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There are basically two kinds of fan translations: the "labor of love" kind, where long months are spent trying to get everything exactly right and polished to perfection; and the "quick 'n dirty" kind, where the point is to get the game playable in English as efficiently as possible, and things like weird line breaks and awkward text placement are no big deal.

I think there's room for both kinds. An imperfect translation that exists and is playable TODAY is better than a hypothetically perfect one that's five years away. Plus, sometimes a quick 'n dirty job will spur someone else to re-hack and re-translate the game as a labor of love.

And while I find it irritating when people go on about the question of whether a game "deserves" translation, Zoids Densetsu is the kind of shovelware-ish game for which a quick 'n dirty localization hack is a good fit. The Japanese-language text was minimal to begin with, with no dialogue to navigate or puzzles to solve. Once you're past the title screen and have chosen one of the game's two teams (whose only differences are cosmetic), what's left - your team name, your rank, your character's name and stats - is basically window dressing.

True, a perfectionist might have done some ASM hacking to put "REPUBLIC" on one line - or to spell out the full length of words like "EMPR" (empire), "LENGT" (length), "HGHT", "WDTH", and "SPED", which were probably squashed to fit in the same space occupied by the original kana.

But does any of that affect the playability or comprehensibility of this below-average mech shmup? Not one whit, and I'd rather be able to play the game today with "EMPR" than wait five years for a perfected hack. Besides, had the game been localized back in the day, it probably would've looked a lot like this - at best.

There's also a small amount of mangled English that was in the original game; had I been the hacker, I might have tempted to fix the names of the weapons called "BALKAN" (vulcan) and "NAPARM" (I think that one's obvious). But maybe purists would complain - I don't know, I'm not a fan of the Zoids franchise.

So, thanks to MrRichard999 and LastBossKiller, we know we're not missing anything: Zoids Densetsu really is that clumsy, shallow, and poorly-designed. It's also not as bad as some critics have claimed, nor as difficult - it took me less than two hours to beat. But it's nice to get a chance to play through the game and know that I'm not overlooking something in the kana that would somehow make it a better experience.