Napple Tale is a cute 2.5d platformer for the Dreamcast, designed by a team of mostly women. The game features excellent music by Yoko Kanno and voice lines and songs performed by Maaya Sakamoto, basically the dream team of '90s anime appearing in a video game.
Fan translation
The thing that made this game accessible to me is the wonderful fan translation patch by Cargodin in 2019.
The fan translation requires a CD image of Napple Tale in .cdi format to play.
caroline_bunny made a bugfix patch that you can apply on top of it with xdelta. The fan translation introduced a bug where the "Porch's memo" screen, showing your current objectives, is blank after the first time you open it in a session. This patch switches a single byte to fix the bug.
Gameplay guides
- caroline_bunny's notes - describes the current speedrun route, plus a lot of additional information about where to find things in the game
- kihaku's guide - notes about where to find things in Napple Tale, with screenshots. In Japanese, from 2003.
Original website
- The official Napple Tale website (from 2000) is down, but here is Rolly's archive of it
- Cargodin translated the website into English alongside translating the game!
Speedrun
I routed the Napple Tale speedrun and came up with the categories, and I'm the world-record holder as of 2026.
The game has interesting routing and occasional risks you can take, it takes less than three hours, and it's just a comfy experience from start to finish. Here's the speedrun.com page.
To save frames and my wrists, I use JoyToKey to set one of my controller buttons to "turbo X" at 15Hz, for skipping through dialogue.
MSU-1 pack for A Link to the Past
You can play A Link to the Past or ALttP Randomizer and replace its music with Napple Tale music, using this MSU-1 music pack.
Desktop backgrounds
These 1024x768 backgrounds can be found as files on the game disc.
