Hope is not entirely lost. In mid-2023, a new Spanish translation team announced they were starting a full translation of Danball Senki Wars. Since Spanish uses a similar Latin alphabet to English, their font and menu hacks could theoretically be adapted back to English.
Furthermore, the explosion of AI translation tools (DeepL, GPT-4) has made it easier than ever to clean up the remaining untranslated strings. The only missing piece is a programmer willing to spend 20 hours fixing the menu pointer tables.
If you are a 3DS ROM hacker reading this: The files are all extracted. The script is translated. The game is good. Please, finish the job.
Level-5 USA did localise the first LBX game for the Nintendo 3DS in 2015, but it was a modified version of the PSP original. By the time Danball Senki Wars was released in Japan, the 3DS was aging, and Level-5’s Western branch was beginning to struggle financially. Danball Senki Wars 3ds English Patch
Furthermore, LBX had a troubled launch in the West due to poor marketing and the collapse of the associated toy line (distributed by Nintendo and later Spin Master). The cost of localising a text-heavy, voice-acted RTS like Wars was deemed too high for a niche audience. Thus, the game was abandoned for English territories.
This left fans with three options: learn Japanese, play the game “blind” using Google Translate on a smartphone camera, or wait for a fan translation.
If you own a modded 3DS (or a Citra emulator on PC), you can play the Danball Senki Wars – English Menu & Prologue Patch v0.4. Here is how: Hope is not entirely lost
Warning: This requires basic knowledge of homebrew. Do not ask for ROM links.
What you will get:
What remains broken:
If you have a Japanese save, it will work with the patched version.
The patch was created by Team DATS (a fan translation group known for Digimon and other Level-5 games).
The team released the patch in 2021 after years of work. Level-5 USA did localise the first LBX game
If you want to monitor for any revival of the Wars translation:
As of 2026, no active project has been announced. The partial patch remains the only community effort.