If you love long-forgotten 80’s era JRPGs, or just want to experience a classic step-movement gridder that few even knew existed, you might want to head over to Romhacking.net, where a translation patch has just been released for the obscure NES gridder Shadow Brain.

Borrowing some of its look and gameplay style from the 8bit Megami Tensei game and employing a single party member/single monster combat system similar to the original Dragon Quest, Shadow Brain should be enjoyable to anyone who grew up on Wizardry, or who love grinding away levels to repetitive Famicom music. Regardless, the team that worked on the rom patch put a lot of effort into the tiny game, as evident by the readme that comes with:

Well, this project started like ages ago for me when a person (I think it was ASchultz, one of my first editors) approached me with a suggestion about this game. I looked into, found it quite complicated back then and postponed the project till better times. Better times came in year 2014 when I was already confident enough in my skills. The point is that this is one of the hardest hacks I have ever done, and I’ve basically redone a good part of the game to make it run expanded and fit all the hacks back in, while testing everything to make sure the game wasn’t broken.

The game itself, as Pennywise already mentioned is a SMT-like false 3D crawler in a (surprise-surprise for poor ol’ NES) totally sci-fi world.

For those of you willing to know the whole plot I highly recommend reading the intro script and watching a video on YouTube (both are found in the same file attached to this very archive). Otherwise you’ll be thrown out in a middle of nowhere – that’s how this game actually starts.

A companion VHS Tape was released with the original game, and there are currently offers from people in this thread who are willing to help in getting it ripped and translated.