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

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