Moon: Remix RPG Adventure · PlayStation · 1997 · Japan → Import (Japan-only)
A Japan-only 1997 "anti-RPG" from ex-Square staff at Love-de-Lic, Moon cast the player as the cleanup crew for a heroic adventurer's rampage — a cult import so obscure it went unlocalised for over two decades before inspiring Undertale.
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure was developed by Love-de-Lic and published by ASCII Entertainment for the PlayStation in Japan on 16 October 1997. Love-de-Lic was a small independent studio founded by Kenichi Nishi, a Squaresoft alumnus who had brought along many of his most talented former colleagues; the studio lasted only about five years and released just three Japan-exclusive games, all of which sold poorly at the time. Moon was its debut, and it is one of the earliest and sharpest deconstructions of the JRPG. The game's premise inverts the genre it satirises. It is set inside a fictional role-playing game in which "the hero" has run rampant — slaughtering hundreds of creatures and looting people's homes in the name of adventure. The player does not control that hero; instead they play a supporting character trying to undo the damage the hero has done, catching the souls of the "monsters" the hero killed, helping the world's ordinary inhabitants, and experiencing the fantasy from the perspective of the people who live in it rather than the murder-hobo passing through. It is postmodern, satirical, and pointedly unheroic, questioning the casual violence and acquisitiveness that RPG protagonists take for granted. That conceptual daring, combined with its commercial failure and Japan-only status, made Moon a deep-cut import legend. For most of its life it was untranslated and nearly unknown outside Japan, a game whispered about among enthusiasts as one of the most interesting and least accessible artefacts of the PlayStation era — the kind of title whose reputation vastly exceeded the number of Western players who had actually finished it. Its influence outlived its obscurity. Toby Fox has cited Moon as an inspiration for the design of Undertale (2015), a game whose entire ethos of sparing rather than killing monsters echoes Moon's central idea. After Fox spoke about it, original designer Yoshiro Kimura was inspired to finally localise the game: Onion Games released a Nintendo Switch port in 2019, localised for Western territories in 2020 and later brought to Windows, PlayStation 4, and macOS. Moon's arc — a Japan-only cult failure, kept alive by reputation, vindicated by its influence, and localised at last more than twenty years on — is one of the most satisfying in import history.
Moon takes the unexamined logic of the role-playing game — kill the monsters, take their stuff, save the world — and asks what it looks like from the other side. By casting the player as the one who follows behind the "hero," rescuing the souls of the creatures he killed and helping the townsfolk he ignored, it reframes the genre's casual violence as something closer to a tragedy the player is complicit in cleaning up. In 1997 this was a startlingly early critique of conventions the JRPG barely acknowledged as conventions, delivered by a studio of Square veterans turning their expertise against the very form that trained them.
For over two decades Moon was almost a rumour in the West — a Japan-only commercial flop with an outsized underground reputation. What ultimately rescued it was its own idea propagating forward: Undertale's spare-don't-kill philosophy drew on Moon, and Toby Fox's public admiration for it helped bring the older game back into view. That, in turn, moved designer Yoshiro Kimura to localise it at last, more than twenty years after release. Few imports demonstrate so clearly how influence can outrun availability — a game most Western players could not play still shaped one they could, and was eventually set free because of it.