In 2005, publisher Bandai had plans to bring its Cowboy Bebop game for PS2 out worldwide, but those plans were killed before the English translation ever saw the light of day. Now, 20 years after its original Japanese launch, Cowboy Bebop: Tsuioku no Serenade has finally gotten an English translation courtesy of a fan patch.
The translation was developed by a modder going by SONICMAN69, which is the most impeccable and appropriate moniker for a PS2 fan translator I've ever seen. Translating the game's title as Cowboy Bebop: Serenade of Reminiscence, the patch fully converts "all text, graphics, credits, and much more" into English, and is available via GitHub.
I've only played a few minutes of the fan translation so far, but it's an impressive effort – aside from seeing an adorable cat photo and the name SONICMAN69 in the opening, you could easily mistake this for an official localization. Most importantly, it gives English subtitles to all the cutscenes, letting you enjoy an original story that effectively serves as a bonus episode of the anime.
I'm less sure about the quality of the game itself. Again, I haven't played very far, but this is a pretty stiff-feeling beat-'em-up, and the instant I started controlling a shooting sequence in the tutorial I found myself breathing a barely audible "oh no." There are, at least, some neat mechanics here, with a combo system that rewards you for rhythmically tapping attacks rather than button mashing, and a neat defense mechanic that lets you automatically dodge incoming attacks for a brief time.
Still, the idea of a new Cowboy Bebop story is probably going to be enough for me to push through some rocky combat, and the game at least looks pretty nice for its era. It also features much of the anime's soundtrack, so you know the music's bangin', and has a handful of original tracks from series composer Yoko Kanno.
While this might seem like the kind of thing that was always destined to stay in Japan back in the mid-'00s, publisher Bandai did publicly announce plans to bring it stateside. SONICMAN69 also recently posted an old E3 brochure from Bandai, which pegged the game for an October 2005 release in the US, just a couple of months after its Japanese release. The game disc even contains a tiny bit of dub vocals from Cowboy Bebop's English cast, but while those lines are played in the translation trailer above, there aren't nearly enough for even a partial English dub.
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