title to be developed and released for a Nintendo console. It was released on July 31. Its release was timed to coincide with a traditional time in Japan for people to tell each other ghost stories. Upon release, the game featured several bugs affecting player progress through the game, as revealed in a message to fans from Nintendo. While no North American release was planned, a European release was in the works and was briefly outed by a French gaming magazine. After the leak, Nintendo stated that a European release had been planned, but since then the localization had been cancelled. In addition to Nintendo, no other third-party publisher would publish the game overseas, leaving Mask of the Lunar Eclipse as a Japan-exclusive title at that time. After Nintendo's announcement, a three-person team decided to create a fan translation of the game. The development process was compared by them to "a Frankenstein's monster", referring to how they needed to assess the data, construct a development schedule for the translation patch, going through theories about file structure, then creating a tool to access the game's data files. The modification program was then tested on Super Smash Bros. Brawl by a dedicated tester, then sent back for refinement. They worked hard to preserve the atmosphere of the original game, along with attempting to make the translation as true as possible without being overly verbose. To help translate the text, they posted the script in segments on internet forums, then later restricted access to the work due to quality concerns. During this time, they found several competent translators who were able to do the final 20% of script translation. It took several months for the entire process of extracting text, translation, then patching in the translated text to be completed. The patch ended up being quite large as the game designers had split the game into hundreds of different data archives and suitable accommodations and adjustments needed to be made for this. The fan translation was released on January 19, 2010. The patch was designed to work on any Wii device, bypassing the console's region locking, and included a newly made costume for the main character. Prior to any Western release, the game was commonly dubbed "Fatal Frame / Project Zero IV" or "Fatal Frame / Project Zero: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse" by journalists. A Western release was eventually announced in September