In yet another win for the preservation and accessibility of Japan-bound video games, Macross 3 for Dreamcast is finally playable in English. Macross M3 is the kind of game that quietly lodges itself in your memory even if it never quite earns classic status, and the new English translation finally lets the story carry its weight instead of just the license and the import price. Originally released on Dreamcast in 2001 and locked to Japan, Warashi’s 3D shooter drops you into transforming Valkyries in a string of objective based missions, leaning heavily on the appeal of piloting variable fighters rather than on especially innovative mechanics.
Set after Space War 1, the game follows Maximilian Jenius, Milia Fallyna Jenius and Moaramia Jifon as the elite Dancing Skull team, with a bespoke narrative framed by fully voiced cutscenes and in-mission chatter that felt completely out of reach for most Western players at launch. The new fan translation by NetsuiAya tackles exactly that problem, fully translating story scenes, radio comms, menus and image based text so you can finally follow the plot beats while swapping between fighter, GERWALK and Battroid forms, even if the briefing text remains in Japanese due to the lack of native subtitles.
The patch is flagged as fully playable and is built to work from a verified Japanese GD-ROM dump, with the author recommending pairing it with a separate colour accuracy mod that retextures the Valkyries to better match the anime’s look. For a long time, Macross M3 sat in that familiar Dreamcast import limbo, a middling shooter that only truly mattered to die hard fans willing to squint through the language barrier, but being able to actually understand its character work nudges it much closer to what it always wanted to be, a proper side story for Macross obsessives that just happens to come packaged as a scrappy early 2000s mech game.
Source: Romhack.ing via Time Extension
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