Assault Suit Leynos 2 is the next game in the Saturn Tribute line, publisher City Connection announced Thursday. It’s set for a release some time in 2024 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox and Steam.
The 2D mecha run-n-gun was originally developed by NCS and published by Masaya on the Saturn in February 1997 exclusively in Japan. It’s a sequel to Genesis game Assault Suit Leynos, aka Target Earth in North America, and Super Nintendo game Assault Suit Valken, aka Cybernator in North America and Europe.
While the original game is full of Japanese, City Connection also announced that it’s localizing Assault Suit Leynos 2 in English.
Rather than using overlays to display English over the emulated game using the Unity wrapper that accompanies all of City Connection’s Saturn Tribute releases, the screenshots posted to social media appear to show English text that’s been hacked into the original game.
This is a first for City Connection — in its previous Saturn Tribute efforts, it either released a game that already was in English, like Elevator Action Returns, or a North American release existed for them to release, like Galactic Attack, or they simply released a game with its Japanese intact when it wasn’t required to understand the game, like Cleopatra Fortune.
Tetsuro Sato, an intellectual property manager, sound designer and game director at City Connection, posted to X — formerly known as Twitter — a video showing off the English localization. With it, he wrote in English, “Want to see the secret of Leynos 2? All you foreign fans, you can count on it!”
The official website mentions that other languages are planned as well.
Saturn Tribute games are the Saturn originals running on what City Connection calls the Zebra Engine, which dataminers have found appears to be a modified version of the SSF emulator. City Connection appears to use the “S-Tribute” label for the Saturn games from Taito that it’s handling, while games like Cotton 2 and Suchie-Pie are from other publishers and sport the “Saturn Tribute” label. It used a “Saturn Tribute Boosted” label for Batsugun earlier this year, denoting extra features that aren’t in their other Saturn efforts.
That emulator gives players features like rewind, quick save and quick load.
So far, 14 games have been released under the three labels: Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang and Guardian Force, which came out in 2021; Layer Section & Galactic Attack, which came out April 2022; Cleopatra Fortune and Elevator Action Returns, which came out November 2022; the four games in the Suchie-Pai collection, which came out December 2022; Metal Black and Bust-a-Move 2: Arcade Edition & Bust-a-Move 3, which came out in January; and Batsugun, which came out in May.
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