For those who followed the English fantranslation efforts of Japanese RPGs since the very first days, back when the idea of playing localized versions of Final Fantasy V, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean and Seiken Densetsu III seemed too good to be true and teams like RPGE and DeJap were like wizards inhabiting a different plane of existence, this scene was never just about perusing patches, but also about acknowledging and celebrating the people that made all of it possible.

Translator Eien Ni Hen, whose untimely demise was made known to most just yesterday, is one of those whose unbound love and dedication for Japanese gaming helped build this scene over decades of efforts and, while this column is usually dedicated to discussing fantranslated games, I think it’s more than appropriate to celebrate her talent and generosity by showcasing her amazing and diverse legacy as a translator.

-JUST A TRANSLATOR

Considering how many gaming figures have gradually veered toward an extreme personalization of their output, to the point that being “content creators” is often more about discussing and promoting themselves with so-called nerd culture providing marketing opportunities and a common framework of references to connect with their viewers or readers, the fact no one outside a tiny niche of collaborators likely knew anything about Eien Ni Hen as a person (the only biographical detail she ever disclosed, as far as I know, was hailing from Austin, a city rich in RPG history, and the rest isn’t really our business), and that even her nickname was likely unknown to many of those who perused her work, is already pretty telling.

Even I kinda took her work for granted over the years, almost as if finding her name among a translation’s credits was a pleasant inevitability, but each and every one of those efforts, obviously, only materialized because of her unflinching commitment to this niche, and yet so rich context.

She was the kind of passionate hobbyist that wasn’t in love with herself, but with the games she tried to spotlight and popularize, and her work, not content, was a free act of love that allowed English speakers to discover the titles developed by countless other creators, this time Japanese ones, whose feats would have been much harder to discover outside their homeland, if not for her intervention.

She wasn’t a solitary preservation activist, either, but someone willing and able to cooperate not just with plenty of different romhackers and editors, but also with other translators, without a hint of drama over decades of work, and her own Romhacking profile beautifully showcases her humbleness, starting with “I’m just a translator, probably one of the few people on this board who doesn’t know too much about ROM hacking.”

-THOR’S ANCIENT MAGIC

While I haven’t been able to ascertain when exactly Eien Ni Hen become involved in the English videogame fantranslation scene, it was likely in the early '00s, when many of the projects she worked on started out, often being released much later.

The first games whose English patch credited her were Airwolf, where she acted as co-translator around 2003, and Data East’s Karnov, whose patch was published in 2006, but soon after she was involved in a metric ton of JRPG-related projects, starting with her role as a translator for the 2008 English patch of Famicom action-JRPG Dragon Scroll: Yomigaerishi Maryuu (which was also one of the first works of renowned romhacker KingMike) and her involvement with Super Famicom JRPG Eien no Filena as a co-translator. Eien no Filena was actually the JRPG adaptation of a fantasy novel series by Takeshi Shudo, whose heroine’s adventure were also animated in her own OVA.

This project possibly kickstarted her contacts in the budding fantranslation scene due to the involvement of a number of figures like Satsu, Disnesquick, Near and Aeon Genesis founder and fantranslation legend Gideon Zhi.

The latter would immediately team up with Eien Ni Hen for the English patch for Hot B’s Ancient Magic! Bazoo on Super Famicom, whose art direction by Akihiro Yamada and peculiar magic system always interested me. Ancient Magic’s English patch, released in 2010, was just the start of a veritable landslide of efforts on her part, including a team effort for both the English patch of Lady Sword on PC Engine and the original translation of the script of Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu on Super Famicom.

Seisen no Keifu, known in the West as Genealogy of the Holy War, was quite an ambitious entry in that storied franchise, featuring regional-size maps and two generations of heroes, and the script Eien Ni Hen worked on was later used for a number of its early English patches, allowing fans like yours truly to discover what would quickly become one of my favorite entries in Intelligent Systems’ franchise.

As we will see, this wouldn’t be the last time Eien Ni Hen worked on a game developed by Fire Emblem creator Shouzou Kaga, including retranslations for events and endings in entries like Mystery of the Emblem and Seisen no Keifu’s hard-as-nails midquel, Thracia 776, later on, even if the next Kaga title she would work on wouldn’t actually be part of that franchise!

