Magic Knight Rayearth is a name that might not be familiar to a lot of modern anime fans, but for those who are into video game collecting, it is a name that inspires a certain amount of dread.

The original incarnation of MKR was as a manga written by CLAMP (of Cardcaptor Sakura and Chobits fame) in the mid-90’s, telling the story of three girls who were summoned to another world to save a princess. The manga would go on to spawn three anime series, multiple video game adaptations, and even get a spot in Super Robot Wars T. However, for those into video game collecting, it’s its Sega Saturn adventures that are its most important. Magic Knight Rayearth’s Saturn incarnation was the last game to ever be released for the system, and is one of the rarest video games in the secondary market, with used copies often going for hundreds of dollars.

How did this anime tie-in game end up becoming such a holy grail for collectors? It turns out that it has a lot to do with Toonami, anime dub changes, and a whole lot of legal fuckery. All primary and secondary sources will be listed at the end of this essay in case you want to do some reading of your own. The rabbit hole goes very deep on this one.

Let’s take a step back into the far, far off year of 1995. The fifth generation of games is in full swing, with the Sony PlayStation absolutely wrecking the competition, the Nintendo 64 is doing its best to truck along, and the Sega Saturn is, uh…

(Source: Wikipedia)

…It’s existing.

At around this time, the anime adaptation of the first half of Magic Knight Rayearth is wrapping up in Japan. Though it would be three months until the anime wrapped up, a video game adaptation of the story is out by August, featuring scenes from the anime, new content, and a broad strokes expansion of the story.

Meanwhile, in America, the first stages of the anime revolution are going on. DBZ and Sailor Moon’s successes proved that anime could sell to the larger market, and a ton of companies are looking at MKR as their potential next big hit. Meanwhile, localization company Working Designs (best known for their work on Lunar and the Arc the Lad series) is looking at picking up the Saturn game and bringing it stateside. The timing was perfect – with the MKR anime’s release being a near sure thing in the future, the adaptation could be released alongside the anime and the manga when they inevitably came stateside.

It would take thirty months for Working Designs to get Magic Knight Rayearth out the door after they got localization rights. Working Designs’ version wouldn’t come out until December of 1998. It was the last game to ever be released for the Saturn in all territories.

So, what happened?

According to the extensive translation notes in the back of MKR’s manual, which are corroborated by Working Designs head Victor Ireland’s posts on an ancient Sega Usenet group, a huge part of the delay was getting character names approved by the license holder. This was largely due to the clusterfuck that was the Magic Knight Rayearth anime’s legal situation during the 90’s. According to an interview that Jason DeMarco (former head of Toonami, now senior vice president and creative director at Adult Swim) did with Vulture in 2017, MKR was originally sought for Toonami’s anime block, as it was huge in Japan at the time, would probably be a great fit for Toonami’s demographic, and was just a plain cool show.

However, Toonami was so big during those years that if word got out that they were seeking a license, there was a high chance that someone would swoop it up while they were working out negotiations. This is exactly what happened to Magic Knight Rayearth. TMS International and Ocean Studios (who you may know better for an infamous Dragonball Z dub) swooped up the license and dubbed it with intent to have it shown on Fox Kids. Like many dubs at the time, it would have had altered character names, a redubbed opening, and just generally been a bit more kid friendly (In fact, this is exactly what happened with the Latin American dub. Las Guerreras Magicas was as much of a massive hit in Latin American countries as DBZ and Sailor Moon were, and still maintains a healthy fandom in those territories).

At some point after this, Summit Group got the rights and started shopping the dub around for a release. However, all negotiations fell through due to the show’s unique art style, as advertisers weren’t confident that they could sell it. By the time MKR’s license was freed up, it was far too late for Toonami to try airing it – viewer tastes had moved on. The show ended up being dubbed by Media Blasters in collaboration with Bang Zoom! Entertainment instead. It was released with a dubbed intro and unaltered character names and content to VHS only.

However, at the time that the Saturn game was being localized, the anime’s rights were still tied up in licensing hell. Working Designs originally intended to use an original set of localized names, as, according to Vic Ireland, the original names sounded “too Japanese” when spoken aloud. About six months into the localization process, Working Designs was told that they couldn’t use their original names anymore, and instead had to use the names from the TMS dub. Working Designs refused, kicking off eighteen months of legal tug and war with the license holders.

When Mixx (who you probably know better as those wacky fellows at Tokyopop) decided to license the manga, they contacted Working Designs with intent of syncing up their character names with Working Designs. WD, sick of fighting for their set of dub names, decided that they’d just rather go with the character names from the Japanese version of MKR, and Mixx agreed. With Working Designs and Mixx pressuring Kodansha and TMS from two fronts, both groups managed to get the rights to use the original names instead of TMS’s dub names.

