Spectral Tower (PS1) translated into English: Idea Factory’s 10,000-floor game
By Tgames · · 1 min read
Thirty years after its release in Japan, Spectral Tower, Idea Factory’s PS1 game with towers of 10,000 floors, is playable in English thanks to a fan patch.
A cult game for the wrong reasons
Spectral Tower (Idea Factory, 1996) is a role-playing game with roguelike elements: a party climbs towers of 10 to 10,000 floors. Slow, repetitive, full of empty rooms and dice-based battles, it is often counted among the “kusoge”, games so bad they become fascinating. The last tower would take hundreds of hours, according to players’ estimates.
The patch
Playing it
Once the patch is applied, the game runs on a modded PS1 console or in an emulator such as DuckStation: see our DuckStation tutorial.
Sources: Patch (GitHub) · Time Extension
A cult game for the wrong reasons
Spectral Tower (Idea Factory, 1996) is a role-playing game with roguelike elements: a party climbs towers of 10 to 10,000 floors. Slow, repetitive, full of empty rooms and dice-based battles, it is often counted among the “kusoge”, games so bad they become fascinating. The last tower would take hundreds of hours, according to players’ estimates.
The patch
- Version 1.0, released on 2 October 2026 for the game’s 30th anniversary, by Yoshimanix.
- The menus, the dialogue and the videos, which are subtitled, are translated.
- Team: Yoshimanix (programming, font, graphics), Quade (translation), NicheTopic (graphics) and SnowyAria (videos). The team states thatno AI was used.
- It is a patch in the format xdelta, to be applied to the BIN image of your own disc (Japanese version): you drag the file onto the supplied script (Windows or Linux), which also creates the CUE file. On a phone, an online xdelta tool does the job.
Playing it
Once the patch is applied, the game runs on a modded PS1 console or in an emulator such as DuckStation: see our DuckStation tutorial.
Sources: Patch (GitHub) · Time Extension
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