The History of Akaneia Saga:
The year is 1997. Two years have passed since the release of Nintendo’s
Satellaview peripheral. Attached to a Super Famicom, the Satellaview allows
users to download data from a satellite in space for various purposes.
In co-operation with St. Giga, a Japanese radio company, Nintendo broadcasted
a large variety of games. One of the major selling points were “Soundlink”
games. These blended video game and radio show: players could play the game
while listening to live voice-acted commentary regarding the game’s events.
Generally, these games were prefixed with “BS”, standing for Broadcast
Satellite. Many properties received games for the service.
One such game was BS Fire Emblem: “Akaneia Senkihen”, Akaneia Saga in English.
By this stage, Fire Emblem had received four games, and the third entry,
Mystery of the Emblem, had sold particularly well. Being the first foray
into a particularly detailed story in the franchise, the developers desired
to expand it. Akaneia Saga was divided into four episodes, each focusing
on different characters from the game. Marth, the protagonist, was absent.
All four episodes took place before the events of Dark Dragon and the Sword
of Light, the first game. A new episode was aired each week, with players
encouraged to obtain a high score. The first episode was broadcast on the
28th of September 1997… [1]
These four episodes provided background information on`various happenings
between many characters, but the primary focus falls upon the Camus/Hardin/
Nina love triangle, a primary driving element of the overall Akaneian story.
However, due to the Satellaview’s very nature, the game could not be played
at will. Akaneia Saga has only been broadcast in its original form three times:
reruns took place on the 30th of November 1997 and the 4th of April 1999,
each episode following a week after the previous. After the April 1999 showing,
Akaneia Saga’s original form vanished into the mists of time. Nintendo
withdrew all support for Satellaview just before the final broadcast, and
the platform itself shut down the next year. All the games produced for the
system were believed to be lost forever. With no physical copies ever sold,
how could one access a Satellaview game?
Fortunately, the games haven’t been completely lost to time. All Satellaview
games are downloaded into a special cartridge before they can be played.
While Soundlink games such as Akaneia Saga are not intended to be played
outside of its scheduled time, some of the game’s data still must be downloaded
to the cartridge. From there, the cartridge can be taken to a cartridge copier
and from there, safely backed up onto a computer. However, this was not without
cost. The dumped rom did not contain significant amounts of the broadcast.
The chapter proper is present, but the voice acting and music is absent. The
artwork shown as the game loaded in was missing as well. Parts of the game
were preserved, but by no means was it entirely so.
Fire Emblem is a popular franchise, and BS Fire Emblem was one of the more
fortunate games for the platform. Dedicated fans recorded gameplay footage
along with the voice acting and images and uploaded them to various video
sharing sites. A Youtube user has uploaded mirrors of these here: [2]
An early Japanese romhacker created ZSNES compatability patches to allow
Akaneia Saga to be played once more. The date on these patches places their
release on the 3rd of October 1999. These eventually found their way to
English-speaking Satellaview sites. However, the Fire Emblem community had
their focuses on other entries of the series. Akaneia Saga was just an odd
footnote.
Time flowed onwards. Fire Emblem games started getting official translations.
And for the older games, fans picked up the slack. First Sword of Seals
received a full translation. Then Mystery of the Emblem was translated.
Genealogy of the Holy War had all but the ending translated. Even Fire Emblem
Gaiden had some form of effort, and the Thracia 776 patch had the dialogue
mostly completed. There was momentum, and in 2009, a script translation was
done by KiddoCabbusses, a Satellaview enthusiast and operator of a blog on
the platform. This was possible due to a dedicated Japanese fan transcribing
the dialogue and placing it up on a website. The script is available here: [3]
The translation of the voiced dialogue is an important milestone, but there
was still no progress on actually hacking the games. Then, something unusual
happened.
A remake of Mystery of the Emblem was announced. The unusual part of this was
the fact that the Akaneia Saga chapters would be included as bonus content
in New Mystery. This was a very rare case of Satellaview content being
acknowledged outside of its initial production. The DS version of Akaneia
Saga, dubbed “Archanean War Chronicles” in the New Mystery fan translation,
converted the events of each chapter into a more traditional form. The endless
reinforcements were replaced with standard objectives, the real time clock
was completely removed, and the scoring system was completely changed. This
version of Akaneia Saga is by far the easiest to play. No special emulators
are required to emulate strange Satellaview elements. They are just standard
chapters to be played on standard Nintendo DSes. Most people were content with
this form of the game, and did not consider the original worth the effort.
