The Lunar Remastered Collection was announced at PlayStation State of Play this week, finally returning a pair of beloved JRPGs to modern audiences after a 25-year hiatus. Fans of the series had begun to lose hope that these games would ever get a modern remaster, and it all goes back to the controversial English localization that brought them to Western audiences in the first place.
Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue were originally developed for the Sega CD by Japanese studio Game Arts. Game Arts later remade both games for PS1 as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete. All four versions were translated by a localization studio known as Working Designs.
Fans of Japanese obscurities tended to have a love-hate relationship with Working Designs in the '90s. The studio took up the torch for JRPGs in an era before they became mainstream and provided English translations of many games. notables that would otherwise never have been located. But those locations were filled with pop culture references and various bits of crude humor. Much of it is now very dated and there are some parts that will definitely not fly in 2024.
However, the translation of Working Designs was he translation of the original Lunar games, and after the company folded in the 2000s, the rights to that localization appeared to end up in the hands of former president Victor Ireland. Almost everything we know about Ireland's administration of those rights comes from rumors and some posts he made on old gaming forms before largely disappearing from the public eye.
What we do know is that the Working Designs versions of Lunar have never seen a modern reissue. The Sega Genesis Mini 2, in particular, included Sega's Japanese CD versions of the Lunar games, but not the English versions. In a review of the mini-console, the YouTube channel Game Sack, a channel that tends to be quite aware of what's going on in the retro gaming scene, reported that Ireland did not give Sega the rights to the translation of Lunar because he felt they were not enough. It doesn't offer enough money.
Lunar Collection Remastered – Announce Trailer | PS5 and PS4 games – YouTube
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I am not here to judge Ireland's apparent resistance to releasing those rights; After all, any complete human-made translation represents something valuable, and the few details we have about the talks between Ireland and Sega are reduced to rumors. . But these are the kinds of things that Lunar fans have latched onto as the reasons why the original games never got an English reissue.
The original Lunar got two more remakes in the form of Lunar Legend and Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, both of which were released in English with completely new scripts that didn't bear much similarity to the Working Designs version. But none of these remakes were the original Lunar that fans really wanted to see on modern platforms.
Getting English versions of the original Lunar and Lunar 2 on modern platforms would apparently mean paying Ireland for the rights to the old translation or creating a new localization in-house, and up to this point no publisher has been willing to foot any of the costs. for a direct remaster of the old games. Until GungHo announced the Lunar Remastered collection at State of Play.
On the PlayStation blog, GungHo said that the remastered collection features “all-new English voice acting,” but beyond that we don't know the exact nature of this localization. The bits of dialogue we hear in the translation sound similar to the Working Designs version, but there's not enough to determine if it's all one-to-one. The copyright on the official site certainly does not refer to Working Designs, Ireland himself or his modern company Gaijinworks.
Exactly what has changed to make the Lunar Remastered Collection a reality remains a mystery, but I doubt fans will question things. also difficult when what it really means is that we finally got a Lunar relaunch 25 years late.
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