The last few years have been an incredible time for fan translations, but here’s a doozy: Square’s combination racing and role-playing game Racing Lagoon is now fully playable in English.
Racing Lagoon, first released on the original PlayStation back in 1999, wasn’t a critical or commercial success for Square at the time. While the game received middling reviews from Japanese press and reportedly only moved around 141,000 units in its first six months, Racing Lagoon’s reputation as a stylish cult classic landed it on a 2009 list of Famitsu readers’ most wanted sequels.
Watching any Racing Lagoon footage at all makes it obvious why everyone was so enamored with this game almost a decade later. It just oozes cool, from the retro, almost vaporwave aesthetics to the smooth soundtrack of jazzy bangers.
Sadly, Racing Lagoon never left Japan, forcing English-speaking players to either learn the language (which, I mean, most of us probably should anyway) or stumble through its adventure with a third-party walkthrough. The possibility of experiencing Racing Lagoon in English became one of those pipe dreams that everyone hopes to see materialize but mostly assumes never will.
Enter a Canadian translator known as Hilltop. After wrapping up work on another PlayStation-era obscurity, Dr. Slump, Hilltop quickly set their sights on Racing Lagoon. They released their first Racing Lagoon patch, an English translation of the game’s prologue, in late June before building a team that steadily worked their way through subsequent chapters.
And now, in less than five months, Racing Lagoon is fully translated, a monumental achievement that would have sounded highly unlikely at the start of 2021.
The delightful sequel we never thought we’d see 20 years later, we finally have more content to explore and 171 more Pokémon to take cute little pictures of as they dance around and eat apples.
“Over 20 years later, it is finally time for the rest of the world to experience one of the most unique and memorable RPGs ever created,” Hilltop’s announcement post reads. “I want to extend my deepest thanks to the rest of the team and to everyone who kept the dream of this game’s localization alive.”
There’s no better time to form partnerships than at the start of a new year, and apparently, Pearl Abyss agrees with us, as it renewed its collaboration with Prime Gaming for Black Desert Mobile. If you’ve not used the service before, it offers you a range of goodies across various mobile, PC, and console games. …
Home Features Indie The Forgotten City (Image credit: Modern Storyteller) Staff Picks (Image credit: Future) In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2021, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new staff picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the …
Home News FPS Halo Infinite (Image credit: 343 Industries) One of the more pleasant surprises of Halo Infinite, now that it’s out in the wild, is that it’s leaned into the more comical aspects of the series. Ever since the original game the grunts have been a good laugh, their malevolence and well-placed stickies bound-up …
Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for December 14th, 2021. In today’s article, we’ve got two full-sized reviews for you to enjoy. I take a look at the surprisingly excellent The Kids We Were, while our pal Mikhail has a detailed look at the somewhat less charming Twelve Minutes. There are also …
FurryFury is a turn-based arena battler that shares some similarities with pool. If pool was played with ball-shaped, hyper-violent creatures on a table covered in spikes and goo. And it’s coming to Android later in the year. The game has been in Early Access on Steam for a couple of years, but developer Demibug, which …
Home Features (Image credit: Future) The best gaming PC isn’t necessarily one you built yourself. The sad truth is that, though we love DIY PC builds, they’re one of the many casualties of the chip supply crisis. System builders simply have a better chance of getting hold of CPUs and GPUs than we do of …
Square’s Obscure Street Racing RPG Is Finally Playable In English
The last few years have been an incredible time for fan translations, but here’s a doozy: Square’s combination racing and role-playing game Racing Lagoon is now fully playable in English.
Racing Lagoon, first released on the original PlayStation back in 1999, wasn’t a critical or commercial success for Square at the time. While the game received middling reviews from Japanese press and reportedly only moved around 141,000 units in its first six months, Racing Lagoon’s reputation as a stylish cult classic landed it on a 2009 list of Famitsu readers’ most wanted sequels.
Watching any Racing Lagoon footage at all makes it obvious why everyone was so enamored with this game almost a decade later. It just oozes cool, from the retro, almost vaporwave aesthetics to the smooth soundtrack of jazzy bangers.
Sadly, Racing Lagoon never left Japan, forcing English-speaking players to either learn the language (which, I mean, most of us probably should anyway) or stumble through its adventure with a third-party walkthrough. The possibility of experiencing Racing Lagoon in English became one of those pipe dreams that everyone hopes to see materialize but mostly assumes never will.
Enter a Canadian translator known as Hilltop. After wrapping up work on another PlayStation-era obscurity, Dr. Slump, Hilltop quickly set their sights on Racing Lagoon. They released their first Racing Lagoon patch, an English translation of the game’s prologue, in late June before building a team that steadily worked their way through subsequent chapters.
And now, in less than five months, Racing Lagoon is fully translated, a monumental achievement that would have sounded highly unlikely at the start of 2021.
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New Pokémon Snap – Nintendo Switch
The delightful sequel we never thought we’d see
20 years later, we finally have more content to explore and 171 more Pokémon to take cute little pictures of as they dance around and eat apples.
“Over 20 years later, it is finally time for the rest of the world to experience one of the most unique and memorable RPGs ever created,” Hilltop’s announcement post reads. “I want to extend my deepest thanks to the rest of the team and to everyone who kept the dream of this game’s localization alive.”
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