Exactly 20 years after it was released exclusively in Japan, the Cowboy Bebop PS2 game is now playable in English
In 2005 I lived and breathed fansites, many of which I can still name off the top of my head: Eyes on Final Fantasy, Zelda Universe, Animal Crossing Ahead, DK's Jungle Vine—outside of gaming magazines, these sorts of websites dominated my bookmarks folder so that I could hunt down any scrap of news from the games I was obsessed with.
Another that I somehow still have bookmarked, a dozen PCs later, is The Jazz Messengers, which is remarkably still online despite having a single page of news updates over the last 22 years. The webmaster popped back up to post some photos from the doomed live action Cowboy Bebop series in 2021, but didn't bother to post anything else about the series. I hope, wherever they are, that they see fit to share their reaction to this bit of news: the Cowboy Bebop PlayStation 2 game that they first wrote about on June 13, 2004 is finally playable in English.
Cowboy Bebop: Serenade of Reminiscence was released exactly 20 years ago on August 25, 2005, but sadly only in Japan. While there were seemingly some early plans to localize it for the West, where Cowboy Bebop had by that point become a hit on Cartoon Network's late night Toonami block, the merger of developer Bandai with Namco that same year may have doomed it to falling between the gaps of corporate restructuring.
Or maybe the issue, as guessed by the Jazz Messengers' webmaster in that 2004 post, was that "games based on anime rarely ever pan out to something worth playing."
They may have been right, but I'm delighted that English-speaking Bebop fans now have a way to experience it for themselves. Fan translator Sonicman69 released a fully translated patch for the game's 20th anniversary, including English UI, subtitles for all the cutscenes and re-edited textures where needed. Sonicman69 kept their work on the game under the radar for the last year to drop it as an anniversary surprise, though this isn't their first release: they also helped translate the 2004 PlayStation 2 Detective Conan game for its anniversary last year.
The Cowboy Bebop game is playable on original hardware, though these days I'd suggest the easier route: the excellent PlayStation 2 emulator PCSX2, which happens to work very well on the Steam Deck. The art looks like it scales up quite well to high resolutions, too.
Kotaku's Richard Eisenbeis once called Serenade of Reminiscence "a bad 3D brawler, but a decent episode" of Cowboy Bebop, and that honestly sounds like a treat to me. It's a stylish-looking game from a series that, back in 2005, I desperately wanted more of but was beginning to think would probably never see a sequel or any other form of continuation.
These days, I'm not sad about that—I think we got just the right amount of Bebop way back when. I didn't bother to watch Netflix's attempt to turn a perfect work of animation into live action.
But there's a particular novelty to tie-in games from this era given their often scrappy budgets or oddball ways of adapting their source material into forms less rigidly codified than today's anime arena fighters. Good or not, it's going to be a fun one to revisit.
If you can get your hands on an import copy, you'll find some very easy patching instructions on the Github.