The fan-translation scene has a new reason to blow the dust out of the old PlayStation — and this time, the humans are doing the talking. Loudly.
Chapu Translations — the ROM hacker behind English patches for Japan-only PS1 oddities Tiny Bullets, Wonder Trek, and Prisoner — just announced that their next project is a full English fan translation of Schrödinger no Neko, Takara and Dual’s 1997 first-person dungeon crawler that never left Japan. The news dropped via a short trailer on YouTube, and while details are still thin, this is exactly the kind of announcement that gets my attention.
Chapu isn’t going it alone on this one. They’ve brought in Japanese-to-English translator Cadensia and image-and-movie-editing specialist Super Retro Polygons to handle the localization and the game’s presentation — no small job on a PS1 title with heavy cutscenes to wrangle. No release date has been given yet. Just the classic “coming soon.”
Here’s the part that matters most to this site’s regulars: in a scene increasingly divided over machine-assisted patches, Chapu drew a bright line on BlueSky, calling the project “absolutely human-made” — no AI, LLM, machine translation, or anything like that for the translation, art, or coding. That’s Chapu’s own claim, stated as a point of pride — and honestly, given the team’s track record, it reads as a quality promise as much as a philosophy. I’ll take human hands over a chatbot on a 1997 dungeon crawler any day.
So what’s the game? Yes, it’s named after Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, but mercifully there’s no quantum physics homework involved. According to Time Extension, you play as Iris, a young girl who gets lost while visiting family, follows a cat, and winds up in a strange new world — entering a castle that kicks off a time-travelling adventure. First-person dungeon crawling, late-90s low-poly charm, and a premise that sounds like a fever dream. Oh, and it’s from the same Takara that published the Battle Arena Toshinden series — plus, as Time Extension notes, the Transformers and Beyblade toys of your childhood. Busy company.
No word yet on when the patch lands, or how deep the translation will go — but the announcement trailer is below, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this one. A Japan-only PS1 dungeon crawler, translated by actual humans who clearly love the stuff? That’s the good stuff. Now, which untranslated PS1 shelf-warmer are you hoping gets the Chapu treatment next?
Check out the announcement trailer below:
Sources: The Daily Game News (Oct 14, 2026) and Time Extension‘s writeup by Jack Yarwood (Oct 14, 2026).