Base: Final Fantasy V · Super Famicom · 1997 · Fan Translation
Creator: RPGe (Myria, SoM2Freak, harmony7)
The most famous fan translation ever made — the first RPG ever fully translated by fans, produced by a handful of amateurs with no professional experience, and the project that inspired an entire generation of ROM hackers.
Final Fantasy V was released in Japan in 1992 and became one of the most acclaimed entries in the series, but Square never brought it to the West, leaving English-speaking players with no way to experience it. Into that gap stepped RPGe, an informal group of amateurs, whose members Myria, SoM2Freak, and harmony7 undertook the enormous task of translating the entire game and rebuilding the ROM to display English text. The technical hurdles were formidable. Translating a Super Famicom RPG meant reverse-engineering the game's text encoding and compression, expanding the space available for a language that needs far more characters than Japanese, and reinserting the script without breaking the game — all with hand-built tools and no documentation. The project fractured along the way: Myria began working with SoM2freak, a Japanese-English translator she had met online, after splitting off from the rest of RPGe. Then an early version of the translation mysteriously surfaced on a Geocities website with others taking credit for the work, forcing RPGe's hand. They released their translation as "v0.96" on 17 October 1997, with the final polished patch following in June 1998. The result was extraordinary. The patch drew acclaim for both its technical accomplishment and its near-professional writing quality, and it was the first RPG ever completely translated by fans. Square never contacted RPGe about it, and when the company finally produced its own English version in 1999, many players considered it inferior to the fan effort — though Myria herself would later judge Square Enix's 2006 Final Fantasy V Advance translation superior to her own. The project's true legacy lies in what it started. Countless ROM hackers and translators cite RPGe's Final Fantasy V as the reason they entered the hobby, among them Clyde Mandelin, who would go on to create the celebrated English fan translation of Mother 3. Myria continued hacking and reverse-engineering games and eventually took a job at a major video game company. What began as a handful of enthusiasts refusing to accept that a masterpiece was off-limits became the founding document of the entire fan translation movement.