Description
A playthrough of Konami's 1992 cyberpunk adventure game for the PC Engine CD, Snatcher CD-ROMantic.
Link to the translation patch: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K3euDXY9nLF7x12RV-UG-eS8gh9x624z
0:15 The game starts
6:52 Act 1: Snatch
4:50:24 Act 2: Cure
8:19:20 Act 3: Junk
Snatcher was ported and remade several times in the decade following its original 1988 release on the NEC PC88. The 1994 Sega CD version (https://youtu.be/sVVS2E3dwXg), released exclusively in North America and Europe, is still the only official way to experience the game in English.
The Sega CD version is a port of the Snatcher CD-ROMantic for the PC Engine (TurboGrafx) and the game's second major remake. (The first, https://youtu.be/W5IFDaWwjIs, was a JRPG retelling of the story.) The PC Engine remake was the first CD version of the game, and it (along with its prerelease promo/demo, the "Snatcher CD-ROMantic Pilot Disk") was Konami's first game designed for the CD-ROM format. It was also the first to feature the third act and to not end on a cliffhanger, and it was the final version of the game that Kojima himself worked on.
The Sega CD version is similar to the PC Engine game, but it introduced several changes. It added a few scenes, changed and extended several others (especially the finale and ending), censored graphic images and references to sex and drugs, toned down the misogyny, rewrote the content of some conversations, changed much of the music, paved over the overtly Japanese sense of humor, and used redrawn art for several of the character portraits and parts of a few background images. It also removed the Japanese staff members' entries in the Gaudi (Jordan) database and replaced the PCE's videophone bonus content (including the quiz line, the naughty stories, and the sex hotline) with new stuff.
This patch puts the entire PC Engine game in English. The script and voiceovers have been carried over from the Sega CD game, and the lipsync routines have been edited to match the animations to the English voices. I translated (by hand) the content that was left out of the Sega CD localization. For the cutscenes with Redbook audio, in cases where the SCD version changed the music, I rebuilt the tracks by isolating the English lines and laying them over recordings of the music in the PCE version (using clean tracks from soundtrack CDs when available).
I also created a new error screen for when you try to run the game on too old a system card. As far as I know, aside from background graphics that the SCD version intentionally left untouched, the only Japanese that remains in the game is the voiceover on the warning track that plays when you put the disc in a CD player.
For the work on the existing SCD script, I gave it a fairly extensive editing and proofreading pass and rewrote some lines to reflect the meaning and tone of the original Japanese. That includes those meant to censor certain details (like Liquid Sky being a variant of LSD, Metal's off-color joke about a woman Gillian hits on at Alton Plaza, and Gillian's unsolicited advances on female characters), several jokes and cultural references (like Gillian's interactions with Katrina's panties, the parrot's imitation of Shelly from Twin Peaks, the adult video tape, and the patrons at Outer Heaven), and I addressed a few contradictions that resulted from the timeline being shifted five years forward in the SCD version.
I didn't mess with the details that would've contradicted the spoken lines, so, for example, the Catastrophe still happens in 1996, the Tricycles are called Turbocycles, and Katrina asks about her birthmark instead of her measurements. I also retained the SCD's aging up of Katrina from 14 to 18, because otherwise, ew... you know?
I used Claude to deal with the technical stuff that I wasn't equipped to handle on my own, including the script extraction and insertion, ADPCM encoding, modifications made to the in-game keyboard and its associated table lookup routines (and the fixing of a coding oversight in the original game that resulted in inputs being dropped as you're trying to type), and the realignment of animation loops and scene transitions to match the English text and audio.
Since the patch uses assets from the Sega CD version, you'll need bin/cue images of both the Sega CD and PC Engine games. Once you launch the patcher, point it at your cue files, and it'll spit out an image that can be played on an emulator or a real system from a CDR or ODE.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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