File this one under “games I had no idea I was missing out on.” A fan team has released a full v1.0 English translation patch for Monster Slider, Datt Japan’s Japan-only Saturn action puzzler from March 1997 — and it’s available for everyone to enjoy.
Monster Slider is one of those games that makes you wonder how it stayed a Japanese exclusive. Blocks fall in pairs, Puyo Puyo-style, but the playfield itself is permanently slanted — and you can flip the tilt left or right at will, sending blocks sliding downhill into chains you’d never pull off in Columns. Match three of a kind to clear them. Simple to grasp, devilish to master — and wrapped in a goofy horror skin where a girl named Nina puzzle-battles Dracula’s minions to rescue her kidnapped sister Claudia. (Sega, give us a break: the arcade got a Visco-handled conversion in August 1997 and we got… nothing.)
Why now? The patch was clawed together specifically for the SHIRO! Community Challenge‘s October event — yes, an entire month of competitive Monster Slider on real Saturn hardware. The team is a small supergroup of fan-translation veterans: wiredcrackpot on translation, Exxistance on hacking and sprite editing, and SHIRO! writer Rasputin3000 on sprite editing. Between them they count more than twenty translation projects, including this summer’s “Summer of Saturn” releases. The idea floated as early as October 2025, kicked off properly in early August, and took roughly two months of hex code, Japanese text, and sprite troubleshooting.
This isn’t a quick menu hack. Everything is translated: dialogue, menus, sub-menus, warning screens, miscellaneous sprites, even the credits roll. The team even added subtitles to the ending sequence, where the retail release had none. As a bonus, the patch fixes a genuine retail bug — on the Satiator and some emulators, the unmodified game crashed during Stage 3’s opening conversation, forcing you to mash a button and skip the scene. That’s gone now. The patch has been tested on real hardware plus the Ymir, Yaba Sanshiro, and Mednafen emulators.
One transparency note, because the team published one themselves: AI tooling (Claude) was used for compressing and decompressing the game’s LZSS sprite data and for diagnosing that Stage 3 crash — but not for a single line of translation, not for sprite edits, not for dialogue or menus, and not for any decisions. The script is 100% human.
I love stories like this — a weird, forgotten puzzler getting a second life because a handful of volunteers refused to let it sit untranslated. Are you dusting off your Saturn (or firing up Mednafen) for the October challenge?
Check out some gameplay below:
Sources: SEGA SATURN, SHIRO! (patch announcement); Sega Retro (game details); the SHIRO! October Community Challenge. The xdelta patch is distributed via the SegaXtreme resource page and the patch’s GitHub repo linked in the SHIRO! announcement — you supply your own legally obtained retail disc.