Near adored the Final Fantasy series at the time, and the realization that there was a game out there for them to play, even if it was in a language they didn't understand, was alluring. Near's obsessive attitude sprouted a long time ago, while Near was paging through an old video game magazine-EGM or GamePro, they’re not sure-and saw an advertisement for a company specializing in importing games that mentioned Final Fantasy V. It is not a surprise, perhaps, to learn Near's personal website includes an autobiographical section that proudly notes they have an "overwhelming drive to achieve perfection" and that "you'll pretty much always find me working on something, as I don't enjoy leisure time."īut why Bahamut Lagoon? This one game? Because Bahamut Lagoon is Near's origin story, and goes back to an era when they went online as byuu, taken from the main character in Bahamut Lagoon because it meant "mistake" and reflected their aggressive perfectionism. Unlike Near's trailblazing work on SNES emulation, which allowed people to experience older games the way they were meant to be played with their computers, this was a personal mission, an accomplishment that had far more to do with pride and history, with the cursed knowledge that, for 23 years, they've tried and failed to localize this game. It's not as though it was impossible for the world to play Bahamut Lagoon. The thing is, as of 2020, perfectly acceptable and celebrated localizations of Bahamut Lagoon had already been released. (Today, Squaresoft is Square Enix, following a merger with Enix in 2003.) It was a period when Squaresoft was red hot in the world of JRPGs, but was not yet such a household name than anything it made was, without question, released to the rest of the world. This unfinished project was Squaresoft's Bahamut Lagoon, a game about raising and fighting wartime dragons released on the SNES in Japan on February 9, 1996-a little under a year after the genre-defining Chrono Trigger and a month before Super Mario RPG.
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