling aside… I’d actually love to see Sega stop being so damned resistant to their history, go on ahead and either support these fan projects or do this series justice by putting them out on PC as downloads on their own site. The latter would of course, mean that PS Cave would get a nice cease and desist letter from Sega, but that’s one risk sites like these need to realize is one outcome of doing stuff like this.
That said, I hope enough people are interested in this that Sega does SOMETHING positive other than sit on the series and bask in the glory that once was the single player, more story driven PS series…
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geelw I have been playing this game for about 7 hours total now and I’m loving every minute. The new dialog, the grinding, the new graphics, the classic tunes, the new little features and the English text! 🙂
Do you have a modded PS2? If so I think I can help you avoid fussing with an emulator get you playing this game if you think you might enjoy it.
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Glad to see you’re playing and loving it – that’s a relief! I’m on the hunt for PSG1 now, so we’ll see what turns up with that, as I definitely want to own a copy of the game. Of course, I only have Japanese and US PS2s here (both older models). I need to track down a debug console (I actually passed one up on eBay a little while ago so i could afford to pre-order a Wii U) that will run everything at some point, I guess…
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