The long-awaited English release of Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer stands out even in a year stacked with fantastic independent games. Not just because it’s a massive strategy RPG that combines the beloved characters of Touhou Project (a series of shoot-em-ups developed by ZUN) with systems inspired by the Super Robot Wars series of games. But also because, frankly speaking, a translation of this game was always unlikely. It’s a hundred hour title rooted in two niche franchises that has tons of dialogue, multiple story scenarios and even an extensive Library detailing every character and piece of terminology. How did the team find the time and resources to translate so many words for a small, if enthusiastic, audience? The translation of Fantasy Maiden Wars was a 13-year project. What began as a forum Let’s Play organized by amateurs (with professional assistance) evolved into a full-on professional translation. Some staff from those early days took the lead for the official release. Others offered their blessing. But the game as it exists in English today is only possible because of everybody’s hard work at every step in the process. “I like to joke that it was only possible due to the Power of Friendship,” says the lead translator Clarste. “But honestly, that’s true.” It started on the Let’s Play subforum at Something Awful, where readers posted their video games diaries for an audience. The subforum had an active community of Touhou fans. One of these fans was BlitzBlast, who came up with the idea of writing up Fantasy Maiden Wars E : a strategy game developed by Sanbondo that had received an unofficial English fan patch not so long ago. This was the first of four games that would later be combined into the Fantasy Maiden Wars that we know today. RELATED: The Power of Soul: How Wholesome RPG Zakuzaku Actors Was Translated Into English With the help of Goast, a forum friend who helped transcribe the patch’s English script, BlitzBast finished up the E Let’s Play in about six months. The sequel P would be more difficult, though, as it had not yet received a translation patch. It was also longer and denser than E . So while BlitzBlast initially translated the script on his own, he burnt out halfway through and was on the verge of abandoning the project. That’s when fans came to the rescue. One of them was Christina Rose, who first found Touhou through a Let’s Play thread on the Something Awful forums . Rose was a freelance translator as well as a big fan of robots, so she offered BlitzBlast her services. But she, too, only had so much time available because she was busy with work. The other was Clarste, who discovered the original Touhou games on GameFAQs back in 2005. Clarste liked how much they left to interpretation; how “there’s always a sense that we’re never seeing the full picture, and [that] each character has more to them than we see in the games.” Fantasy Maiden Wars leaned into that aspect of active interpretation that he enjoyed so much. So when BlitzBlast’s Let’s Play ran aground, Clarste volunteered his services at the same time that Rose did. The two of them decided that Clarste would translate the script while Rose proofread and edited his work. Clarste and Rose accompanied BlitzBlast through Let’s Plays of Fantasy Maiden Wars P in 2014 and Fantasy Maiden Wars I in 2015. When BlitzBlast retired from making Let’s Plays after I , another forum member named Battler stepped in to finish the job with Fantasy Maiden Wars D in 2017. “I was recently out of work,” he said, “and I had a lot of spare time.” Writing up Fantasy Maiden Wars D took three years to complete. What was it about Fantasy Maiden Wars that compelled these folks to put in so much work? Part of it, said Christina Rose, was that the game told “a full, serialized story from start to finish.” A Touhou novice could play through the series (or read the Let’s Play) and be satisfied without needing to know anything about the original source material. Also, while Fantasy Maiden Wars has a large cast of characters, it introduces them one by one. In Rose’s opinion, the game “is a wonderful way to ease you into the story and characters a bit at a time.” Fantasy Maiden Wars is notable from a gameplay perspective as well. The game’s nastier bosses have spellcards, special attacks that distort the map and debuff your characters. As a result, says Rose, these bosses are “much more varied and interesting than what you would see in a typical turn-based strategy RPG.” RELATED: 1000xResist's Remy Siu on the Power of Performance The game also has a cost system, which regulates how many party members you are allowed to have in battle at any given time. The player might choose to stack their team with low-cost units like Cirno or Daiyousei. Alternatively, they might shell out for units like Kanako or Suwako, which are powerful but much more expensive to deploy. Therefore, Rose says, “it creates a great deal of variance in what kinds of teams each player sends out, depending on each individual player's personal playstyle and preferences.” Aside from Touhou Project , Fantasy Maiden Wars has plenty of love for robots as well. Reisen, the moon rabbit, has a theme that parodies MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 00 . Lily Black models Black Sarena from Martian Successor Nadesico: The Prince of Darkness . There are also references to other anime works, like a Mokou special attack that parodies 3×3 Eyes . Not to mention Mehko, an original character who (says Rose) herds a flock of sheep with names reminiscent of various Gundam characters. The scripts from the Let’s Plays were eventually converted into fan translation patches for Fantasy Maiden Wars P and I . But then Sanbondo released Fantasy Maiden Wars: Complete Box in 2019, which combined E , P , I and D into one big game within the same engine. Rather than just patch that version, Rose and Clarste had something more ambitious in mind: an official translation published by Phoenixx Inc., which the two of them had a working relationship with. Rose said that a colleague encouraged her “to write up a pitch to Phoenixx summarizing [ Fantasy Maiden Wars ] as a translation project and its associated volume of work and cost.” Unfortunately, when Rose crunched the numbers, she was discouraged by what she found. The entirety of Fantasy Maiden Wars “had a massive scope of 2,468,211 moji [characters], and there [were] a lot of logistical challenges associated with a project of that size, especially when it's an indie title that doesn't benefit from the structure and support of a AAA game project.” Despite her love for the game, she “could not find any way to justify the cost of doing that much work for what [she] saw as a relatively niche title.” So what changed? Well, Phoenixx Inc. picked up the Japanese release of Fantasy Maiden Wars: Complete Box on their