Legend of Ninja Burai (English Translation)
- physical : no
- rom : yes
- genre : Strategy
- licensing : unlicensed
- code : legendofninjaburaienglishtranslationsegagenesis
- Date(s) : 2026-wip
- Platform(s) : MD
- By(s) : Patch Clan
Data retrieved from romhackplaza.org
Legend of Ninja Burai (English Translation) SEGA Genesis
- title : Legend of Ninja Burai (English Translation) SEGA Genesis
- language : English
- status : Complete
- last updated : 2026
- genre : Strategy
- by : Patch Clan
- version : v0.1 beta build 15
- download : 12
- platform : SEGA Genesis
- code : legendofninjaburaienglishtranslationsegagenesis
Sega's 1991 Mega Drive tactical RPG, released only in Japan. It's a grid strategy game with seven unit classes, units that die for good, and a deadline in days for every chapter. Your soldiers' health shows up as lit candles instead of numbers.
The story is one the cartridge assumes you already know. A European ship runs aground on the coast of Japan, and a three-year-old boy survives the wreck. A ninja takes him in and raises him under the name Burai. Years later, Nobunaga has fallen under the power of the sword Kusanagi and become a demon, and Burai sets out with his companions to stop him. The campaign runs through ten chapters, nine of them named after real historical districts of the Tōhoku region in northern Japan.
The script was never stored as text
This is what we're proudest of. There's no Japanese text in this ROM to translate, at least not in any form a text tool can find. Every dialogue screen is stored as compressed graphics: a block with the unique 8×8 tiles of the finished screen, and a tilemap that puts them back in order. The characters live in the pictures, and the order lives in the map.
To translate it, we reimplemented both of the game's compression formats from the disassembly (a Huffman scheme for graphics and an LZ variant for tilemaps). Then we read the whole script out of the tile data, translated it, and replaced the picture-based dialogue with real text in a new Latin font. The original box fits 15 Japanese characters per line. The new one fits 31.
What's in the patch
The full script in English: all 110 dialogue boxes and the 10 scenes of the opening narration, from villagers and shopkeepers to temples, castles and the defeat screen.
The whole interface: battle commands, the sidebar, status and combat screens, all 41 item names, options, shops, the inn, and the village, temple and castle panels.
Graphics redrawn in English: the title logo (Legend of the Ninja Burai), the chapter title cards, the Record Book save and load screens, the defeat screen and the EXIT signs.
A new Latin font with lowercase. The original only had capital A-Z, used for a few labels.
ROM expanded from 1 MB to 2 MB to make room for the English script and graphics.
Names and terms follow the official 1991 strategy guide. Masamune and Muramasa are the legendary swordsmiths, Tanegashima is the island where the arquebus first reached Japan, and Kusanagi is one of the three imperial regalia. Martial ranks stay as dan (1 DAN), the way the game counts them, not "Level 1".
Every text was reviewed twice against the Japanese: once for meaning, and once by a reader who only sees the English, the way a player reads it. Every box was measured so nothing runs past its edges, and the save and continue cycle was tested end to end.
Why it's a beta
Nobody has played the game through to the final chapter yet. We put every one of the 120 dialogue screens on screen in the translated ROM and read them there, and we reached the defeat ending in a real run. To see the late-game text, we used a debug build and forced our way through, so the later chapters weren't actually played. The text should all be there and fit its boxes. What a beta can still hide is a problem that only shows up in a real playthrough. The full release comes once the game has been played to the end.
Good to know
Two things stay in Japanese on purpose: the brush-painted logo on the boot screen and the 林火山 scroll on the dojo wall. Both are artwork, and we kept them as they are.
The game opens with a short Patch Clan screen (BETA V0.1 BUILD 15).
ROM
Japanese ROM, plain binary (.md / .bin / .gen).
Size: 1,048,576 bytes (1 MB)
CRC32: A8D828A0
MD5: d1263fb5efd1af669a0df2a45689c3f5
SHA-1: 9cc3419ca7ecaf0d106aa896ffc0266c7145fff7
The patched ROM is 2,097,152 bytes (2 MB), MD5 8579ad6e3a9a3d1ba86f95f46413a735. If you have an interleaved .smd dump, convert it to plain binary before patching.
Patch only. We never distribute ROMs.
Take the field
Grab the patch, lead Burai's company through Tōhoku and tell us how it goes. If anything breaks, freezes or reads wrong, post it here with a screenshot and the chapter you'd reached. That's exactly what gets this beta to v1.0. If you know the game in Japanese and a line or a name sounds off to you, tell us too.
Screenshots
