Quote Originally Posted by Edmond Dantes View Post
I've heard that Working Designs sometimes tweaks the gameplay in their localizations (Thunder Force V and Silhouette Mirage being two known examples, though I can't remember the specifics right off hand).
Quote Originally Posted by Tempest View Post
Yeah Working Designs was famous for doing this with all the games they ported to the Sega CD, TG-16, and Saturn. Popful Mail and Exile III come to mind immediately, but they always seemed to think that the original Japanese release was too easy and that American audiences enjoyed frustrating challenges for some reason. In fact when they tweaked Exile III they screwed up and made it too difficult so that you needed to cheat or be a gaming god to beat it.
One of the most infamous localization tweaks by WD had to be the change to Lunar 2 on the SegaCD, where you had to spend magic experience to save your game. Made it VERY hard to get started, as you didn't get much magic experience, and thus couldn't save your progress as much as you'd like in the starting stages of an old RPG when you are weak and easy to kill. Of course, later on, when you can kill anything in sight and nothing is a threat to you, you have all the magic XP you could ever want and then some, so saving is no problem. A very unbalancing change, probably the one thing WD ever did to a game that pissed me off.

Speaking of WD, before they got the rights for Popful Mail, Sega themselves had plans to port it at one point, in a manner that would've made it perfect for this thread. They planned to graphically overhaul it into Sister Sonic, a game about Sonic's sister (if the title wasn't enough of a giveaway, lol). Wow that would've been... interesting.