In a year brimming with exceptional independent games, the long-awaited English release of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer’ truly stands out. It’s not just because this massive strategy RPG masterfully combines the beloved characters of the ‘Touhou Project’ (ZUN’s iconic shoot-’em-up series) with the tactical depth inspired by ‘Super Robot Wars.’ It’s also because, to be frank, an English translation of such a game always seemed incredibly improbable.
This is a hundred-hour epic rooted in two distinct, niche franchises, boasting a staggering amount of dialogue, intricate multiple story scenarios, and even an extensive in-game Library detailing every character and piece of terminology. The question lingered: How did a team find the time and resources to translate so many words for what, at its core, was a dedicated but smaller audience?
The answer lies in a remarkable 13-year endeavor. What began as an amateur-led ‘Let’s Play’ forum project, eventually supported by professional assistance, gradually blossomed into a full-scale, official translation. Some original contributors from those early days took the reins for the official release, while others offered their invaluable blessing. The English version of the game we enjoy today is a testament to the collective hard work invested at every stage of this demanding process. “I like to joke that it was only possible due to the Power of Friendship,” says lead translator Clarste. “But honestly, that’s true.”
This ambitious journey first took root on the ‘Let’s Play’ subforum of Something Awful, a vibrant community where readers shared their video game diaries. Among its active members was a passionate group of Touhou fans, including BlitzBlast. He conceived the idea of documenting ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars E,’ a strategy game by Sanbondo that had recently received an unofficial English fan patch. This was the first of four games that would eventually be combined to form the ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ saga we now know.
With crucial help from Goast, a forum friend who assisted in transcribing the patch’s English script, BlitzBlast successfully completed the ‘E’ Let’s Play in approximately six months. However, the subsequent installment, ‘P,’ proved to be a far greater challenge. Not only was it longer and denser than ‘E,’ but it also lacked any existing translation patch. BlitzBlast initially tackled the script alone, but midway through, he experienced burnout and was on the verge of abandoning the project entirely.
It was at this critical juncture that the fan community stepped in. Christine Rose, a freelance translator and ardent robot enthusiast who had discovered Touhou through a ‘Let’s Play’ thread herself, offered her expertise to BlitzBlast. However, her professional commitments limited her available time. Simultaneously, Clarste, who had found the original Touhou games on GameFAQs way back in 2005, also volunteered his services. Clarste was drawn to the interpretive depth of Touhou, the sense that “we’re never seeing the full picture, and each character has more to them than we see in the games.” ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ resonated with this aspect of active interpretation he so cherished. Thus, as BlitzBlast’s project stalled, Rose and Clarste joined forces, deciding that Clarste would handle the translation while Rose would meticulously proofread and edit his work.
Clarste and Rose continued their collaboration with BlitzBlast through the ‘Let’s Plays’ of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars P’ in 2014 and ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars I’ in 2015. After ‘I,’ BlitzBlast retired from creating ‘Let’s Plays.’ Another forum member, Battler, then stepped up to complete the final installment, ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars D,’ in 2017. “I was recently out of work,” he recalled, “and I had a lot of spare time.” Completing the write-up for ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars D’ ultimately took three years.
So, what was it about ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ that inspired these individuals to dedicate such immense effort? Part of its allure, as Christine Rose explained, was its ability to tell “a full, serialized story from start to finish.” A newcomer to the Touhou universe could play through the series (or follow the ‘Let’s Play’) and feel completely satisfied without needing prior knowledge of the original source material. Furthermore, despite its large cast, ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ introduces characters gradually. In Rose’s estimation, the game serves as “a wonderful way to ease you into the story and characters a bit at a time.”
Beyond its compelling narrative, ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ also shines from a gameplay perspective. The game’s most formidable bosses feature unique “spellcards” – special attacks that distort the map and inflict debuffs on your characters. This design choice, Rose notes, makes these bosses “much more varied and interesting than what you would see in a typical turn-based strategy RPG.” The game also incorporates a strategic cost system, regulating the number of party members you can deploy in battle at any given time. Players might opt for a team packed with low-cost units like Cirno or Daiyousei, or instead invest in powerful but more expensive units such as Kanako or Suwako. This system, Rose believes, “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.”
In addition to its homage to ‘Touhou Project,’ ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ is also rich with references to robot anime. Reisen, the moon rabbit, has a theme that humorously parodies ‘MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 00.’ Lily Black’s design draws inspiration from Black Sarena in ‘Martian Successor Nadesico: The Prince of Darkness.’ The game even includes references to other anime works, such as a Mokou special attack that references ‘3×3 Eyes.’ Not to mention Mehko, an original character who, according to Rose, herds a flock of sheep whose names cleverly allude to various ‘Gundam’ characters.
