One of the ways in which Rainbow Silkroad is neat is because it’s somewhat loosely based on historical fact. Not so historical as that you’d actually learn something, but just enough that you’d say “oh hey, that’s neat” every once in a while. You take the role of the long-lost prince of Littleland, who must reclaim his throne from the guy Zrool that took the throne and was evil. Yeah the plot sucks, but it’s irrelevant to the coolness that is this game. Instead the heart of the game is commerce. You take advantage of prices of various goods in various towns, and go back and forth trading goods to get more money. And don’t think you can just kill monsters instead; all that monsters give you are License Points that, when enough are collected, will get you a license to trade in a certain good, such as oil. You don’t have any stats or experience either! The only way you can increase your attack or HP or whatever is by buying more powerful weapons and armor. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Of course it does, dammit! So go play!

This is a complete translation patch for Rainbow Silkroad aka Niji no Silkroad for the NES. It was previously translated by Gaijin Translations circa 2000. While good for the time, we felt the translation in general was truncated. Being a fan of the dev, we decided to do our own translation from scratch. We’d like to thank M-Tee for his title screen and for Eien ni Hen’s help on polishing the final product.

• File: Niji no Silk Road (J).nes
• Length: 393232 Bytes (3 Mbit)
• CRC32: 5BD1AC0B
• MD5: c77c8370de8897754ff363b9e5c37892
• SHA1: 4d44e94dffe5309dd1e7c50f0f32c33e01cf6771