A Sega Fan's Dream... Right?
The wait is finally over for Dreamcast and Sega fans alike. Yesterday, February 27th the English translation patch for Segagaga was released to the public. This game has had a storied history not just during its era when the game was released, but as a cult Japanese game that was localized because of Sega's position in the gaming market, and the Dreamcast dying out shortly after the games release. Segagaga (or SGGG if you prefer) has had a history in the fan translation community, with at least 2 other teams trying and failing to make something that was in a playable/releasable state. 25 years later however, we're finally able to enjoy what the Japanese audience has enjoyed. With every fan translation though comes doubters and people who aren't happy with the final product, and this release is no different, but for good reason. To understand this however, you need the full picture. What is a Segagaga, the patch's history leading up to its most recent release, and the current controversy?
A Game for the Fans
2001 wasn't a good year for Sega. The company had gone through much turmoil after the large success of the Sega Genesis in the USA. Sega of America and Sega of Japan's relationship had been deteriorating for quite some time, and Sega had grown to be a company that consumers weren't trusting in (at least in the U.S market). The release of the 32X attachment for the Genesis, the rushed launch of the Sega Saturn in the U.S market and the launch of the Sony PlayStation marked the beginning of the end for Sega's slice of the game console market. Japan was a bit more fortunate with the Sega Saturn, with it being the console that being the most well received out of any others in Sega's home country. The Saturn kept a close position to the PlayStation through out '95 and '96, but the release of Final Fantasy VII is largely considered the turning point for Sony's console, and they never looked back. After the Saturn's failure to capture the same audience the Genesis once had in the U.S, Sega had to do something to revamp its image and quickly. Enter the Dreamcast. Released in 1998 in Japan and '99 in the U.S, the console was a true leap in home gaming hardware that people couldn't even imagine. Incredible graphics going from 32-bit to 128-bit hardware, direct internet access right out of the box with a built in modem, and a strong library of With a strong reception in the U.S, becoming the fastest selling console in U.S history to that point with over a million units sold after about two and a half months of being on the market⁽¹⁾. Japan faced a similar strong launch, but chip shortages meant that consoles couldn't be sold as quickly as customers would've liked to buy the new console⁽¹⁾. Although the Dreamcast had a decent launch, consoles were still being sold at a lost, as was the common practice at the time, with companies making up sales in software. In September of 1999 at the Fall Tokyo Games Show⁽²⁾, Sony revealed the PlayStation 2, and the writing was on the wall. The PlayStation 2 released the following year in the U.S and Japan, and the Dreamcast's discontinuation was announced in January of 2001⁽³⁾.
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| Senior Managing Director at Sega Hidekazu Yukawa in the What's Shenmue? demo disc |
As the console's life was coming to a close, enter a little game called Segagaga. Segagaga was an RPG that parodied Sega's current status in 2001, and used that story to it's advantage. In the game, Sega only holds 3% of the console market share, and its up to two kids to save the company from the evil corporation DOGMA. The game uses many a Sega intellectual property, staff members, consoles and more as a love letter to the company. Outside of references to Sega, the game also references other popular franchises, as well as some things being a 4th wall break on the games development. For example, characters in the game will literally talk about lazy asset reuse or lack of animation in certain spots when characters are talking. While being a common trait in other JRPGs of the time, its also referencing the games small budget. This isn't to say that the game is bad looking, it mashes a variety of visual styles together to create something quite unique for its time, and features animated sequences from Toei Animation throughout the adventure. It is because of the game's satirical nature and uniqueness that it became a cult classic, and something that English speaking Sega fans wouldn't be able to experience as the game came out in Japan only days before the Dreamcast was fully discontinued. Because of this, the game has been heralded as a holy grail fan translation to many in the community, with many fans waiting decades to finally play this game in their native tongue. Why was there such a wait though?
The Fans' Turn to Create a Game
From my understanding, several attempts to translate this game were started, but never really got off the ground it appears. Some users on the Dreamcast-Talk forum had been trying to collectively work on things with the game, with some tools even being posted like a texture extractor for the game. Enter the project's lead Exxistance. Exxistance is not a stranger to the fan translation scene, even creating patches for some Sega Saturn games like Delisoba Deluxe and Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru that translate those games into English. Exxistance had found this texture extractor tool on the Dreamcast-Talk forum, and decided to tinker around with SGGG. According to Exxistance "when I started looking through SGGG’s textures, I realized that the game had an enormous amount of text baked into the textures, much of it as user interface elements. All the primary actions of the player, for example, are drawn into the UI rather than being simple text elements that can be updated in the game files. Merely translating the game text alone would not provide a player with the context they need to comfortably play the game in English"⁽⁴⁾. From my understanding of other fan translation efforts, most games have text files that aren't baked into the UI, but rather an entire script that is usually extracted, translated and reinserted into the game. The hacking work usually comes in with making the retranslated text is in English instead of Japanese, adjusting font-widths, making sure that text boxes are appropriately showing a correct amount of text, and more. Any fan translation that is released should be appreciated as the amount of work that goes into a single project, let alone a game the size of SGGG, is immense and usually done in fans' spare time. Exxistance has experience in adjusting textures, and decided to adjust some of the text textures little by little as a hobby project. However, after posting his progress to the Dreamcast-Talk forum, word quickly got around and more people showed interest in joining the project. After a little over a year of consistent work on the project, Exxistance and team released their English translation patch of Segagaga on Friday, February 27th 2025.
