Gley Lancer for Genesis/Mega Drive is a lot more than just an amusing mistranslation
After going through the Valis series and finding them fascinating but not especially great, I kind of lumped Gley Lancer in there with them since they’re all part of a care package Retro-Bit sent me. I figured it would be a niche title that was forgotten because it wasn’t especially noteworthy. That is not the case. Gley Lancer is beyond rad.
What’s Gley? I’m assuming it’s an off-white color, similar to cleam or beice. If you guessed mistranslation, then that seems to be the case here. The Japanese language doesn’t have any distinction between “r” and “l” consonant sounds, so someone was so absolutely certain that they had translated it correctly that they put it on the title screen. Let’s cut them some slack. The internet wasn’t what it is now. It definitely gives it that ‘90s charm.
Gley Lancer was created by Masaya, and the development team has a lot of great crossover. Producer Toshirou Tsuchida is credited with creating the Front Mission series and served as director on most of the titles. Looking into other members of staff, you see them wind up working on Arc the Lad, Cybernator, and, uh, Cho Aniki.
Gley Lancer didn’t get a localized release until just recently on the Switch. However, that version, handled by Ratalaika, took the weird approach of translating the cutscenes with subtitles rather than having the text actually within the game. Retro-Bit sent me the recent Sega Genesis re-production, where they went to the effort of actually translating the text within the game itself.
Retro-bit’s reproduction is in exactly the same style as their Valis series rerelease, and I go into more detail about it in my write-up of Valis. To sum it up, however, it’s very nice, from the packaging all the way down to the printing
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