English Fan Translation Released for Sega Dreamcast Shooter Triggerheart Exelica!

It's become tradition at this point for top hacker Derek Pascarella to gift us with at least a handful of English fan translations of Japanese Sega Dreamcast games each year. He just gave us Di Gi Charat Fantasy back in December, and now it's the turn of Warashi's cult-favourite shoot 'em up Triggerheart Exelica.

A port of a NAOMI arcade game, Triggerheart Exelica released for Dreamcast exclusively in Japan in —get this— 2007. In fact, it was released so late into the Dreamcast's commercial lifespan, we actually covered the news of its upcoming release here on the Junkyard! 

It was also one of 13 Dreamcast titles to ship in a DVD case.

Triggerheart has been an easy import for years due to it requiring little knowledge of Japanese to access its gameplay and enjoy it, but Derek's new patch will now allow you to follow along with its story mode in English, along with a few other bells and whistles. The localisation created for the game's 2023 Steam/Switch re-release served as a base translation, while dialogue exclusive to the Dreamcast version was translated into English by Walnut, who also made some additional refinements and translated the tutorial section. Text featured within graphics was also translated into English, with the altered graphics themselves reassembled by Malenko.

The game has a reputation for being bastard hard, and so Derek has seen to that as well by hacking in an "invincibility" mode that can be toggled on or off in the game's options and pause menus. Don't worry, this mode doesn't make you actually invincible to enemy fire, but instead grants you unlimited lives, so you never have to use a continue. This will allow those who struggle with the gameplay to experience the storyline. Not all of us can be gods at shooters!

Analog stick support has also been implemented, for those who prefer to use it over the D-pad, and for us European players, Derek has also fixed a quirk where the game would default to 50Hz when booted up on a PAL console. With this patch, it now defaults to 60.

If you want to play this, simply mosey on over to the GitHub repository and download the patch. Instructions can be found in there on how to patch an existing GDI of the game. While you're at it, also grab yourself a free download of the game's rippin' soundtrack.