Rightfully so, fans were excited, as was I. I recently started learning Japanese last year with the hope of eventually being fluent enough to not only speak the language, but also be able to read the games that were exclusive to a Japanese audience. I also recently purchased a Dreamcast for myself earlier this month, and SGGG was a game that was on my radar as something that I would eventually play. Thankfully, that turned into a sooner rather than later because of this patch and the people that worked on it. Shortly after the patch was announced and released however, some addendums were revealed that soured some peoples' opinions on the patch.
Fans will be Fans
Scrolling through my social feeds after the announcement of the patch, I saw peoples' opinions go from excited to somewhat soured. According to the addition on the GitHub page of the hack itself, "Due to the importance of SEGAGAGA to the fan translation community, I think it’s important to disclose where AI was used in the development of this translation patch. What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don't think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge"⁽⁵⁾. This news made many people in the community question the quality of the patch itself. Some further discussion on the matter I found mostly on Bluesky, with people mostly disappointment in the use of AI for a game that so entrenched with otaku and game culture that people with the right kind of context would understand. Below I've attached some screenshots of others' opinions that I've seen on Bluesky. I haven't seen as much talk about this on Twitter personally, and the searches I have done haven't gotten nearly as much traction as the discussion on Bluesky.
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| MattoBii is a Japanese to English translator and has worked on several fan translations in the Sakura Taisen franchise. |
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| Aura is an indie game developer and animator, and was the lead animation lead on the game Wanderstop according to their bio. |
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| Maud has also fan translated several games from Japanese to English, including Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon on Sega Saturn |
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| Thomas James is a professional Japanese to English game translator, and has worked in the games industry for over a decade on games like Ghostwire Tokyo, Tales of Arise, and The Legend of Heroes franchise⁽⁷⁾ |
Outside of Bluesky, I also perused the Dreamcast discussion channel on Sega Saturn Shiro's Discord server after the patch was released. The discussion seemed to be pretty split for the most part, with people bringing up ethical concerns in using AI as a base translation for the game, while developers on the patch and several other users defended the translation citing the human review and rewrite method. The machine translation was not the only thing that was provided to the translators, the original Japanese script was also provided to compare and contrast with the working playtest translation⁽⁶⁾ according to SixFortyFive, a translator who worked on the SGGG patch. Additionally, the game's script is nonsensical and purposefully written in such a way that some literal translations may be taken as something done by machine learning, when it may not be the case. Most importantly, the patch itself includes all the tools and work that had been done up to the point of the patch's release, making the project available for anyone to pick up, adjust or make improvements, and re-release. Additional clarification from Exxistance was left in the Shiro Discord as well.
My personal opinion on the patch is a bit in the middle. Before getting into it however, it is important to know that as I'm writing this, I haven't experienced the patch for myself. I do plan on giving it a try for myself in the near future, and may come back to update this once I have. On one hand, I'm happy and excited that this cult classic game was translated and available to a wider English speaking audience. It's very clear to me that a large amount of human work went into the patch to get it off the ground. Several of the community members that have worked on this patch have worked on other patches for the Dreamcast and other consoles like the Saturn and their work is quite good on other projects. On the other hand though, I agree with the sentiment that using the AI translation as a playtest and translating off of that on occasions can lead to oversights in the quality of the work. Translating and localizing works for another audience is an art in a way. Deciding on what to keep as literal as possible to honor the developers' intentions, and deciding on what to change to make the game playable and understandable for a different audience is no small task, and there's a lot of nuance in it as well. In this case, I don't think that the AI usage was done in a way that paints the developers as lazy or trying to translate in such a way that says "at least it's translated in some way instead of not being translated at all". They used it as a tool so that they could focus on other parts of the patch to make the experience as good as possible. I also appreciate the option of making your own patch using this one as a framework. If I wasn't happy with the translation, theoretically I could sit down using the tools provided and adjust things myself with enough time and knowledge. Lastly, all of this work was done for free and in the developers' spare time! That doesn't make it free from criticism, but I absolutely take that into consideration. In this day and age we're fed so much AI trash content and scams even if you don't interact with the tools directly. To me it's easy to see if something is AI trash or not, and I don't think this patch should be portrayed that way alongside things that clearly don't have an ounce of effort or human touch in them. Whether you decide to play SGGG or not is up to you, but I think it's important to have nuance and not write people's hard work off based off of the use of a tool.
Thanks for reading. I don't think I'll use this blog to make a ton of opinion pieces like this one in the future, but I wanted to try something different. I don't usually share my opinion online in this way, but I had a lot of thoughts on the situation overall, and I thought this would be a good way to give a broad view on the patch to someone who doesn't have any skin in the game.
Sources
1. History of the Sega Dreamcast/Release. Sega Retro. (2025, August 24). https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Release
2. Perry, D. C. (2016, July 13). TGS 1999: Sony’s Grand Showing. IGN. https://www.ign.com/articles/1999/09/21/tgs-1999-sonys-grand-showing
3. History of the Sega Dreamcast/Decline and Legacy. Sega Retro. (2025, April 27). https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Decline_and_legacy
5.https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-Translation/blob/main/README.md#AI-Notice
6. https://bsky.app/profile/sixfortyfive.bsky.social/post/3mfvb67nvds2d
7. James, T. (n.d.). Thomas James Japanese-English Translator. Freelansations. https://www.freelansations.com/
