Finding Xanadu: Inside a JRPG classic translation 15 years in the making

A long-running fan translation of Nihon Falcom’s PC Engine RPGs The Legend of Xanadu and The Legend of Xanadu II shows how painstaking technical work and collaboration can rescue games never officially released in English. The project began in 2011, when Japanese translator SamIAm and hacker EsperKnight tried to tackle the sequel but got stuck reinserting its text. Retired programmer Elmer joined in 2015 and found that Falcom’s game engine intertwined dialogue with executable code, unlike the more straightforward text banks used by many other RPGs. He built tools to decompile and recompile the scripts, devised more efficient compression to make room for English text, and created a working path for the translation. The first game’s English version arrived in 2026, with the sequel planned to follow.

The translation itself involved roughly 240,000 Japanese characters for the first game and 95,000 for the second. Sam translated both scripts, then played through the games to refine phrasing and make sure lines fit the screen and sounded natural. The team also improved the font and sought volunteer actors for English voice work, since key cutscenes contain spoken dialogue but no subtitles. Coordinating a cast and fitting new audio into the games proved far harder than expected; after years of delay, the developers explored adding code to the visual scenes instead. The project’s long timeline reflects both the technical limits of the hardware and the persistence required to make a detailed, playable translation.