Some fan translations bring a forgotten classic back into the spotlight, and some bring back something so strange that you can’t help but admire the people who spent their time on it, and the new English patch for Idea Factory’s 1996 PS1 game Spectral Tower falls very much into the second camp.
The patch is out now, it was highlighted by Time Extension and also given a shout-out in Wes Fenlon’s emulation newsletter Read Only Memo, and it means English-speaking players can finally find out just how ridiculous this game really is.
What is Spectral Tower?
Spectral Tower is a roguelike dungeon crawler from Idea Factory, the Japanese company later known for the Neptunia series, and it was released on the original PlayStation in Japan back in 1996 without ever getting an official Western release.
The premise is simple enough, because you guide adventurers through a series of five towers that get harder as you go, but the scale is where things get silly, because those towers range from a gentle 10 floors all the way up to a frankly absurd 10,000 floors.
Time Extension describes it as perhaps the longest “kusoge” ever made, which is the Japanese term for a game that’s bad in a way people can’t help but love, and reports that the tallest tower has an expected playtime of around 5,000 hours if you take it on the slow way.
It’s not quite as bad as it sounds
Before you start clearing your calendar for the next few years, one of the patch’s creators, SnowyAria, has pointed out that the 5,000-hour figure assumes you barely use any items, and that an experienced player who knows what they’re doing can actually get through it in about 20 hours.
That’s still a big commitment for a 1996 roguelike, but it’s a lot more reasonable than a number that sounds like a full-time job for two and a half years.
There’s a fun bit of history here too, because Idea Factory reportedly offered pin badges to players who cleared the game’s highest towers, although Time Extension rightly points out that it seems highly unlikely anyone actually won one.
Who made the patch
The English patch is the work of a small team, with Quade handling the translation, Tasos500 doing the hacking, NicheTopic working on the graphics and SnowyAria translating the FMVs, and the team has made a point of stating that no AI was used for the patch.
That’s worth mentioning, because AI translation has become a real talking point in the fan translation scene lately, and Read Only Memo specifically praised all-human work in the same issue, including the massive new Ar Tonelico 2 retranslation, which runs to over 550,000 words.
The Spectral Tower patch is available from Yoshimanix’s GitHub repository, and as with any fan translation, you’ll need to apply it to your own copy of the game, so we won’t be linking to anything dodgy here.
Are You Going to Check it Out?
I love stories like this, because there’s no commercial reason for anyone to translate a 30-year-old PS1 dungeon crawler with a ten-thousand-floor tower, and yet a group of fans sat down and did it properly anyway, by hand, simply because they thought it deserved to be playable.
Will Spectral Tower be your new favourite game? Almost certainly not, but if you’re into roguelikes, obscure Japanese PS1 games or just enjoy the idea of staring down a challenge that’s this ridiculous, it’s absolutely worth a look, especially with an emulator’s save states on hand for when floor 3,000 starts to drag.
It’s also a nice reminder that the retro scene is still turning up new things to play, and that the people doing this work deserve a lot more credit than they usually get.
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