Publisher D4 Enterprise's EGGCONSOLE series has been giving the absolute most hardcore of JRPG lovers a window into the obscure gems of retro PC gaming in Japan through the magic of the Switch eShop for some time now. But two recent releases are suddenly set to disappear from the service, and while D4 itself hasn't offered any reason why, it's looking likely that Microsoft's own MS-DOS is to blame.
Yesterday, the Japanese EGGCONSOLE account on Twitter announced that two PC-98 titles, Fray and Brandish Renewal, would soon be removed from sale. As with most of the EGGCONSOLE line, these are untranslated Japanese PC RPGs, but they might hold some interest for Western fans – Brandish in particular is a notable early title from Nihon Falcom, the studio behind cult JRPG hits like Ys and the Trails series.
While D4 itself has not revealed why these two specific games are being delisted, there's a pretty good theory going around courtesy of a user going by All City Slop Shop on Bluesky: "they straight up used MSDOS in their PC98 emu."
My colleagues (Ed. note: not all of his colleagues. - Rollin) tell me that I need to explain what MS-DOS actually is here, and while I refuse to believe I'm that old, it's essentially Microsoft's first notable operating system. It was a central part of the early IBM PC standard that evolved into the PCs we know today, and it served as the underpinning for the early versions of Windows.
A version of MS-DOS also ran on the Japanese PC-9800 series – more popularly known as simply PC-98 – and that's how we get to Fray and Brandish Renewal. These games apparently make use of hard drive features you need an operating system for, so MS-DOS was bundled in on Switch to make them go.
If you check out some gameplay footage from either title you'll see that, sure enough, the MS-DOS name briefly appears on screen complete with a 1981/1992 copyright from Microsoft. It seems dubious to think that Microsoft would be licensing out a decades-old version of an unsupported operating system for an obscure set of Japanese RPG re-releases.
Both Fray and Brandish Renewal remain available on the North American eShop for now. If you're interested, you might want to grab them before anybody notices they're not supposed to be there.
Our list of the best JRPGs is a little more mainstream, but you'll still find some bangers that may have slipped under your radar.
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