By the time New Mystery’s fan translation was completed, Fire Emblem Gaiden
and Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light were fully translated. Revisions of
the other games’ translations to conform with Awakening’s decisions were also
taking place. Soon, Akaneia Saga received its first attempt at translation.
Done by Serenes Forest user joesteve1914, a partial menu translation of the
first episode was released on the 6th of November 2014. [4]
This initial build translated little more than the basic menus, with
important messages such as reinforcement spawns and almost all the dialogue
being untranslated. The project’s original post considered translating the
remaining three episodes before working on a Thracia 776 project, but neither
of these came to be. On the 9th of May 2016 a cleaned up version of the
Episode 1 patch was released, before the translation effort was cancelled on
the 18th of February 2017. The cited reason for the cancellation was Akaneia
Saga’s inability to run in any debuggers, inhibiting attempts at a complete
restoration.
However, this wasn’t true. joesteve1914 found out a few months later there was
a debugger capable of running Akaneia Saga: bsnes+. However, he begun working
on updating the New Mystery translation to use Fire Emblem Heroes names.
Akaneia Saga no longer had an active translation effort. At around the same
time, bookofholsety, leader of Project Naga, the completed Genealogy of the
Holy War translation, had done some digging into the internals of Akaneia Saga.
He discovered that a massive amount of leftover data from Mystery of the Emblem
remained intact in Akaneia Saga, posting a Fire Emblem Universe thread on the
topic. [5]
Several more discoveries were made throughout the next few weeks, with the
final results being gathered onto a Cutting Room Floor page. [6]
Once again, developments on Akaneia Saga fell silent.
On another note, members of the Fire Emblem romhacking community
are fond of attempting to remake other games in the series in different
engines. Before New Mystery was announced, Arch, founder of Fire Emblem
Universe, begun planning a recreation of Akaneia Saga in Blazing Sword. These
plans were soon scrapped on New Mystery’s announcement, and the concept was
transferred to Elibe, evolving into Elibian Nights. No other attempts were
made at porting Akaneia Saga until 2019, where Fire Emblem Universe user Sme
begun porting the New Mystery versions of the chapters to Sacred Stones. [7]
The project was completed on the 21st of September the same year. In addition,
it was also showcased in that year’s Fire Emblem E3, an annual showcase of rom
hacks and fan games based off of Fire Emblem. While this hack was an easily
accessible form of Akaneia Saga, it still was closer in content to the altered
New Mystery form of the chapters, although it did utilise the original’s
illustrations.
Outside of the New Mystery remake, Akaneia Saga has been the most neglected
title in the Fire Emblem franchise. Every other game has been represented in
the Fire Emblem Cipher card game, and it is also one of the very few titles
not to have any representation in Fire Emblem Heroes, the mobile game. The
developers of Fire Emblem are inconsistent on whether Akaneia Saga is a
numbered title or not; the fandom as a whole near-unamiously does not count it.
Due to its inaccessibility, very few people have played the game in any form.
The Satellaview as a whole was a strange, obscure platform few have paid notice
towards. By the end of 2019, Thracia 776 finally received a full translation.
Every Fire Emblem game could be played fully in the English language. Every
Fire Emblem game… except Akaneia Saga.
The year is 2020. Darrman, a Fire Emblem Universe user who had previously
created menu translations for several hacks, begun investigating Akaneia Saga.
After figuring out how to calculate the checksum to allow the translations to
run properly in the BS-X BIOS, he begun work on hacking the game from scratch.
He had already translated a Mystery of the Emblem hack, and due to the
similarities between it and Akaneia Saga, much of the work for it could be
reused. This helped to speed up the process of hacking greatly. All four
episodes were completely translated. And so, on the 12th of August, 2020,
BS Fire Emblem: Akaneia Saga received a complete English translation for the
first time. Finally, every game in the series was 100% playable in English.
This is the end of what has been recorded in history. But this is not the end
of the story of Akaneia Saga. The game has been fully translated. But that
is not a restoration. There is still no audio. There are still no images.
There is no voice acting. The game is fully playable, but the Soundlink
elements of St. Giga’s original broadcast are still missing. Some day in the
future, a brave fan may undertake the difficult task of restoring Akaneia Saga
to its former glory. Only once the entire game has been completely restored,
with an English dub to go with the original illustrations, will the tale of
Akaneia Saga reach its conclusion.
Please contact me if you intend to use this. I will almost certainly grant permission to use my work if you intend to use it as the base for a full restoration attempt.
