The Lunar Remastered Collection was announced at PlayStation State of Play this week, finally bringing a pair of beloved JRPGs back to modern audiences after a 25-year gap. Fans of the series had begun to give up hope that these games would ever get a modern remaster, and it all comes 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 both originally developed for Sega CD by Japanese studio Game Arts. Later, Game Arts remade both games for PS1 as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete. All four of these versions were translated by a localization studio known as Working Designs.
Fans of Japanese obscurities tended to have a love-and-hate relationship with Working Designs in the '90s. The studio picked up the torch for JRPGs in an era before they had become mainstream, and gave English translations to many notable games that may otherwise never have been localized. But those localizations were filled with pop culture references and various bits of crass humor. Much of it is now very dated, and there are a few bits that would definitely not fly in 2024.
Nonetheless, the Working Designs translation was the translation of the original Lunar games, and after the company shut down in the '00s, the rights to that localization appeared to wind up with former president Victor Ireland. Pretty much all we know about Ireland's stewardship of those rights comes from rumors and a few posts he made on old gaming forms before he largely disappeared from the public eye.
What we do know is that the Working Designs versions of Lunar have never gotten a modern re-release. The Sega Genesis Mini 2, notably, included the Japanese Sega CD versions of the Lunar games, but not the English versions. In a review of the mini-console, YouTube channel Game Sack - a channel that tends to be pretty clued in on happenings in the retro game scene - reported that Ireland passed on giving Sega the rights to the Lunar translation because he felt they weren't offering enough money.
I'm not here to pass judgment on Ireland's apparent holdout on releasing those rights - after all, any full-length, human-made translation represents something valuable, and the few details we have on the discussions between Ireland and Sega come down to hearsay. But these are the sorts of things Lunar fans have latched onto as the reasons why the original games have never gotten an English re-release.
The original Lunar did get two more remakes in the form of Lunar Legend and Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, both of which were released in English with all-new scripts that didn't bear much similarity to the Working Designs version. But neither 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 either 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 take on either expense for a straight remaster of the old games. Until, that is, GungHo announced the Lunar Remastered Collection at State of Play.
On the PlayStation blog, GungHo said the remaster collection features "all-new English voice acting," but beyond that we don't know the exact nature of this localization. The bits of dialog we hear in the translation sound similar to the Working Designs version, but there's not enough of it to determine if it's all one to one. The copyrights on the official site certainly make no reference to Working Designs, Ireland himself, or his modern company Gaijinworks.
Exactly what's changed to make Lunar Remastered Collection a reality is still a mystery, but I doubt fans will be questioning things too hard when all it really means is that we've finally gotten a Lunar re-release 25 years overdue.
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