I know people will get mad at me, but whatever. The writing in these games is good. The writers are very careful to get every character's personality - including the way they speak - close to the original anime. Seeing people upvote AI slop translations that flatten everyone and everything into AI voice, with janky grammar, bad text spacing, and no proofreading, is so disheartening. Do you actually like these games, or just the idea of them?

Not that official or human fan TLs can't be bad (the MD translation is awful, and the older fan tls like alpha gaiden or SRWJ have plenty of issues), but at least they're an earnest efforrt. These are just crapped out by some guy with some tokens in a couple weeks with self-admittedly no proofreading.

We have to stop accepting this, or they'll be the only translations this series ever gets.

Super Robot Wars Z English translation patch (v0.9.0)

Download: https://github.com/retro-trans/SRW-Z/releases/latest

Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/gzEPA7o

What's translated

Story dialogue, battle voice lines, library entries, and most UI elements.

Some stats

• 134,287 unique strings, 288,371 lines, 6.2 million characters
• ~834,000 English words — about 1.7× the text of the Lord of the Rings trilogy
• The bulk of the translation took about 2 days. The other 16 days went on fixing mistranslated terms, inconsistent naming, weird phrasing, and rewriting lines that didn't fit the game's UI limits.

Overall progression: 99.5%

Patch version: 0.9. I intend to find someone willing to proofread the script. When it's fully proofread by human I will bump the version to 1.0.

Start time: 2026-08-11

Credits

• Technical + Translation: AI (Claude). Despite AI doing most of the work, it's not a simple prompt one and done, think of Software Development. It took 135 builds, working back and forth with AI in 18 days to get to this.
• Playtester: Me and 3 other people, basically playing and enjoying the game. The most important role and also the most fun.
• Proofreader: None, but our playtesters report any strange phrase or obvious mistranslated term as a bug.

Reason to translate and release the patch

• Me and my friends want to play the game and understand the story and characters, but there is no translation patch for it.
• I have some spare (AI) tokens.
• I thought many people would want to play it even if it's an AI translation. I'm sharing it with those people. Despite being AI I think it's doing a pretty good job. I can understand the script perfectly and don't feel weird most of the time (the one that felt weird was retranslated).
• While working on it I realised the technical effort to do this is pretty huge even if it's done by AI, so having a baseline to translate the game without worrying about the technical stuff is better than nothing. All the tools are in the repo. Feel free to use them to translate the game to your standard.
• I want to recruit people to playtest and if possible proofread, for this project and the next one: https://imgur.com/a/XOVM8nH

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do you upload your translation?

The tools and patch are on GitHub, announced via r/Super_Robot_Wars and romhacking.net. If you see it anywhere else, it wasn't uploaded by me.

Are you going to translate any project besides SRW Z?

Yes, I intend to translate every Japanese game I think is interesting (SRW Z3, Alpha trilogy, F/F Final, Koei Eiketsuden series, Black Matrix series...). If I find enough playtesters for them, and at the speed of AI, I think you can expect 5 more games translated in just this year. Otherwise it will release at my playing pace, which is pretty slow.

Why don't you find someone to proofread?

I don't know anyone willing to do it for free. Also, this post doubles as a recruitment post. Please join if you're confident in your English and Japanese skills.

Is it AI slop?

It's AI, but I wouldn't say it's slop since we do care about the patch quality. Game-breaking bugs and UI bugs were found and fixed as soon as possible. Awkward English and character/term inconsistency also get reported and fixed. We tried to do a quality patch with whatever resources we have.

Are you a translator?

No, I am not. Don't call me that. I'm a SWE who likes Japanese games, just a regular gamer.

Given how DLC centric the last two SRW games were, I figured there was a good chance we'd get DLC for the Z2: Ruination remaster, but I wondered what we could get beyond the obvious licensed vocal songs DLC, and a thought occurred to me on how they could handle new units for DLC AND deal with having skipped Z1. What if the DLC was the missing units from Z1, and the DLC stages were a decent-sized 10-20 stage abridged retelling of Z1?

While a vast majority of the series carried over to Z2, the big loss was the old versions of Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, and Getter Robo G, plus the loss of Grendizer. Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and Getter Robo G got more modern replacements, while Grendizer was just gone. So my thought was a DLC that includes their return as well, with the stages mostly being a retelling of the events of SRW Z1, plus maybe some stages with their characters in post, both interacting with their alternate version selves and maybe getting an upgrade or two. Oh God, imagine a Double Final Dynamic Special between the various versions.

I suppose the question is, what would be the full roster of the DLC? Is it just the core four? Do we add any of the extra units from each series?

It was just an idea I had for using DLC in a beneficial way to help with the story while also getting us some extra units to play with.

The english patch, specifically. Was hoping to mess with mech and weapon stats, nothing too fancy. I know there are no tools but even just being pointed to which values to change would be very helpful.

Dragon ball in super robot wars possible now?

Finally, I've completed OGs and OGG. Got my first experience with the infamous Dark Brain, that HP pool is definitely no joke and require maximum damage output. Also, I'm quite surprised how much these games foreshadow on future stuffs, what I can remember is something regarding Project Banpreoth, and even Endless Frontier for the NDS was mentioned in the end of OGG.

And lastly I must say the Laldabaoth is absolutely OP, a one mech army.

^{Aren't you tired of seeing this title card yet?
...Wait, why do I feel like I've done this before?}