Got 500 hours to spare? Asking for a friend.
The PlayStation’s most infamous endurance test just became playable in English. According to Time Extension, a team of homebrewers has released an English translation patch for Spectral Tower, Idea Factory’s 1996 PS1 RPG that never left Japan — and it lands just in time for the game’s 30th anniversary this month.
Here’s the pitch, if you can call it that: you play a sinner climbing a tower to be absolved of your transgressions. Five towers, actually — Goblin (10 floors), Robber (20), Queen Rose (100), Spectral (1,000), and the Last Tower, a cool 10,000 floors. Time Extension notes the final tower is theorised to take around 500 hours to conquer. Combat runs on dice rolls, the corridors are mostly empty, and the whole thing has earned its reputation as one of the great kusoge — those “crap games” so fascinating you can’t look away. I respect the commitment.
The patch translates the menus and in-game dialogue and adds subtitles to the FMV cutscenes, and it’s available from the team’s GitHub repository. The collaboration behind it is a lovely little preservation story: romhacker spacey-lacey started the project, and kusoge-translation specialist SnowyAria — the translator behind the English patch for the legendarily awful Ancient Roman: Power of Dark Side — jumped in to handle the video subtitles with the Eight Mansions group.
Legend has it Idea Factory offered pin badges to anyone who conquered the tallest towers. Whether anyone actually claimed one remains, ah, unconfirmed — and I can’t imagine why.
No statement about generative AI appears in the project’s public materials, so this one looks like old-fashioned volunteer craft. Check out the game in action below:
So — are you brave enough to start the climb?
Sources: Time Extension; the Spectral Tower translation project on GitHub.