Shining Force iii (scenario 1)

[Reprise]

I'm thinking about buying all the Shining Force iii games, starting with scenario 1. But what I'm wondering is, how easy are they to get into if you don't understand Japanese?

I love Grandia, and have had no problems with that so far (well other than disc problems grr), but that's mostly down to a good translation guide and the fact it's easy to play and understand (especially since I've got Grandia 2). Since scenario 1 was released in English, will I have problems trying to find a translation guide? Should I opt for the rarer and much more expensive English version, or just go for the Japanese version?

P.S. And I assume the game will work fine via a Action Replay cart right?

Thanks in advance!

[Ziggy]

You'll have a pretty hard time playing them in Japanese if you don't understand it. There's translation guides out there, but mostly for the story. I think a lot of the menus are in Japanese which will make it next to impossible for you to do just about anything.

Luckily, a team of people have been working to translate all three scenarios!

http://sf3trans.shiningforcecentral.com/introduction/

So I wouldn't bother struggling to play them in Japanese when these people are putting a lot of hard work into translating them. Just gotta wait for them to be finished. You could play the nearly completed beta versions right now, but I'm waiting for the final versions myself.

I got the NA release of Shining Force 3 a while back, but I stopped playing the game (about half way through) when I learned the second two scenarios were gonna be translated. I wanted to play through them all back to back.

[Reprise]

Thanks for the reply. That's what I wanted to know, since trying to learn Japanese isn't really a realistic option (despite what the guy that created that Tales series thread says ).

I've bought Scenario 1 (it wasn't too expensive) and I'll see how I get on with it. If I have a hard time, well it happens. But I just really want to be able to experience the games.

Thanks for the link too, I'll have a read and keep my eye on how the translations are going. It's great that people are working hard to translate the games.

[Genesis Knight]

Re: the translation effort, where are they at? Last I heard Scen2 was done and 3 was mostly done?

[alienjesus]

I would be very interested if someone could make a thread listing what translation patches are out there for japan-only games. Maybe I should start a thread about it?

[Ziggy]

For every console? Way too many to list. You might want to check out ROMhacking.net. More specifically, this page:

http://www.romhacking.net/trans/

You can sort by system to make it easier to find what you're looking, unless you wanna just browse. RHDN doesn't have EVERY translation that exists, but I believe it has most of them.

[synbiosfan]

You're better off getting the a NA Shining Force. The good news is after playing scenario 1 in english, you'll be familiar with the menus to play 2-3 fairly easy.