Dragon Ball Shin Butoden’s Saturn English patch clears a key hurdle

Dragon Ball Shin Butoden, a Saturn fighter that never received English text, is getting a second chance at being read as well as played. Developer kitchen34 has been building an English translation patch in public on SegaXtreme since June 2023, and posted fresh screenshots on July 24. The work has now cleared a hard technical hurdle: sprite compression.

kitchen34 rebuilt a compatible compressor to extract the game’s graphics data, opening the way to replace Japanese image text with English assets. That is slow, exacting work, but it is the kind of community labor that keeps an import-only library from becoming a closed room. As of today, he says we are close, maybe 10 days away from some type of release. A finished patch would let more players meet this Saturn fighter on its own terms, which is exactly what matters to me.