You might have heard about the Dragon Quest IX hack someone created for maxing out their character’s levels, health, gold, etc. While it’s a neat story — someone creating a cheat before the game even officially releases — that doesn’t have a noticeable impact on most U.S. gamers.

What will interest North American gamers, however, is that work is already work underway on expanding an English translation patch for the Japanese game, as Square Enix will likely not bring over until well into 2010.

The hackers behind the project already realeased an early version that translates some of the game’s menu options. Details behind other specific menus and DQIX’s story are also available in the same GBAtemp thread.

Naturally, to apply the patch, you’ll need DQIX’s ROM, which you can obtain somewhat legally by acquiring an import copy and going through an arcane set of steps with homebrew tools. I strongly advise against pirating the game (as I do with all games), especially considering the hazards with this particular release.

Preoder import: Dragon Quest IX

See also: MetaFortress unlikely to keep DS pirates at bay

tags / translation / patch / dragon quest / dragon quest ix / square enix / import / homebrew / ec