It looks like the English Nintendo Switch release of Onion Games’ satirical JRPG moon: Remix RPG Adventure is not far away. We still don’t have a release date, but the first official English-language screenshot and a new teaser site suggest we won’t have to wait much longer for the first official release of this obscure, cult favourite PlayStation game.
The screenshot, shared by Gematsu, shows the game’s armless, legless protagonist standing in front of an alien-like creature on a stage. Some text on screen—dialogue, presumably—reads “The pOwer of The DiVine MesSenger Can maKe the inViSible viSible!”. That should give you an idea of the tone of Moon, an oddball adventure that spends a lot of time satirising JRPG convention.
There’s little information on the teaser site other than the cover artwork and a “Coming Soon” notice, but the full website will reportedly open on July 31.
Moon originally came out for PlayStation in 1997, and was never released outside Japan. There have been a few attempts at fan-translations over the years, but nothing complete. This all made last year’s announcement of a Switch port including an official English release, that much more exciting.
The Switch version is developed by Onion Games, a studio founded in 2012 by Moon‘s original creators. It came out in Japan last year, but the English version—originally planned for release last December—had to be delayed due the complexity of the translation.
There was little news about it after that until last month, when Onion Games’ studio head Kimura Yoshiro shared an update to say that a draft English script had been completed some time prior, but that the team needed more time to polish the script and ensure they’d properly captured the idiosyncrasies of the characters. At the time, the English version was going through its final debugging stage, and Kimura said that the goal was in sight and that “the next stop on this journey is getting final approval that our build is OK and ready to ship, and so the next time you hear from us about moon will be… then!”
Well, this new screenshot is the next we’ve heard about it. That Onion Games is willing to share a first English-language screenshot now, after months of relative silence, suggests that moon‘s global release really is just around the corner. We may even get a release date announcement soon—perhaps alongside the full website opening next week?
Note: Japanese names in this article use the Japanese name order—that is, family name first, followed by given name.