Innovative Saturn audio-only adventure Real Sound: Kaze no Regret has come to modern platforms — audiobook ones, that is.
Real Sound released on Audiobook.jp and Amazon Audible in Japan Wednesday for 2,200 yen, which is about US$14. It clocks in at three hours and 31 minutes and comes with the original script, which features a different ending, and an audio message recorded in 1997 from creator Kenji Eno, who died in 2013.
Releasing this Saturn game as an audiobook makes some sense because Real Sound uniquely employed no graphics. It was essentially a radio drama spread across four game discs that displayed a black screen for its duration. Eno made it so that blind players could have the same experience as seeing ones.
It tells the story of a schoolboy who plans to elope with his girlfriend before she transfers to a new school, but when he arrives at the place they were going to meet, she never joins him. Years later they reconnect at university and date, but she disappears again. “Just like that summer…” the official description says.
At critical forks in the plot line, a set of chimes will ring, alerting the player that it’s time to make a selection with the controller to change the course the plot will take. It’s unknown how the audiobook form handles these choices.
The audiobook form was released by From Yellow to Orange, which the game’s developer Warp changed its name to in the time since Real Sound released for Japanese Saturns in July 1997.
Being entirely in Japanese, Real Sound has been inaccessible to foreign audiences. Still, a lot of talent was involved in the project.
The script was written by Yuji Sakamoto, who last year won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay for 2023 film Monster, a mystery thriller that can be watched with English subtitles or an English dub on Apple TV.
Real Sound’s music was composed by Keiichi Suzuki, who wrote the music for Nintendo RPGs Mother and Mother 2, known in the West as Earthbound Beginnings and Earthbound. He continues to write music for TV and film today in addition to being an actor.
The voice cast was led by Takashi Kashiwabara — well known to the Japanese public at the time for his roles in films and television dramas — and Miho Kanno, who in addition to being a movie and TV star was also a J-pop idol singer.
Real Sound was ported to the Dreamcast in Japan in March 1999 but hasn’t appeared since until now.
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