Konami has penchant for making great RPGs, and this one is no exception. It’s a frickin huge, fun game. It’s set in the future … fruity-looking mechas abound, seedy merchants, high technology - if you’ve played this type of RPG, you nkow what I’m talking about. Anyway, this game also features some of the best damn music in an NES game, thanks to the VRC7 chip.

Lagrange Point is a sci-fi RPG for the NES. A biological catastrophe has occurred in the series of space colonies collectively known as the Isis Cluster, and after communications cease, Earth sends a recon unit to investigate. Shortly after landing, the squad is ambushed by violent robots. Their pilot, Gene, wakes up in an infirmary with his dying captain, whose last words are to “find Stolte.”

The game itself features multiple swappable party members, item fusion, and a semi-linear plot (at one point the player is tasked with acquiring three macguffins, but it’s up to you which you go after in which order.) Lagrange Point is unique among NES RPGs, the only game on the system to make use of Konami’s proprietary VRC7 FM sound hardware. As such, it’s gained no little notoriety for the quality of the music it outputs; whether the actual compositions are to your liking is up to taste, but there are certainly no other NES game sounds like this.

The translation itself is almost as old as the community that produced it. The project originally belonged to J2E Translations; it was passed to Aeon Genesis in… 2007-ish, after necrosaro disbanded J2E to focus on his doctorate. It’s also the very first game that Tomato did the script for. His relative inexperience at the time unfortunately showed in the text, and several of the strings needed to be doublechecked throughout the editing and testing processes.

The game’s text was originally compressed, with six bits of every byte being used per character instead of all eight (25% savings in space.) By rewriting the dialog engine we managed to get that up to about 33% (closer to 42% if you only count the main dialog, which makes as full use of the changes as possible) but it’s still an awfully tight squeeze. Romhacker Pennywise (http://yojimbo.eludevisibility.org/) helped move some of the game’s data around a bit, and we both worked on menu expansions to allow for twelve-character item names instead of the original eight. The result is quite nice.