The ‘reverse’ localization of PC classic MechWarrior shows just how far ahead Japanese PC tech was in the early ’90s

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist ’80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

Developer: Cross Media Soft Released: 1992 Japanese PCs: X68000, PC-98 (Image credit: Cross Media Soft)

Games get tweaked to suit local tastes all the time. Japan’s Ryuichi Naruhodo will always be better known to English speakers as Phoenix Wright. It just made more sense to rename the Ryu Ga Gotoku series Yakuza in 2006. Street Fighter gave itself a Vega/Balrog/Bison name swapping headache back in 1991 that it still hasn’t recovered from. Final Fantasy 14’s entire world, from the names given to its monsters to the grand speeches made by the heroes who slay them, is filled with hilarious puns and clever turns of phrase that only work in their localisations, thanks to the skill of the translators who wrote them.

What’s often missed is that the reverse has been happening for just as long when Western games are released in Japan. Old PC localisations of games like Alone in the Dark and Baldur’s Gate 2 kept all of the original artwork, but understandably made the text around it readable for Japanese audiences. The PC-98/X68000/FM Towns ports of dungeon crawling expansion Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back ditched the English original’s disappointing recycled art from the base game and replaced it with completely new and different (and much better) pixel art. 

Rarer, but much more special, are cases where a game received a complete makeover, like the one seen here in the Sharp X68000 game Battletech—or what we’d call Activision’s DOS classic MechWarrior.

Released in 1992, three years after the freeform mech sim/adventure’s English debut on IBM-based PCs, this port took full advantage of its new and drastically more powerful home. The core remained the same—find a crew, take on new jobs, wonder if my fusion reactor giving out in the heat of battle is something I can shrug off as my mech’s shell gets pelted by the galaxy’s finest armaments. It just looks better than it ever did before (or ever would again).

Not that it looked bad in its original DOS form: it was bold and ambitious for the time, blending 2D strategy with real time 3D battles on ’80s hardware. The only problem was those old computers didn’t exactly excel at the former and definitely strained themselves trying to do the latter. The game’s low resolution struggles to give the lumbering combat machines the fine details they need to really shine, the limited 16-colour EGA palette further limits any possible highlights while also giving many of its human faces that unmistakably ’80s eyeball-searing salmon pink look, and the selectively polygonal landscapes are lifeless slabs of flat colour.

This X68000 remake retains the broad concepts behind these images—a bar, a spaceport, a bipedal mech in need of repair after a tough fight—and then reinvigorates them with all the polish, technical expertise, and style that Japan seemed to have an endless supply of at the time. The new cutaway-style illustrations showing the interior workings of each mech  are gorgeous high resolution wonders packed with detail.The new designs are credited to Atsushi Takeuchi, famous for their work on the Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell movies, amongst many others. The full, screen-sized background art gives me a real sense of the sort of planet I’m currently on and has a painterly quality to it. Characters have natural skin tones with great shading and subtle highlights, no garish pink in sight—the X68000 could display a full 16-bit, 65,536 colours.

The 3D segments are much improved too, still crude by today’s standards but an obvious leap over the originals. The greatly increased colour depth turns the old ruler-straight land/sky divide into a more natural gradient stretching out to the horizon, and there’s even a little parallax scrolling present in the 2D backdrops, just to help give the view a bit of additional depth. The varied skies above aren’t in any danger of being considered exciting, but knowing there will be some clouds to look at, and maybe even some stars as well, makes it that much easier to imagine I’ve travelled to a new location, that there’s more to this rock than a rectangular arena with a couple of things to shoot in it.

The fresh new look even extends to printed materials included in the box. The user manual feels more like a mechwarrior’s manual than a gamer’s, spending the majority of its pages on world building and technical information instead of key commands and basic troubleshooting. The latest battle mech catalogue included alongside it is packed with Takeuchi’s illustrations and fake ads for everything from new weapons to laser discs of movies like “Exterminator 5”. The makeover is so complete and consistent it would be easy to believe that Battletech had been made by and for Japanese gamers all along.

So it’s an impressive remake for the time, but why bother playing it today, especially when it’s trickier to get ahold of and run than the original but written in a different language, too? Well, the main thing is MechWarrior’s a good time on any format, and this X68000 remake still allows me to spend a lot of time fussing over heatsinks and the state of my mech’s gyro, and desperately trying to remember which keys I need to press to not embarrass myself in the heat of battle because I’ve left the handy fold-out reference card in the game’s box again. 

But Battletech is also a great example of one of the lost pleasures of retro gaming, this trio of discs a rare and precious chance to experience something old in a new way. A modern PC port of something will (hopefully) run at a higher resolution and a smoother framerate than its console equivalents, but the underlying hardware’s too similar these days for a game to truly transform to embody the spirit of whatever box it finds itself on. This old X68000 is something else; it’s not an official reboot that tries to erase the original or a forgettable little bit of extra polish, it’s a unique new look that still keeps the heart of the original firmly in its sights.

Like a great remix of a favourite song, Battletech is fun, familiar, and fresh all at once.

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