1.	Foreword

Hello everyone! It was a long time since our last release (Mirrors, back in 2021). This time, it’s another old project that was in development for several years – The Hybrid Front, for Sega Mega Drive. 

2.	Game description.

The Hybrid Front is a turn-based strategy game developed in conjunction by Sega, Oniro and HIC. It features a deep sci-fi narrative written by Masahiro Noda, set in the distant future of the 26th century. The music was composed by Naofumi Hataya, who is known by his work for Golden Axe and the Sonic series.

The game places a strong emphasis on storytelling, featuring in-game character profiles, history timeline viewer and detailed sub-articles about key historical events. The whole narrative unfolds like a science fiction novel, with each mission presented as chapters that gradually piece the story together.

In terms of gameplay, The Hybrid Front is reminiscent of the Daisenryaku series games, which were mostly released in Japan. It shares many similarities with Advanced Daisenryaku, another Sega title for the Mega Drive. Like other Daisenryaku-style games, The Hybrid Front includes a wide variety of units—nearly 150 different types of units and weapons. However, it distinguishes itself by adopting a more tactical RPG (TRPG)-like approach: units are piloted by characters, each offering different combat bonuses. Some pilots excel against air units, while others are better suited for ground combat. Pilots gain experience and rank by defeating enemies, and their progress carries over between missions.

3.	Project background

The Nebulous Translations team began work on this project in 2017, during a particularly busy period when many of our translation projects were in full swing. Around the same time, streamer Goati did a full playthrough of the game as part of his Sega games marathon, which also brought attention to the need for a proper English translation. 

However, much like Lord Monarch, the Hybrid Front project encountered technical challenges that prevented a release back in 2018.
In 2020, during a renewed push to complete the Lord Monarch translation, team member miralita resumed work on The Hybrid Front, making progress on redesigning the boarding menu interface. Unfortunately, the work remained unfinished back then.

And after a long hiatus cybermind took over the hacking efforts. Through several months of brainstorming and technical problem-solving, the hacking was finally completed. (See “Hacking Notes” below for more technical details.) Afterwards, due to various circumstances, it also took some time to test the whole game and make an English version of user’s manual.

4.	Translation notes (by TheMajinZenki)

This is definitely one of the most ambitious projects for the Mega Drive. A lot of story, many character and unit names, an in-game encyclopedia and time line, character profiles... Text-wise, this game is massive, even if the average player may not notice. I remember particularly that at the time of the translation, I spent a lot of time researching the names of the characters, trying to find proper, existing romanizations for them (it's not an easy task to interpret the katakana of a foreign name when the game doesn't say the origin of that name). I was checking name databases, trying to see if they matched a specific language. I think I did an appropriate job on that regard.

I hope you enjoy this game, which has been on many retro gamer radars for a long time (and I've personally been teased multiple times about its release, you know who I'm talking about Mr. Underscore)

5.	Hacking notes (by cybermind)

Like it was mentioned above, the hacking process for this game came with significant challenges. While TheMajinZenki completed the Japanese-to-English translation back in 2018, things were not that smooth on hacking side.

The primary obstacle was the user interface. The UI in Hybrid Front utilizes a set of densely packed menus, some of which (like unit/character information screens) even rely on vertical kanji to save layout space. Because of that, most of the UI interface layout had to be redone to allow proper English translation.

The most difficult component of UI was the boarding interface, where players assign pilots to units before each mission. This screen features two long lists—units and pilots, along with weapon stat information —and accommodating English names (which tend to be longer than their Japanese counterparts) required a complete overhaul of the layout. A lot of time was spent in graphic editor designing mockup screens translated to English, ensuring that everything fit into limited screen space. After mockup screens were designed, a lot of reverse engineering had to be done to figure out now the new screens should be placed into the game. And since boarding interface utilizes a lot of variations (it does transform a lot while assigning units to characters), a lot of checking and testing was required to ensure the renewed layouts worked without glitches. Several other menus (like unit/character screen) had to be rearranged completely (because of vertical kanji layout constrains).

Again, like with Lord Monarch, using Ghidra SRE really simplified the reverse engineering (and it even allowed to find out a lot of unused stuff inside the game). As a part of this overhaul, the variable-width font (VWF) system was implemented, since using original 8x8 font wasn’t possible without trimming unit/character names, e.g. “Battle Jacket” to “BTLJCKT” (what I really didn’t want to do).

The in-game menus are drawn using metasprites (several sprites composed together). Since it was nearly impossible to fit English words to two-kanji space (and I didn’t favor using smaller font), the menu layout procedure has to be reverse-engineered for the menu to be extended horizontally.  

Another small challenge was the opening cutscene. Like with in-game menu, the messages are composed by metasprites, which are drawn by cutscene control script. Both cutscene format and metasprite format had to be reverse-engineered to so more sprites for text could be used. Also, due to the end of the opening music being synced with the title screen music, the timings in the opening screen scripts were slightly altered to allow extra lines of the text to be shown.

Overall, due to complexity and enormous amount of work required to hack and insert Zenki’s translation, the whole hacking attempt took me several months to hack the game, and to write tools required to patch the game.

6.	Disclaimer

We release this translation in the form of a patch. Please, don’t ask us to send you the ROM file, or where you can find it – we can’t help you with that.

You can redistribute this translation freely as long as you don’t ask money for it and include this readme.txt file with it. We don’t condone any form of commercial redistribution. Please, keep that in mind.

7.	Staff and special thanks

cybermind – hacking, graphics, user’s manual design
TheMajinZenki – translation, user’s manual translation
cccmar – editing
Fei, Spolan – beta-testing
Jiggeh – map/unit chart translation and design
celcion – original hacking, special thanks
miralita – original hacking, special thanks

8.	Contacts:

cybermind - cybermindid at gmail com

