The originalPhantasy Starwas first released in Japan on July 27, 2025, and arrived in Europe and North America a year later. Unfortunately, the game’s English translation was poorly done, with many immersion-breaking errors. In response, a small group of ROM hackers released their own, much-improved,Phantasy Startranslation in 2006. Apparently not satisfied with their work, they’ve now upgraded the patch to version 2.0, nearly 14 years later.
Phantasy Star is legendary in its genre; as one of the first RPGs available on consoles, it proved itself leagues ahead of its primitive competition in both game-play and design. It was a great shame then that the official English patch didn’t live up to it, making several bizarre choices that took western players out of the game, with the most egregious perhaps being the renaming of healing items as “Cola” and “Burger.”
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It was this failure that inspired the five-person ROM-hacking team of Z80 Gaiden, Maxim, Paul Jensen, satsu, and Frank “TheRedEye” Cifaldi to produce their 2006 version, which not onlyimproved the translation, but also added the ability to listen to the original Japanese soundtrack.
The team’s Phantasy Star Retranslation version 2.0, released on May 26th, features not only an even more polished English script, but a host of quality-of-life improvements. These new updates include options to increase Alisa’s walking speed, XP and money multipliers, an option toreduce battle frequency, and new choices for both hair color and font style.
Phantasy Star Onlineis available on a variety of consoles and ROM-emulators, as well as the Nintendo Switch.
