Nobody seems to know why it took 25 years to get the Lunar Remastered Collection, but it might go back to the beloved JRPG's controversial localization
Sep. 26, 2024The legacy of Working Designs lives on
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The Lunar Remastered Collection was announced atPlayStation State of Playthis 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 forSegaCD 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.
Nonetheless, the Working Designs translation wasthetranslation 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. TheSega 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.
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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 thePlayStation 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 theofficial sitecertainly 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 thingstoohard when all it really means is that we’ve finally gotten a Lunar re-release 25 years overdue.
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