[Kid Fenris]

Lost Mission and The Journey Home: Quest for the Throne came up in previous threads about unreleased Super NES games, but I decided to make a thread just for them.

They're not connected beyond the fact that they're both RPGs that would've shown up on the Super NES in late 1993 and early 1994. I, as an RPG-starved kid, would've played the hell out of both of them, so I'm curious as to why they were canceled.

The Journey Home



The Journey Home: Quest for the Throne is Renovation's U.S. version of Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Koudou ("Neugier: Heartbeat of the Wind and Sea"), a Super Famicom action-RPG programmed by Wolfteam and released by Telenet (which effectively ran Renovation as a North American branch). It's a short game worked on by some anime and manga veterans as well as the three Wolfteam employees who'd go on to found tri-Ace.

Renovation scheduled The Journey Home for a winter 1993 release, but Telenet, beset by financial problems, sold Renovation to Sega. Sega swiftly canceled The Journey Home and all other Nintendo-based games, including a port of Arcus Odyssey.

There's a fan translation of Neugier, but the Renovation version of The Journey Home has never surfaced. At the very least, I'm amused that Renovation translated "Neugier" as "Nogal."

Further Reading:

Game Informer's Review of The Journey Home.

The SNES Central Entry on the game, including scans.

The Cover of the Japanese release, drawn by manga artist Kia Asamiya, if that means anything.


Lost Mission



Lost Mission is Vic Tokai's North American name for Shinseiki Odysselya ("Sacred Story Odysselya"), a 1993 RPG for the Super Famicom. It was slated for a 1994 release over here, but Vic Tokai canceled it for unknown reasons.

It's a fairly straightforward 16-bit RPG: you walk around, you get into random battles, you pick moves from a menu and never see your characters when attacking, and so on. The game begins with a dragon-man named Kyle finding an amnesia-stricken and apparently human woman out in the wilderness. After the player chooses her name (the Nintendo Power reviewer went with "Jeff"), the two of them set out from the dragon village. That's as far as I got in the Japanese version.

Prototypes for Lost Mission haven't shown up, and an attempted fan translation of Shinseiki Odysselya seems to have stalled. Contrary to what Wikipedia says, it's not hard to find ROMs of the Japanese release. And contrary to what some other sites say, Lost Mission was developed in Japan, not Britain.

Further Reading:

The game's title screen, taken from a 1993 CES feature in GameFan.

The Nintendo Power review of Lost Mission.

EGM's Lost Mission preview.

[KingMike]

I tried a few times to dump Odysselya's script.
I remember having some difficulty with the LZ compression, but I think I eventually made a buggy de-compressor.
I think Bongo said he had compression tools written.

I'll be saving that title screen in case progress ever happens.

[Ichiban Crush]

Lost Mission is one of those games I wanted to play ever since I was mailed a promo flyer by Vic Tokai when I was 12-13. Shame it got canned.

But then again, I'm a junkie for JRPGs so... take that for what it's worth.

[DarkTetsuya]

I vaguely remember another EGM article on that one after the title was changed... iirc I thought it looked familliar.

Seems like a neat action-rpg, though.