Release information:

https://haroohie.club/blog/2026-01-01-chokuretsu-full-en-release

General information + patching guide:

https://haroohie.club/chokuretsu

About the game

Released in 2009 for the Nintendo DS, Suzumiya Haruhi no Chokuretsu (The Series of Haruhi Suzumiya) is a partially-voiced visual novel/puzzle game based on the Haruhi Suzumiya series!

Play as Kyon as you work with the rest of the SOS Brigade to keep Haruhi from discovering the unnatural phenomena occurring all around you! Set during summer break after the second light novel, the SOS Brigade members must distract Haruhi while she investigates the Seven Wonders of North High and erase the evidence before she finds it.

Featuring over 38,000 lines of dialogue and many possible routes, this unofficial translation made by Haruhi fans from around the world seeks to make the game accessible to a non-Japanese audience. Please support the series by buying the original games & merch!

An impressive translation effort given the scale and complexity of the task! I've only done a bit, but I can already see how much care the team has put into this romhack—there was a background with a storefront that only showed up for about 5 seconds, but they still went through the trouble of editing the image to replace the Japanese name with an English translation. And it's really neat how they went above and beyond by adding little speech bubble translations for in-game audio that was never associated with any text

If you're studying Japanese, one thing you can do is set up two instances of melonDS (or another emulator, I suppose), put them side-by-side, and then use a controller to play (I use the advanced technique of blocking-the-English-translation-with-my-controller so I don't cheat). The controller will simultaneously send input to both games, so you can stay synced without much fuss. Granted, I haven't gotten past the pure visual novel section, so it might get dicier when there's movement involved, and I don't know if there are random elements in the game. but I don't think there's anything fast-twitch. The one thing to keep in mind is that, since Japanese is always going to have fewer characters, you can advance more quickly through the Japanese text, so if you're mashing you can easily desync.

If you're interested in the romhacking process, check out the Haroohie Club blog as well as Janko's YouTube channel.