Magic Knight Rayearth’s 1997 Prototype, A True Working (In Progress) Design

With the recent drop of several Saturn prototype images, one of them stood out to me with much excitement, a prototype of Magic Knight Rayearth, dating back to 9-18-1997:

Naturally, I dug into it immediately to see what difference (If any) there were.

Right out of the gate, was a huge one. A rough English cut of the opening cutscene of the game:

It’s definitely… Different..

As you can see, it seems to use a VHS transfer of the anime’s Japanese opening for the video portion, but a rough audio cut of the opening Unyielding Wish with a completely different singer. Sound effects are slightly different as well between the actual release a year later:

That’s what I’m talking about!

Moving to the menu, it’s pretty much the same, minus the title screen using a logo that more closely resembles the original Japanese logo. It seems to be missing the “Magic Knight” portion of the title, so whether it was going to be released as, “Rayearth” or “Magic Knight Rayearth” is relatively unknown..

Prototype Menu
Retail Menu
Original Japanese logo

The opening cutscenes (And all the following cutscenes), use the Japanese audio with English subtitles, retaining the original Japanese lip-flaps as well.

However, a small portion of English voice acting was added in, possibly as a, “Proof of Concept” to show it can be done:

This line is used in the retail release as well.

Getting into the actual game, it seems relatively the same as the Retail release, minus a few text changes…

Prototype – Nice one guys..
What we got in the retail version. Thankfully the prototype line was changed..

The first portion of the game is pretty much all translated to English. However, as you progress through the prototype, you notice things start to pop-up in Japanese from time to time:

Thanks for such helpful advice Clef..
Ye- Yeah…
I’ll take 10?

I can’t forget about the few glitches I found as well!:

The coolest part though, is your saves from a retail copy of the game and the prototype are fully compatible. You can load a save from your retail copy to see how the area changed since the prototype, and vice versa!

There’s still a ton of changes that haven’t been documented as of yet, so if you find something cool, or a major difference, definitely let us know in the comments!

About the author

TraynoCo

Patrick, AKA TraynoCo is a co-founder of Sega Saturn Shiro. Patrick has a passion for Saturn projects such as homebrew and fan translations. Putting a spotlight on them in both podcast and video forms, trying to bring more attention to the ever growing Saturn homebrew scene.

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