Retro Re-release Roundup, week of June 26, 2025

Show of hands, folks: would you rather roll the dice with one of the three untranslated Japanese RPGs resurfacing this week, or with the third and final remakes from a publisher whose localization efforts have been so haphazard that they've rendered games illegible in their original target language?

ARCADE ARCHIVES

Crazy Balloon

What's this? A dexterity-challenge maze game, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Taito in 1980 and converted both officially and unofficially for various Japanese and European microcomputers, with emulated reissues via the Taito Memories compilation series for PlayStation 2/PlayStation Portable and arranged adaptations for PlayStation, PlayStation Portable and feature phones; the player is tasked with guiding a swaying balloon through a spike-filled maze as quickly as possible, with additional variations and gimmicks added to each of the three core maze layouts with each loop.

Why should I care? You want to try the first great game Taito made post-Space Invaders, or you want to marvel at just how much precision is available to the player for a game powered by such rudimentary hardware.

Useless fact: Before morphing into the sidescrolling action game you probably know and might even love, the game ultimately released as The NewZealand Story began development as a modern adaptation of Crazy Balloon, in a similar vein to Arkanoid's fresh update on classic brick-breakers.

EGG CONSOLE

Madou Monogatari (MSX2)

What's this? A light-hearted first-person dungeon-crawling RPG, originally developed and published by Compile in 1990 and successively ported and/or remade, in part or in full, for PC-98, Sega Game Gear, Sega Mega Drive, Super Famicom, PC Engine CD and more, and released globally for the first time today. Players guide magic student Arle Nadja on three distinct adventures: a "magical kindergarten" graduation exam set inside a magic tower; a trek to a magic school that's detoured by a kidnapping by warlock Schezo Wegey and a search for a mystical item discovered to be guarded by Satan; and a journey with new companion Carbuncle that leads to a run-in with the Satan-crazed warrior Rulue. (Madou Monogatari's characters, settings and lore were borrowed by the far more popular puzzle series Puyo Puyo, in case they strike you as familiar.)

Why should I care? On an immediate level, this release represents another positive step towards unraveling the prohibitive licensing tussle that's largely kept Madou Monogatari in the vault for the last few decades: put simply, EGG Console makers D4 Enterprise own the classic games but any element that's ever appeared in a Puyo Puyo game is owned by Sega, so both parties have to cut a deal for anything to happen with them, with Sega being traditionally reluctant to cut any big deals, so the fact that this game's not only releasing globally but on consoles via EGG suggests that they may have finally loosened up for good. As for the game in question: on top of its goofy humor, silly takes on fantasy monsters and high-quality audiovisuals (including many voice clips, a luxurious feature at the time), Madou Monogatari drew a distinction between itself and other dungeon-crawlers by openly flauting its compactness — the floors of each dungeon are small and helpfully auto-mapped, with progress gated by puzzles or simple deduction rather than grueling design or byzantine number checks, so while it's no pushover, it's certainly suited to a more casual experience than the many Wizardry-likes made then and now.

Language barrier? Madou Monogatari was designed to eschew visible stats and characters values and instead expects the player to intuit their current health, power level, the nature of their abilities and other elements based on indirect indicators like Arle's character portrait and the captions that appear during battles... so, to answer the question: yes, if you can't read the text then attempting to bluff your way through is going to be even trickier than with a standard RPG.

SATURN TRIBUTE SERIES

Farland Saga I Saturn Tribute & Farland Saga II Saturn Tribute

What's this? Emulated reissues of the two games in the Farland Saga sub-series of tactical fantasy RPGs spawned from TGL's voluminous Farland universe, originally released for Sega Saturn in 1998; in addition to de riguer emulator functionality like save states and rewind, these versions offers a double-XP assist feature, as well as an augmented display that shows the status of your characters in the screen borders at all time. 

Why should I care? My knowledge of Farland as a thing is sketchy at best and I've not so much as touched either Farland Saga game, but my perception is that these games were made to be a) far more casual and approachable than the mainline Farland Saga games seen on computers, and b) very character-centric with a lot of very silly voiced conversations, and that the two Saga games are the first and second parts of a complete story, so I could imagine they'd scratch somebody's appetite for SRPG comfort food.

