ROM Hack 3x3 Eyes - Seima Kourinden Translation

eyeliner · Oct 10, 2026

I USED AI. IF YOU HAVE CRITICISM, READ THE DISCLAIMER OR DON'T PARTICIPATE, PLEASE.

OK, after waiting 20 odd years to play this one, I set myself to finally be able to without having to learn Japanese.

I made a few efforts at rom translation in the early 2000's, but it was simpler tasks, from EN to PT, so most times direct text replacement. No big deal.

And I probably lost them to time, but no big loss, really.

This one, on the other hand, was supposed to be tackled by a group and then it was mostly abandoned until it was supposedly pickup by another group twenty years ago. Fast forward to now.

No progress was made in the interim.

I an a fan of 3x3 Eyes, and this game was something I wanted to play since I knew it existed. Juuma no Houkan was already translated. This one was missing.

I set myself to get it translated. Holy hell it was hard. I never could understand what I was seeing in the debugger, made little sense of the unpacker used and how text was being rendered, except some places (intro, monologue and game over screens).

I felt discouraged, but after the "Cool AI Projects" thread, I felt inspired to actually do it.

And I did.
The results of some hours with Claude are here: https://github.com/JAOT/3x3eyes-seima-kourinden-en

Some people might be interested, but to safeguard myself and the community, I won't post the patch in Romhacking.net or the likes.

If like me, there are games you want to play but language is a barrier, no better time than now to make it happen.

I was REALLY impressed with how fast results started showing. Incredible stuff.

radicalten · Oct 10, 2026

Congrats on your project!

eyeliner · Friday at 1:45 PM

The translation is pretty much finished, and I finally finished the game. Will try to make a full run on real hardware.

No point in translating the start screen, but that is an image being displayed with text on it.

I will need to follow other examples.

The game is not that hard, but the labyrinths can be merciless, some times.

Also, the last joining character can be one shotted in the final battles, because the level is high, but the stats are low. Weird.

I'm pretty happy with the result and I am already planning to do this to other games.

It was fun and a very welcome exercise.

And I also got to find some cheats for max health and magic and no fights.

OK, thanks!

ssjkakaroto · Friday at 3:22 PM

First, I would like to say that I am pro-AI and have absolutely no issues using it as a translation tool.

The issue with this and many other recent translation projects is that you are not capable of properly reviewing the AI output because you have no knowledge of the source language. To make matters worse, it seems that Portuguese is your native language, yet your target language is English.

I think it is this type of situation that gives AI usage a bad reputation and makes people parrot "AI slop" at every single project that uses it.

Your translation might be decent and make the game fully playable, but you cannot guarantee its quality, and you definitely cannot fix mistakes because you are unable to spot them.

My suggestion is to translate the game into Portuguese, as it is your native language, so you can at least pick up on expressions and nuances that only a fluent speaker can.

Skelletonike · Friday at 3:48 PM

ssjkakaroto said:
First, I would like to say that I am pro-AI and have absolutely no issues using it as a translation tool.

The issue with this and many other recent translation projects is that you are not capable of properly reviewing the AI output because you have no knowledge of the source language. To make matters worse, it seems that Portuguese is your native language, yet your target language is English.

I think it is this type of situation that gives AI usage a bad reputation and makes people parrot "AI slop" at every single project that uses it.

Your translation might be decent and make the game fully playable, but you cannot guarantee its quality, and you definitely cannot fix mistakes because you are unable to spot them.

My suggestion is to translate the game into Portuguese, as it is your native language, so you can at least pick up on expressions and nuances that only a fluent speaker can.

While I can't speak for the OP, Portuguese people in general are pretty good with English (6th in the entire world for non-native countries). Our media is also much more focused on subtitles rather than dubs, for that reason a lot of people simply prefer having watching movies in their original language for example. For that same reason, I simply can't enjoy games translated to my native language (unless it's a Portuguese game), one of the things that bugs me in new consoles is the fact that I need to change the language of the system to English in order to avoid having Portuguese translated games (especially when they use PT-BR, it just makes everything worse).

I am Portuguese myself and I speak more English at home than I do Portuguese (due to my family having lived in English speaking countries for a very long time).