Oh, but the rabbit hole of legal squabbling goes deeper, because Working Designs was flat out not allowed to use the opening song from the anime’s lyrics, despite the fact that the literal first thing you see when you boot up the game is the anime’s opening. The 90’s were a wild ass time for anime, y’all. Now you know why people get so assblasted about 4Kids. Working Designs ended up dubbing their own opening in-house with a completely new set of lyrics from the ones that Media Blasters used for their dub. I always liked their version better, but I heard it before I heard the Media Blasters one, so… ehhhhhhh…

On top of all of this legal squabbling, Working Designs was hard at work rebuilding large parts of the game code. Before they got their hands on MKR, they were told that a hard drive crash after the game’s completion had wiped out some data, but were “confident that the game data could be rebuilt.” For what it’s worth, it seems like they did a pretty dang good job of it. Not only did Working Designs get a working game out the door, but they managed to improve the game in other aspects. The save system was improved so that more than three files could be saved, and several areas that had bad slowdown in the original were improved.

On the flip side, Working Designs decided to cut most of the in-game voice acting because testers found the large amount of voice acted dialogue exhausting (which is why voice acting for most dialogue just stops after you get to Precia’s House). The freed up disk space was used to voice act the diary sequences in the game instead (which were unvoiced in the JP version), so it kind of comes out to be a wash on that aspect. That being said, the Working Designs version is ultimately improved over its original thanks to all of that hard work.

But wait, there’s more, because there’s another elephant in the room we have to talk about: good ol’ Bernie Stolar. During the 90’s, Stolar was the head of Sony Computer Entertainment of America for a time, before eventually being snatched up by Sega of America to be their COO. During his time at both Sony and Sega, Stolar was infamous for his anti-2D and anti-RPG stances, and was a notorious hardass about what was allowed to be localized because of this. There’s a lot of hugely influential video games for the Japanese industry that never made it over because of this policy, such as Moon, Ore no Shikabane o Koete Yuke, and (probably most importantly) Tokimeki Memorial. All because this guy tried to push 3D really hard during the early 3D era, a decision that seems particularly dumb as hell when you consider that the Saturn was a 2D powerhouse and a nightmare to actually try to make 3D games on.

There’s no documentation, as far as I know, that suggests that MKR was significantly delayed thanks to Stolar, but the environment the game was being released in has to be acknowledged. It was a bad time to try and localize an anime tie-in 2D Zelda-like game on the Sega Saturn, especially when the industry was already trying to push 2D as antiquated and 3D as the hip new thing. Working Designs did their best, but it’s clear that by the time the game came out, it wasn’t going to be a success. Not only was the game the last one to be released for the Saturn, but it had an extremely short print run, making copies of it very hard to come by these days. If you want to play it legally, you’d better be willing to drop several hundred dollars on it.

Working Designs kept trucking on for the better part of a decade after MKR, but they closed their doors in 2005 after releasing Growlanser Generations. Working Designs’ closing was not a huge shock – not only was MKR likely a costly venture after all of the legal struggles and the coding work that needed to be done, but Victor Ireland was not exactly known for his great business decisions, and a lot of their other localizations were similarly costly. After Working Designs closed, Ireland went on to head Gaijinworks, another localization company, but one that I don’t know much about. They’re apparently head localizers for the Summon Night games, so, uh, good on them, I guess?

By the end of it all, Magic Knight Rayearth went from an anime tie-in cash grab to one of the weirder footnotes on video game history all thanks to the crazily volatile nature of the anime industry in the 90’s. If you’ve got access to a copy of it, give it a spin, and experience some wacky ass video game history for yourself!

Sources:

Toonami Was an Anime Gateway for Millennials: https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/toonami-was-an-anime-gateway-for-millennials.html

Magic Knight Rayearth Manual on Games Database: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Sega_Saturn/manual/Formated/Magic_Knight_Rayearth_-_1998_-_Working_Designs.pdf

“Magic Knights Release Date?” https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/rayearth$20tms$20pilot/rec.games.video.sega/8u8sm6x6T0o/rkrSgAkQncMJ

“Rayearth (was Re: Mixx boycott?)” https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/rayearth$20dub/rec.games.video.sega/ZTB10F-MMmY/gXN5ytBoHSwJ

“Magical Knight Rayearth - US TV” https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.arts.anime/v4OH-8RjgYY/XpHD5N03yVUJ

“Bernie Stolar” page on Sega Retro https://segaretro.org/Bernie_Stolar

“Working Designs” page on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Designs