play! progress report (03/04/2026)
Hello people! As I've mentioned on the latest report, I had to finish my Shin Megami Tensei saga, and this month we already have another step towards that: Devil Summoner fully verified. Sadly I didn't had enough time, but I'm almost half-way into Devil Summoner 2 as well. The other game I had in my backlog also got promoted to playable, so let's simply list them below as usual.
New verified playable games [03/2025]:
Way of the Samurai 2
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner
Way of the Samurai 2: simply a matter of testing the entire game as it already was working nicely from the first time I've re-checked in a long time.
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: honestly I've never checked on this game with play! before, so it was a nice surprise to confirm that it's indeed fully playable. Only detail is related to performance, since the game looks VU bottlenecked, then some scenes will run slower than they should (combat in general shouldn't be an issue).
The second game will probably be fully verified by the end of this month, but I would like to take a second to talk about something else related to my previous article (The Hungry Ghosts english translation patch). As some people know, there's a team doing a translation for this game for some time and they have a discord where they share their updates, but no date or anything else other than a broad estimative of how much was already translated, which is fairly normal for projects like this. So no public release of any kind, even for testing, then people waiting on it can't really do much other than crossing their fingers and hope for the best. This is when someone else came in the discord and shared some info related to how he got a copy of the game and would love to play it but he also couldn't read japanese... but he could do something else. With some tools made, a quick translation using the Google Translation API was created. Obviously, the results are far from perfect, but more than enough for the average player to be able to at least play the game (till be very end I may add, since I've finished the game 3 times before confirming that the translation didn't broke it). This was shared around (I've made a patch file based on the translated game, to make it easier to share and apply to your original japanese copy of the game ISO file), and for some reason got a bunch of hate towards the guy that made the translation. Honestly, I can understand the point of view that some hold against this type of approach, but it's something done for free and not trying to offend or hurt anyone, just a player that wanted to play the game and made some efforth to make it playable for others as well.
If you find any post/article/page mentioning this patch, please be mindful that someone just wanted to make the game more approachable (at least until the manually made translation is finished), and that someone probably gave up entirely on making any other translations because of the negative feedback. TLDR: please be nice to people that simply are trying to help you ;)
With that said, thx for your support and attention, see you all next month ;)
Useful Links
play! site: https://purei.org/
play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List
play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002