own and ported it to Switch in 2022 as Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer . Then they reached out to Rose and Clarste to ask if they’d be interested in translating the project. (They had no idea that the two of them had translated the earlier releases for a Let’s Play, although they were quick to make that part clear.) At the same time, Sanbondo messaged Battler on social media in the hopes of utilizing the fan translation in the new release. “When I saw Sanbon-san had DM'd me on Twitter asking about the fan translation,” he said, “my heart nearly exploded.” RELATED: HakanaiBlue on the Joy of Translating Touhou Games Rose was correct that a professional translation of Fantasy Maiden Wars would be unfeasible — under normal circumstances. It turned out that their team had a few distinct advantages she didn’t account for. First of all, BlitzBlast and others from the Let’s Play gave their blessing to use their translation script as a base, reducing the amount of work that had to be done from scratch. Second, Sanbondo was in touch throughout the process to provide information to the team. “This level of direct dev contact and support is practically unheard-of in our industry outside of indie titles,” said Rose, “and it's one of the benefits of working on indie games.” With a script for every game in the series to work from, you’d think that translating Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer would be a cinch. But that would be incorrect. The original Let’s Play, says Rose, “did not cover most battle dialogue or database text.” Neither did the old fan translation patch, which also did not finish translating Fantasy Maiden Wars D . That’s not even getting into the Complete Box additions, including rewritten dialogue and new ace conversations. Clarste was surprised to find that “they had added an entirely new story route and ending for New Game+, which I had not been aware of before translating even though I’d played the entire game in Japanese already…” None of this appeared in the Let’s Play, and so it all had to be translated from the ground up. Besides, he and Rose were not satisfied with just using their scripts from the original Let’s Plays as-is. “There was a great deal of reworking done for the older fan translation text to bring it up to our current, more professional standards,” said Rose. “It was not simply reused wholesale.” Rose and Clarste, the team lead and translator respectively for Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer , needed help to finish all this work. Battler and Goast from the Let’s Play helped with battle lines and quality assurance respectively. Also present was nook, a programmer who previously worked on the older fan translation patches. But several other staff members recruited for the project never contributed to the original Let’s Plays at all. One of those new staff members was Azumi, who fell into the fandom after finding a picture of Touhou ’s cast online circa 2009. Azumi loved how Touhou was full of characters from across mythologies, mixing vampires, oni and tengu. It reminded her of Yanagita Kunio, a Japanese folklorist who “travelled the countryside collecting folktales and local culture from different prefectures… finding out just how different myths could be in different places.” In the same way, she appreciated how fans remixed music from the games, “making the old fresh” just as Yanagita once had. RELATED: System Erasure's Antti and Eero Reveal the Origins of Their Games By her own admission, Azumi was “the newest of the team to fall in love with [ Fantasy Maiden Wars .]” This gave her a unique perspective on the team as a newcomer to the game. For instance, being able to answer the question, “will someone who isn’t as familiar with the genre and the game understand this tutorial text?” Even as somebody discovering Fantasy Maiden Wars for the first time, though, Azumi picked up on particularly funny or emotional scenes in the game that she wanted to do justice. “You really want to make sure the audience feels the same way as the Japanese audience does,” she said, “which always requires really careful, deliberate work. Yet you still need to finish on time!” Alice was another translator who contributed to Fantasy Maiden Wars ’ English release. While she did not work on the Let’s Play, she was familiar with the original iteration of the games back when they were first released. “I was into a certain other game series at the time,” she said, “and was absolutely delighted by all the references and such.” Alice’s greatest contribution to the English translation of Fantasy Maiden Wars was the Library, a repository containing the Gensokyo Chronicle (which profiles every character in the game, no matter how minor) and the Glossary (which defines terminology used throughout the series.) Translating the Library required not just familiarity with the games themselves, but also with spin-off books by ZUN such as Perfect Memento in Strict Sense . “I was very careful throughout translating it all,” Alice said, “asking [the team] questions… throughout the process.” This sometimes meant changing lines in the game’s script to match what was in the Library, or vice-versa. But Alice believed that her “work on the glossary helped hold everything together. We were all very coordinated during the process.” She also maintained an internal glossary for the team, which Azumi found very helpful even though it became so huge she “needed to reorganise it with a new sorting scheme.” That said, in Alice’s opinion, the greatest challenge she faced on Fantasy Maiden Wars wasn’t the Library but instead translating battle lines. “ Touhou Project is full of some pretty zany characters,” she said, “and the main story translators and editors had done such a good job on that end that I felt some pressure to get everything sounding right.” It didn’t help that battle lines were “some of the most frequently occurring text in the game,” meaning that any mistakes would be noticeable immediately. Still, Alice was proud of her work, particularly for the frog god Suwako. “I worked hard on her battle lines to make her come across as the fun, slightly silly character she is!” RELATED: After 13 Years, Indie RPG Masterpiece Ruina is Finally Available in English The final results speak for themselves. The Steam release of Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer features a complete, polished English translation well above standard for Japanese indie titles. Yet it stands on the shoulders of every prior iteration. Without the original translation patch, BlitzBlast might never have done the Fantasy Wars E Let’s Play. Without that Let’s Play, Clarste and Christina Rose might never have become involved. Without their involvement, there would be no script, and thus Fantasy Maiden Wars might never have received an official translation at all.
