by Gregory Gay - 01.18.10
Fatal Frame IV, which was released in Japan over a year and a half ago, was something of a departure for the series. Rather than being developed by the traditional team at Tecmo, much of the programming and design was overseen by Suda-51 and his team at Grasshopper (who you may know from Killer 7 and No More Heroes). Even more interestingly - Nintendo picked up the publishing duties.
Despite it being the most successful entry in the entire series, Nintendo of America unceremoniously rejected the game for an English release. Not only that, but they prevented Tecmo from publishing it as well. After Nintendo of Europe also rejected it, fans were left with no way to play the game in English.
Until now, that is. The fan translation has finally been completed. All that you need to do is load their patch onto an SD card, run an installer, and launch a legal disc-based copy of the game. Need a copy of the game? Play-Asia has you covered. Want to know more about the game itself? A trailer for the fan translation lies just beyond the cut.
I want to play this so very badly.
9th Sage - 01.18.10 9:44 pm
It’s times like these when I despise Nintendo. :’(
Andrew - 01.19.10 2:46 am
Andrew,
I agree with you, but it’s totally fun when fan translators find ways to say screw you NOA, and more specifically that’s who you are despising right?
Nintendo of Japan released Mother 3, Fatal Frame Wii, and so on, so we can’t very well despise all of Nintendo..
Kyle - 01.19.10 9:50 am
Started playing this yesterday. It’s a very professional translation, and it’s fabulous to be able to hear the original Japanese voices.
I am very grateful to the team at Beyond the Camera Lens for giving us the opportunity to play the game that I had been waiting so patiently for, I doubt we’ll ever see a proper release of this, so the translations worth it’s weight in gold.
Game wise it reminds me of the first game a lot, but the Grasshopper touches are clear, fighting the ghosts are a lot easier thanks to a lovely ghost indicator which helps point out the direction their in, and the wiimote as a torch is an inspired touch, I love having to hold the A button to pick up items, it really aids the tension.
MIchelle - 01.19.10 1:52 pm
Started playing this yesterday. It’s a very professional translation, and it’s fabulous to be able to hear the original Japanese voices.
I am very grateful to the team at Beyond the Camera Lens for giving us the opportunity to play the game that I had been waiting so patiently for, I doubt we’ll ever see a proper release of this, so the translations worth it’s weight in gold.
Game wise it reminds me of the first game a lot, but the Grasshopper touches are clear, fighting the ghosts are a lot easier thanks to a lovely ghost indicator which helps point out the direction their in, and the wiimote as a torch is an inspired touch, I love having to hold the A button to pick up items, it really aids the tension.
MIchelle - 01.19.10 1:53 pm
Yeah, I’ve had a chance now to play it a bit, I really like what I see so far.
9th Sage - 01.21.10 3:27 am
Ok, so maybe I”m an idiot, but what do I need to do to play this? Just buy the Japanese version, and load a file from my sd card? Does my Wii need to be hacked to do this?
Rocketboy_X - 01.22.10 8:10 pm
havent tried it yet but ill go out on a limb and say the patch for the wii dashboard 4.2 has a way to bipas the region lock… no issue since its NTSC still, if you’re in PAL format land, i think you might need to go in through homebrew and force the game to PAL >.> not going into detail
Peter B - 01.23.10 7:39 am
There’s a lot of files you need to copy (in the right spots) to your SD card, then you can start up the launcher that does some stuff…not entirely sure what. Then start the launcher again and it will start.
Technically, if you want to, you don’t need to permanently hack your Wii (install the Homebrew Channel I mean) to use this. If you get the System Menu specific one you’ll find it comes with bannerbomb, which will let you launch the FF4 launcher without actually installing things to your Wii.
The 9th Sage - 01.23.10 2:42 pm
Ah, I will say that if you go the Bannerbomb route, you might be better off getting it it’s own SD card (IIRC a 1 GB one would be more than enough). With Bannerbomb on the card, you’ll either not be able to use the SD menu or not be able to use the data management screen depending on what System Menu version you’re using (Bannerbomb works slightly differently in 4.1 and below than it does in 4.2).
The 9th Sage - 01.23.10 2:44 pm
@The 9th Sage
You only have to run bannerbomb once; afterward, it can be deleted. There’s no reason to have a separate SD card.
Greg - 01.24.10 11:46 am