My dad went on a business trip to Japan once and I talked to him on the phone about buying my brothers and I a video game from Japan. I tried explaining to him how he should get Bust-a-Groove, but that in the US it was called Bust-A-Move and he shouldn’t confuse it for another game called Bust-A-Move which was called Bubble Bobble in Japan, in case he sees those there. He brought back Alundra. My Playstation couldn’t play it but it did have a nice textured map inside and it was neat seeing how the JP PSX boxes were a little different, more thin and rounder. This did put me on the path of eventually getting an Action Replay so I could finally play the JP disc.
I did play the English version of Alundra (and I feel like this was before he got us the JP version) and I remember really liking it and it having a great soundtrack. There was one song that had a part that always scared me, this one right here because of the scream, but I really liked the game’s entire atmosphere. There was some song from the game I got off WinMX that I remember listening to a lot which I can’t remember what it was now, but the US version made an English version of the games vocal Jpop credits theme, so look forward to that.
And then I used my Action Replay or Game Shark to get Moon Jump and jumped super high into some sort of fortress on the east side of the map that I wasn’t supposed to be able to get into yet, and when I returned to the village it was suddenly playing cutscenes in the middle of a plot featuring some new characters I had never seen before. I never legitimately got that far into the game but I’ve always wanted to go back in play it.
I never got around to playing it but I remember being pretty disappointed when Alundra 2 was announced and it looked the way it did but in hindsight it’s probably fine.
