Ninja Princess
Sega SG-1000
Translation [Japanese > English] v1.0

BACKGROUND:

Ninja Princess is a vertically-scrolling shooter/action game, ported to the SG-1000 from the arcade original.  There's also a MSX port, which appears identical.  It was later remade as "The Ninja" for Sega Master System.

I haven't played the arcade game so I can't comment much on it, but the home port seems pretty good given the limitations of SG-1000 hardware.  However, the playfield scrolls in large chunks all at once, which can lead to some cheap deaths.  Still, the game is well-designed, with one button for multidirectional shooting and another button dedicated to shooting upward.  Press them both, and the princess will disappear for a moment, briefly becoming invincible.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward, but there's a bit of a twist: in order to get the proper ending, you have to collect five red scrolls hidden throughout the stages.  These give you a secret message which, in turn, tells you how to warp to the final stage (Step 13).  Otherwise the game just loops from Step 12 back to Step 1.

Four of the scrolls aren't too tough to find if you check everywhere, but the fifth is much trickier.  If you're having a tough time finding it, here's a hint: a good ninja never wastes a shot...and Step 3 is a great place to show off your aim.

TRANSLATION:

There were basically five things to translate in Ninja Princess: the title screen, the map screen, the secret message, the ending text, and the game-over message.  The first two involved some tile editing, which turned out to be a little tricky.

The meaning of the kanji on the map screen was tough to decipher, and I ended up consulting my Japanese neighbors for guidance.  They were pretty bemused, at one point pulling out a bag of agar to show me what one of the kanji meant!  Based on what they told me and what the folks at SMSPower thought, I opted for "The Path to Castle Agar" as my translation.  Perhaps someone can shed more light on this.

As for the other three screens, these were mostly straightforward once I figured out the encoding.  However, I don't know how to change the game's text display routines, so the characters are laid out vertically.  It's not pretty, but it works.

TOOLS:

I used a hex editor (Hex Fiend), a text editor (BBEdit), a command-line relative search program (Opensearch), and a tile editor (TileMolester).

IMPROVEMENTS:

This could be cleaned up in multiple ways!  My graphic design for the title and map screens is subpar at best, with a bit of color clash on the title screen;  I'm not convinced that my map screen translation is correct;  and the text display routine really needs to be rewritten to allow for horizontal flow.  If the shortcomings of my effort provoke someone else into doing better work on Ninja Princess, then I'll have done my job.

NOTES:

Since this is a SG-1000 game, the colors won't display properly in many SMS emulators.  This is a problem that also appears on real hardware, since the SG-1000 palette wasn't implemented correctly on SMS hardware.

CONTACT:

You can reach me via PM (private message) at romhacking.net, where I'm registered as "goldenband".  Please let me know if there are any bugs or unintended consequences.

VERSIONS:

v1.0 - initial release (first posted at smspower.org on 2010-10-03)