Way back in 2005, when I got my first Mac, I bought the Mac version of Puyo Puyo Fever. I love puzzle games, and it's also one of the only games Sega ever published on the Mac - almost no one was making Mac games back then, and I couldn't resist just for the novelty.
I didn't know any Japanese back then, so I just muddled through the dialogue and menus. I only found out recently that some of the other Japan-only releases still had English - like the Dreamcast, which has a language switch right in the settings menu. The Mac version skips that, so I figured I was still out of luck.
Then, more recently, I found the Puyo Nexus fansite's guide to translating the PC version, which... just involves editing the save game. On Windows, the translation switches are still in the save game even if the menus don't expose it. So I thought, what if I tried doing the same thing on Mac...?
The Puyo fan community's save editor doesn't work on Mac - it assumes you're editing a save right in the Windows version's directory, but it also isn't compatible with the Mac saves. I took a look at their sample saves, and it turns out the Windows version uses compressed saves that their tool has to decompress and recompress - but the Mac version uses plain old uncompressed saves. Which is a lot easier to save. So I looked at the source code, found the offset to the setting for text language, flipped that one byte in my Mac save, and prayed.
...and it just worked, perfectly. So it turns out I could have been playing Puyo Puyo Fever in English this whole time, and I just didn't know for 19 years.
If you want to do it yourself, it's pretty easy so long as you know how a hex editor works.
- Using your hex editor, open the file at
~/Library/Preferences/PuyoPuyo Fever/PUYOF.BIN - Set your editor to "overwrite".
- Find the byte at
0x288(648 bytes). It should be set to zero; change it to one. - Save the file.
And the game will just boot up in English the next time you play.
There's also a byte for voices, but it looks like neither the Mac or Windows versions shipped with English voices - just text. The Windows fan community has a voice pack that might work, but apparently there are some issues with it so I never bothered trying. YMMV and all that.