Helpful(tip: Do note that these games haven't been localized, and there's been no indication that they will be at any point in the near future.

OTHER

Fast Striker EX

What's this? A revision of a vertically-scrolling bullet hell shooting game originally developed by homebrew studio NGDEV for the Neo Geo and Sega Dreamcast in 2010, with later ports to iOS, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita; this new "EX" version promises all the visual elements that were cut when porting the game to Dreamcast and remained absent across other versions and adds several more quality-of-life features including stage select and training modes, autofire, additional visual touchups and, allegedly, hundreds more unlisted gameplay tweaks.

Why should I care? NGDEV was a studio that was able to coast on being the only developers for their audience for a long time, but Fast Striker's the first game of theirs to offers something genuinely enjoyable beyond the novelty of playing a new game for old hardware, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that the lessons they learned making the recent, excellent Gunvein might have allowed them to tweak this game into even better shape.

Useless fact: NGDEV went to great lengths to get the SNK of fifteen years ago to give Fast Striker their official endorsement — they didn't and couldn't fulfil this request, but Twinkle Star Sprites creator Yoshiyasu Matsushita did offer some informal game design advice.

Front Mission 3 - Remake

What's this? The third and last of Forever Entertainment's remakes from the classic Square/G-Craft mecha tactics series Front Misson, with this entry originally developed and published worldwide for the Sony PlayStation in 2000; as with the previous remakes, the game has been fully remade with new 3D assets and digitally-"enhanced" 2D assets, newly-reorchestrated music, new translations across various languages and more, as well as additional visual customization options and a new quick-skirmish mode.

Why should I care? Look, I've tried to be charitable to these folks, but after seeing that the majority of the game's 2D images have been "enhanced" with AI to the point of being unrecognizable or straight-up incorrect, I'm done being polite: every one of these remakes has been awful and their one saving grace is that complaining about them online, with the ultimate goal of reminding Square-Enix that there is a hungry audience for Front Mission that wants and demands genuine games, is something that can be done without having to waste actual money on this junk.

Hazard forecast: Forever's remake of The House of the Dead 2 drops in a week or two, and as far as anyone's aware, they're still working on a remake of Panzer Dragoon Zwei, but beyond that, their run of painful remakes may have drawn to a close.

ToHeart (remake)

What's this? A remake of the big-in-Japan erotic visual novel To Heart, originally developed by eroge studio Leaf for PC in 1997 and subsequently ported and remade in a cleaner form for PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable, with a sequel and numerous other media properties following soon after; developed by Tamsoft, this version recreates the game in full 3D and offers the ability to play the game in either "novel mode" (with text displayed over the entire game, visual novel style) or "adventure mode" (with text confined to the bottom of the screen, a la an adventure game), and also offers English, Japanese and Chinese language support with the option to use all-new Japanese character voices or the original 1997 voice performances. (The Switch version is Japan-only for the moment and, to my knowledge, does not contain languages other than Japanese.)

Why should I care? My vague third-hard impression of ToHeart as being "the one eroge-gone-mainstream that wasn't made for sickos" might be off-base, but it's all I got. Maybe this remake will straighten me out!

Helpful tip: Aquaplus decided to wait until after launch to announce their DLC plans: they'll be releasing extra paid routes for two characters next week.

UPDATES UPATES UPDATES

Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition (PS/Xbox/Switch) "Backworms Compatibility" update

Team 17 and Digital Eclipse have added four more Worms variants to their recent console remaster: the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive conversions of Worms, the Game Boy Color conversion of Worms Armageddon and the Game Boy Advance conversion of Worms World Party. Are these transformative additions? Nope! Do they nonetheless offer a welcome affirmation who grew up playing these particular ports? Sure? Have I ever stopped regretting trading my 108-in-1 Game Boy cart for a copy of GBC Worms Armageddon? Not for a single second.