The magnificent bastards at the Romhacking Aerie told me to drum up support for a possible Christmas release of their Super Robot Wars J translation, and when the 25th of December came and went with nary a sighting of Santa carrying a sack full of binary patch code, the caterwauling of fans crying out in unison caused such a disturbance in The Force that Jedi in a galaxy far, far away could feel it, to say nothing of the psychic pressure our more local Newtypes had to put up with.

However, it was all a ploy to teach us the true meaning of Christmas: being surrounded by friends and family and not by Game Boys. Now that Christmas is over, we can finally get back to ignoring our family again because, yes, the fan translation is now out. Carefully follow the directions included in the readme, which detail the patching procedure and suggest utilities to use if command-line interfaces give you the heebie-jeebies.

The release of Super Robot Wars games into English through fan translations are always marked as grand occasions, because although most fan translations deal with games which are unreleased in English, most of them still have the theoretical possibilities of release through either an updated version or a classic game download service such as the Wii’s Virtual Console. The Super Robot Wars games, however, have no such chance at release because of the legal issues surrounding them. They’re much beloved for their combination of multitudes of fans’ favorite mecha anime series into the same game, but this combination produces a legal snarl of epic proportions as different companies all claim ownership of the rights to these properties in the West, making negotiations prohibitively expensive at best and utterly impossible at worst. As such, make sure to enjoy the fruits of their translation labors.