The scripts meticulously crafted during these ‘Let’s Plays’ were eventually converted into fan translation patches for ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars P’ and ‘I.’ However, a significant development occurred in 2019 when Sanbondo released ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Complete Box,’ which unified ‘E,’ ‘P,’ ‘I,’ and ‘D’ into a single, cohesive game running on the same engine. Instead of merely patching this new version, Rose and Clarste envisioned a far more ambitious goal: an official translation published by Phoenixx Inc., a company with whom they already had a working relationship. Rose recalls a colleague encouraging 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, her initial calculations proved discouraging. The sheer scope of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ encompassed “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 profound 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? In a serendipitous turn of events, Phoenixx Inc. independently acquired the Japanese release of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Complete Box’ and subsequently ported it to the Nintendo Switch in 2022, rebranding it as ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer.’ They then reached out to Rose and Clarste, inquiring about their interest in translating the project. (Unbeknownst to Phoenixx, they had already translated the earlier releases for the ‘Let’s Plays,’ a fact the duo quickly clarified.) Simultaneously, Sanbondo contacted Battler via social media, hoping to leverage the existing fan translation for the new official release. “When I saw Sanbon-san had DM’d me on Twitter asking about the fan translation,” Battler recounted, “my heart nearly exploded.”
Christine Rose’s initial assessment that a professional translation of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ would be unfeasible was, under normal circumstances, correct. However, their team possessed several distinct advantages she hadn’t initially accounted for. Firstly, BlitzBlast and other contributors from the ‘Let’s Play’ generously granted permission to use their translation script as a foundational base, significantly reducing the amount of work that needed to be done from scratch. Secondly, Sanbondo maintained close communication throughout the entire process, providing invaluable information and support to the team. Rose noted, “This level of direct dev contact and support is practically unheard-of in our industry outside of indie titles, and it’s one of the benefits of working on indie games.”
With a comprehensive script for every game in the series as a starting point, one might assume that translating ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer’ would be a straightforward task. However, this was far from the truth. As Rose explained, the original ‘Let’s Play’ “did not cover most battle dialogue or database text.” Similarly, the older fan translation patch also lacked these elements and had not even completed the translation for ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars D.’ Moreover, the ‘Complete Box’ introduced entirely new additions, including rewritten dialogue and fresh ace conversations.
Clarste himself was astonished to discover 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 new content had appeared in the ‘Let’s Play,’ meaning it all required translation from the ground up. Furthermore, Clarste and Rose were not content with simply reusing their existing 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,” Rose affirmed. “It was not simply reused wholesale.”
To tackle this monumental undertaking, Rose and Clarste, the team lead and translator respectively for ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer,’ enlisted additional help. Battler and Goast from the original ‘Let’s Play’ projects contributed their expertise in battle lines and quality assurance, respectively. Nook, a talented programmer who had previously worked on the older fan translation patches, also joined the team. Significantly, several other staff members recruited for the project had never contributed to the original ‘Let’s Plays’ at all.
One such new team member was Azumi, who immersed herself in the Touhou fandom after discovering a picture of its cast online around 2009. Azumi cherished how Touhou was brimming with characters from diverse mythologies, skillfully blending vampires, oni, and tengu. This resonated with her appreciation for 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 a similar vein, she admired how fans creatively remixed music from the games, “making the old fresh” much like Yanagita had done.
By her own admission, Azumi was “the newest of the team to fall in love with [Fantasy Maiden Wars].” This fresh perspective allowed her to offer unique insights, particularly in answering crucial questions like, “Will someone who isn’t as familiar with the genre and the game understand this tutorial text?” Even as someone new to ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars,’ Azumi quickly identified particularly humorous or emotional scenes in the game that she felt compelled to translate with utmost justice. “You really want to make sure the audience feels the same way as the Japanese audience does,” she stated, “which always requires really careful, deliberate work. Yet you still need to finish on time!”
Alice was another vital translator who contributed to the English release of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars.’ While she wasn’t involved in the ‘Let’s Play,’ she was intimately familiar with the original iterations of the games since their initial release. “I was into a certain other game series at the time,” she shared, “and was absolutely delighted by all the references and such.” Alice’s most significant contribution to the English translation was her work on the extensive Library, a comprehensive repository containing the Gensokyo Chronicle (profiling every character, no matter how minor) and the Glossary (defining terminology used throughout the series). Translating the Library demanded not only 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 explained, “asking [the team] questions… throughout the process.” This meticulous approach sometimes necessitated adjusting lines in the game’s main script to align with the Library’s content, or vice-versa. Alice firmly 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 incredibly helpful, even though it grew so vast that she “needed to reorganise it with a new sorting scheme.” That said, in Alice’s opinion, the greatest challenge she encountered on ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ wasn’t the Library, but rather translating the battle lines. “Touhou Project is full of some pretty zany characters,” she noted, “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.” The difficulty was compounded by the fact that battle lines were “some of the most frequently occurring text in the game,” meaning any inaccuracies would be immediately apparent. Despite the pressure, Alice was immensely 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!”
The final results speak for themselves. The Steam release of ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer’ features a complete, polished English translation that far exceeds the typical standard for Japanese indie titles. Yet, its success stands firmly on the shoulders of every prior iteration. Without the original translation patch, BlitzBlast might never have embarked on the ‘Fantasy Wars E’ ‘Let’s Play.’ Without that ‘Let’s Play,’ Clarste and Christine Rose might never have become involved. And without their tireless involvement, there would have been no foundational script, and thus, ‘Fantasy Maiden Wars’ might never have received an official translation at all. It’s a true testament to the enduring power of community, collaboration, and a shared love for a remarkable game.