Also, I have read translations a lot of translations made by Americans with crappy grammar and even spelling mistakes, while being a native speaker may help, it is not everything that matters when it comes to translations. The most important here is not the English but rather the Japanese since some words may not be accurately translated (while AI is pretty good, it can sometimes misunderstand the original meaning, like with jokes, but it's getting pretty good at it).

Anyway, I'll be giving it a try. I'm quite enjoying the Medabots DS and Love Quest's translations which were made with AI a while ago (the Love Quest one has a few mistakes, but it's pretty good overall).

ssjkakaroto · Friday at 5:56 PM

I have taken a Translation Studies course, so I am well aware that a non-native speaker is capable of translating into a language different from their primary one. The thing is, for any good translation, the translator NEEDS to be well-versed in both languages of the translation pair, which is not the case here or in many other projects. In my opinion, that is the main reason such projects are met with strong rejection.
Professional translators have been using machine-assisted translation for decades now, AI didn't change that, it just made the work easier and faster.

eyeliner · 2026-10-25T01:04:51+0100

ssjkakaroto said:
I have taken a Translation Studies course, so I am well aware that a non-native speaker is capable of translating into a language different from their primary one. The thing is, for any good translation, the translator NEEDS to be well-versed in both languages of the translation pair, which is not the case here or in many other projects. In my opinion, that is the main reason such projects are met with strong rejection.
Professional translators have been using machine-assisted translation for decades now, AI didn't change that, it just made the work easier and faster.

Valid points. The translation was verified. And I can also tell you that the translation is EXTREMELY competent.

I am a translation major that changed areas because of the advent of machine translation, but AI is something else.

Either way, everything is on Github for anyone to improve.
The original script is there, in all it's original form.
No reason for an English-speaking person not to validate the translation by using the resources available. All the tools and needed resources are shared.

After all this time, I managed to play the game, enjoy it for what it is and understand the story in its entirety.

I made sure to enforce a translation that would make sense according to the Manga, as the game is based of a volume of it.

Either way, the exercise was mostly for me. I just wanted to ensure that at least, if ANYONE besides me likes that game and wants to dive in it, can do so.

Short game, difficulty spike in the last bosses that makes you REALLY grind to power up a character.
Unless you have the game's manual, it's also hard because the game doesn't tell you what most items do!

Skelletonike said:
While I can't speak for the OP, Portuguese people in general are pretty good with English (6th in the entire world for non-native countries). Our media is also much more focused on subtitles rather than dubs, for that reason a lot of people simply prefer having watching movies in their original language for example. For that same reason, I simply can't enjoy games translated to my native language (unless it's a Portuguese game), one of the things that bugs me in new consoles is the fact that I need to change the language of the system to English in order to avoid having Portuguese translated games (especially when they use PT-BR, it just makes everything worse).

I am Portuguese myself and I speak more English at home than I do Portuguese (due to my family having lived in English speaking countries for a very long time).

Also, I have read translations a lot of translations made by Americans with crappy grammar and even spelling mistakes, while being a native speaker may help, it is not everything that matters when it comes to translations. The most important here is not the English but rather the Japanese since some words may not be accurately translated (while AI is pretty good, it can sometimes misunderstand the original meaning, like with jokes, but it's getting pretty good at it).

Anyway, I'll be giving it a try. I'm quite enjoying the Medabots DS and Love Quest's translations which were made with AI a while ago (the Love Quest one has a few mistakes, but it's pretty good overall).

Thanks for understanding the whole point.

I grew tired of waiting. Also, my company pays for the Claude subscription and I barely use it at work, so why not make use of for something actually useful?

Please do try the game. You can finish it in 5 hours, if you take it easy. It's a fun little time waster with little in the way of challenge. The labyrinths can be ridiculously confusing, but soon you'll get so overpowered that Yakumo just steamrolls everything.

ROM Hack 3x3 Eyes - Seima Kourinden Translation

Has an itch needing to be scratched.

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Has an itch needing to be scratched.

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♂ ♥ Gallant Pervert ♥ ♀

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Has an itch needing to be scratched.

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