Uhhhh… So as if the whole appearance and release of Castlevania Resurrection wasn’t enough.., this recent Japanese twitter post (below) just came to our attention care of Mr^Burns… It seems there is now evidence of an existing game disc for Monika no Shiro (モニカの城), an UNRELEASED “Pioneer LDC” game for Sega Saturn…
The game was originally developed as Faradoon: The Legend of Dragon Castle, and renamed later in 1997. This game had been placed on the game magazine’s release calendar for a long time, but disappeared in mid-spring of 1999.
The above tweet translates as:
“Well, I’ve been unearthing discs that I had put away a while ago.
-@zan2zanjp
I don’t have an actual machine to run it easily, so I’ll just use SSF.”
Here is an image showing the contents of the disc:
Here is yet another tweet from the same user that translates as follows:
“Is there an OP-like demo for each character?”
-@zan2zanjp
Here is footage from a Promotional Japanese VHS tape, showing the game in action…
And here are the original Japanese print advertisements:
SHIRO! has reached out to @zan2zanjp to see if they have any plans to share the image with the community…
Sadly the game is in a Japanese collector. Why sadly ? Well I contacted him ( my wife is Japanese) and wrote a very kind message to him about this insanely rare game. I asked if it was possible to dump the game….
Does he answered me ? Nope, he just blocked me.
Very kind guy 😒.
I know many guys collecting rare stuff ( SGX, Neogeo Kiosk, Mega jet prototype) and they are friendly and answer to me ( even if they don’t want to sell anything). But boy, oh boy the culture barrier with Japanese collectors is so high….
We must preserve rare games and I really don’t understand this behavior ( I don’t ask him to sell his original copy!) .