Personal background: Me and this game go way back. It's what made me decide to learn Japanese, what made me pursue foreign language studies, and what basically got me to pursue what I now do as career (translation). It's developed by Love-de-Lic, which has developed somewhat of a cult following. Moon is their magnum opus, so to speak, and has a bit of a following outside of Japan despite never having been released in English. I actually translated the game 100% and was working with a hacker to get that out some years back, something I need to follow up on since I think it's long overdue. Anyway, I've always been curious about the unreleased localization of Moon for PSX. I first learned of it from a preview in the September 1997 issue of Gamefan that claimed it would get a 1st quarter US release. That never happened, but apparently the game was already being prepared for localization as early as E3 of that year. The video below shows a small preview of an in-progress build with a localized Moon logo. Skip to 1:07:22 I spoke briefly with Mark Johnson, who was the producer for the game at ASCII's US branch, and he couldn't remember why it was cancelled anymore. I'm wondering if any of the sleuths here ever came across samples of the game, or if any materials involving its localization are out there. Since I am especially interested in any early versions of the game, finding a copy of any samples of it from during its early localization would be a dream. This may be too obscure of a title for many to know, but this is the home of the obscure...
I would love to see a translation of this game. I own it, but haven't been able to get into it due to the language barrier.
I didn't notice a single translated in-game element. Do you think it's likely there even was anything beyond a trade show video (containing language-agnostic gameplay) with some english promo-text overlays and a title screen that may or may not have been spliced in in post?
That's a good question, but there's no telling if that build in the video was actually from something that had English work done on it. But I like to think in any case that there must have been an internal copy of an early iteration of the game floating around US ASCII offices, translated or not.
Bump. Wondering if somehow anyone has more about this. Would love to see an earlier version of this game. I've tried contacting other former ASCII staff to no avail, so just hoping this somehow shows up in someone's collection someday. Here's some screenshots from Gamefan, who seem to be the only magazine that really covered it in any form (besides others like Game Informer at least listing it in a release calendar).
Small bump. Moon celebrated its 20th anniversary just the other day. I shared this on Twitter but will put it here for posterity. An ASCII employee reached out to me by chance the other day and shared pictures from a 1997-1998 ASCII product brochure. It has a section for Moon's localization as well as a section covering some other unreleased ASCII title called Aqua Prophecy. Here are the pics they shared with me. Unfortunately they don't have anything else left from those days and mentioned that the localization was cancelled early on due to the deal falling through. They also don't recall it having been sent to magazines for preview, either. It likely never even reached the translation stage and just had some general art made for it to garner interest. I'll have to check with Mark about Aqua Prophecy sometime, but I'm going to assume the Moon localization never got off the ground.
