Sega’s Japan exclusive Mega-Drive turn based strategy game The Hybrid Front receives a fan translation

Sega’s classic cyberpunk turn-based strategy game for Genesis/Mega-Drive, The Hybrid Front (1994), has finally been fan translated.

This translation was 7 years in the making, as the team of fans responsible, Nebulous Translations, had announced this translation back in 2018. Due to some difficulties with packing English text into the game’s visual interface, which was intrinsically designed for kanji-heavy Japanese to be written out vertically, the translation patch took a lot longer to put together in the team’s spare time. After much difficulty, a translation patch is now available for the public to download and try. The Hybrid Front and its surprisingly in depth story and dialogue for its time is now far more accessible to curious English speaking fans.

If your interested in trying it for yourself, strategize your way past the break for the download link.

As mentioned before, The Hybrid Front was known in part for its incredibly in-depth storyline that even most 16-bit RPGs did not have back then. The game was written by an esteemed sci-fi writer and included mountains of text for its story, as well as many character profiles, a chronological story timeline, and a universe encyclopedia. Add in the aforementioned difficulty of working with a text system coded around vertically oriented Japanese text, just like in a Japanese book or manga, rather than horizontally oriented romanized text, and you can understand why this took so long to translate. That’s also before you factor in that, like any fan translation, this was made out of passion from fans working around their own personal lives and responsibilities, as well as other fan translations they happened to be working on simultaneously, to get it done.

You can download the patch from this page on the Nebulous Translations website. You’ll have to apply the patch to a game rom file that fell into your lap through completely legal means. There, you can also read more on all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into putting this translation together. We here at SegaBits tip our hats to the hard working fans at Nebulous Translations for their years of hard work and are glad to see it finally pay off. They’ve also prepared a translated game manual to help you understand how the game works.

Were you aware that The Hybrid Front was set to be translated in 2018? Are you excited to finally see the translation completed? Have you played The Hybrid Front before or were you ever planning on playing it after someone translated it? Tell us in the comments below.

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