-STARDUST AND FIRE EMBLEM

In the same timeframe, she was also tackling the retranslation of Story of Thor on Mega Drive, where she lent her talent to Joao Albertoni’s project since around 2008, with the patch being released in 2011. At the same time, she was also working on the English script for Arabian Nights on Super Famicom, whose own patching effort, led by Lost Templar and by the renowned romhacker and Stardust Crusader founder, Pennywise, was released in late 2012.

Eien Ni Hen’s partnership with Pennywise also involved Lunatic Fantasy, an incredibly obscure doujin JRPG for Sharp’s X68000 home PC whose English patch was also released in 2012, and that year she also finished her work on the script for Slayers’ PC98 JRPG adaptation, which would blossom into a proper patch a decade later.

It sounds almost crazy to write, but… in that same 2012, she also worked on the original translation for TearRing Saga, the awesome Fire Emblem-like PS1 JRPG developed by Shouzou Kaga after leaving Intelligent Systems even if this, at least, was a group effort where she took over a script partially translated by Firelizard alongside four other translators.

Then again, without this team effort the later English patch released in 2017 wouldn’t have been possible, since it used that version’s localization as the base for its own English script, and we could have missed out on one of PS1’s best, and unfortunately lesser known, tactical JRPGs.

After discussing the first decade of Eien Ni Hen’s fantranslation efforts, the reader will likely share my sentiment about how amazing she was to produce so many quality English scripts in such a small timeframe, even if we must always remember how fantranslation efforts are often extremely long affairs, where a completed English script can sit for years waiting for a romhacking breakthrough that can finally lead to a proper patch, meaning we shouldn’t necessarily consider the date those patches were released as the actual timeframe when Eien Ni Hen worked on their translations.

Of course, this doesn’t really change anything since each of those multi-year projects still happened concurrently to the others, not to mention how she still kept this astounding pace for a number of years. While she worked with a number of different teams since the beginning of her fantranslation efforts, one could say she was a one-person-translation team herself simply due to the quantity and quality of her output.

-EMERALD DRAGON’S FORCE

The years between 2012 and 2014 saw Eien Ni Hen working on a much larger project, the translation of the storied Emerald Dragon’s Super Famicom version, which saw her work together with romhacking legend and Translation Corporation founder Nightcrawler. This was one of her proudest accomplishments so far, given this elusive JRPG’s reputation, and her efforts likely helped to foster yet another independent fantranslation patch for its PC Engine version later on.

Not that those were the only projects she was tackling in this timeframe, as the reader by now likely imagined: around 2010, she had also joined a large team of translators tackling grand strategy JRPG Dragon Force II on Sega Saturn, sadly left in Japan despite the original’s cult hit status and whose own English patch graced the scene in 2015, being one of the titles that started the current avalanche of Saturn fantranslation projects, to which Eien Ni Hen would end up contributing yet again later on.

That same year, showcasing her incredibly prolific workflow, she teamed up yet again with AeonGenesis to create an English patch for the Super Famicom version of Westone’s Dark Half using a script she had worked on before, while yet another English script of hers was a key part of DDS Translations’ patch for Akitoshi Kawazu’s seminal Romancing SaGa on Super Famicom, the first game in that series to introduce its signature sandbox element after the first three SaGa games on GameBoy.

Around that time, she had managed to help out Wizardry Gaiden IV’s fantranslation effort, acting as co-translator, while also doing some editing for the new English patch of Niji no Silkroad on Famicom, an effort led by Pennywise and Aishsha.

By then, she had already started working on the translation for Super Famicom JRPG Princess Minerva, the tamer version of a game already released on home PCs, whose script ended up becoming one of her most liberal ones, possibly due to Dynamic Designs’ editing style for their 2017 English patch.

Eien Ni Hen also teamed up with Dynamic Designs for another Super Famicom project, this time LA Wares, an interesting JRPG that was actually the adaptation of a Japanese tabletop mecha-fantasy RPG ruleset, Wares Blade, which had recently seen a crowdfunding resurgence. Her work on this title likely started around 2015, with the actual English patch being released in early 2018, just one year after Princess Minerva.

