Origin historian Pix took a brief look at the Super Famicom port of Savage Empire yesterday.

Savage Empire was however published on the Super Famicom in 1995 using the Ultima 7 engine making it the last Ultima game to be published on a Nintendo at least so far. The port never made its way to western shores but a full translation was apparently finished if never published. That means Japanese text throughout and I’m not going to do any more in this post than have a quick run around some of the world. A fan translation was started recently which I’m eagerly awaiting but no doubt it will take quite some time to complete.

That project would be this one, by the way…headed up by slashgravatar and assisted by Dungy and his wife.

At any rate, Pix fired up the game and explored for a while. Not being fluent in Japanese, he wasn’t able to progress very far, but he grabbed a handful of interesting screenshots, and was left (overall) with a positive impression of this particular Ultima port:

On first impressions I’d have to score this highly on graphics and music with reservations about the gameplay. It appears to have as much of a helping of Runes Of Virtue as Savage Empire to it from what I’ve seen. This still looks like fun anyway and it is undoubtedly going to offer quite a different experience to the original. I look forward to trying this out when I can understand it but in the meanwhile I will have to content myself with Ultima 7 on the SNES instead which will follow at some point.

I trust I speak for everyone here when I wish him good luck with the Ultima 7 port?