It's time to revisit a forgotten Game Boy creation — in English
About a year and a half ago (has it really been that long!?), Game Boy Works (née World) reached into the depths of Japan-exclusive software and came up with a true deep cut: A deeply Japanese dungeon-crawler RPG called Ayakashi no Shiro.
It seemed an enormously promising game considering its platform and vintage, but the extremely dense non-English text (which even rendered English loanwords like "potion" in more traditional Japanese script) kept me from making a whole lot of progress into the quest. If only someone would create a fan translation of this, I sighed, I could give it a more thorough examination.
Imagine my surprise when someone took me up on that. A fan translator by the name of summvs found themselves as intrigued by Ayakashi no Shiro as I was and decided to do something about it. The result is that, as of today, you can now play an English-language adaptation of Ayakashi no Shiro on your very own Game Boy (assuming you have a hack-friendly flashcart, of course). It's been given the new title of Doman's Revenge, and aside from a mysterious late-game overflow bug mentioned in the readme file, it appears to be a comprehensive localization of the game.
Needless to say, I definitely intend to revisit it for Game Boy Works. But that'll take a while. In the meantime, you can check out the game for yourself by downloading the language patch in this forum thread.
And, of course, I'm unspeakably happy to see Game Boy Works help spread awareness and spur action for forgotten games. This is the kind of thing the entire project exists for, and I hope this isn't a one-time incident. Huge thanks to summvs for taking up the baton and bringing an intriguing little slice of video game history to a wider audience.