-A POSTHUMOUS ADVENTURE

Around this time, her contribution to the JRPG fantranslation scene slowed down a bit, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t ready to help out as co-translators for projects like two 2021 English patches covering wildly different titles, Glory of Heracles’ Game Boy spinoff, Snap Tale, headed by Pennywise and with Aishsha as the main translator, and the long-waited Sakura Taisen fantranslation project, which employed a wide group of translators and whose English patch marked one of the most meaningful Sega Saturn efforts in a decade, alongside the abovementioned Dragon Force II and the long-running, series-wide titanic project by Shining Force Central that could well deserve its own piece.

Also, we shouldn’t forget that, while this publication’s focus demanded me to give a prominent coverage to her JRPG efforts, Eien Ni Hen also worked on plenty of projects in other genres after her Karnov debut, with platforms like Miracle Girls on Super Famicom, a number of Dragon Ball titles or adventure games like Psy-O-Blade and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water on Mega Drive or Metal Slader Glory on Famicom.

In fact, her last work on an adventure game, the script of My Eyes on X68000, ended up being released posthumously, and its announcement by her longtime friend Pennywise was also the reason most of us ended up knowing about Eien Ni Hen’s disappearance.

-A VOCATION OF LOVE

In a world where videogames are often seen just as Intellectual Properties rather than cultural artifacts, with their own owners uncerimoniously abandoning them for decades because their historical and cultural preservation, let alone their linguistic availability, isn’t a priority for anyone unless it can provide a sizeable secondary revenue stream, Eien Ni Hen and those like her act as something like our medium’s version of those scriptorium monks who tirelessly copied books from ages past, not because they hoped to gain fame or riches, but simply because helping the future generations to know and appreciate those works was a part of their vocation, whose cultivation is itself an act of love.

Her tireless work brought her into contact with so many fantranslation veterans who could well deserve their own pieces, from Nightcrawler and Gideon Zhi to King Mike, Pennywise, Aishsha, Esper Knight, Satsu and far too many others to count, making her an irreplaceable part of fantranslation history and an example for anyone working in a field that already has generosity, passion and dedication as prerequisites.

May she rest in peace and be remembered fondly by both those who knew her in the analog world and those who were graced by her generous and tireless work in the digital space.

A SHORT, QUITE LIKELY INCOMPLETE, JRPG-FOCUSED TIMELINE OF EIEN NI HEN’S TRANSLATION EFFORTS

-2003 Co-translator for Airwolf, the first English patch based on her work

-2006 Translator for Karnov

-2008 Translator for Dragon Scroll Yomigaerishi Maryuu on Famicom

-2006-2009? Co-translator for Eien no Filena on Super Famicom

-2009 Co-translator for Hoshi wo Sagashite on Sega Master System (adventure)

-2008? Script co-translator for Fire Emblem Seisen no Keifu on Super Famicom, later on contributing on a variety of levels to the translation for Mystery of the Emblem and Thracia 776

-2010 Translator for Ancient Magic! Bazoo for Super Famicom

-2010 Co-translator for Lady Sword on PC Engine

-2011 Translator for the retranslation of Story of Thor for Mega Drive

-2011 Translation for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water for Mega Drive (adventure)

-2012 Translator for Arabian Nights on Super Famicom

-2012 Translator for Lunatic Fantasy on X68000

-2012 Script co-translator for TearRing Saga on PS1, later used for a 2017 English patch

-2012 Script translator for Slayers’ PC98 adaptation, later used for a 2024 English patch

-2014 Translator for Emerald Dragon for Super Famicom

-2015 Translator for Psy-O-Blade on Mega Drive (adventure)

-2015 Co-translator for Dragon Force II on Sega Saturn

-2015 Translator for Dark Half on Super Famicom

-2015 Translator for Romancing SaGa on Super Famicom

-2016 Co-translator for Wizardry IV Gaiden on Super Famicom

-2016 Co-translator for Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan Densetsu on Super Famicom

-2016 Script editor for Rainbow Silkroad on Famicom

-2017 Translator for Princess Minerva on Super Famicom

-2018 Translator for Shin Seikoku La Wares on Super Famicom

-2018 Script editor for Metal Slader Glory on Famicom (adventure)

-2019 Translator for Miracle Girls on Super Famicom (platform)

-2021 Co-translator for Sakura Taisen on Sega Saturn

-2021 Touched up the translation of Glory of Heracles Snap Story on GameBoy, mostly done by Aishsha

-2026 Translator for My Eyes on X68000 (adventure, released posthumously)