I'm really glad Moon finally exists in English and intend to pick it up, but I hope the real takeaway folks get from it is that Japanese game design has had that level of awareness about games for a long time. They're not a new development just because games like Nier exhibit it.

The thing is that a lot of the best examples of that in old Japanese games come from genres that were difficult sells to localize their heyday, particularly adventure games. People remember the Japanese PS1 output as being full of RPGs when it was and remains incredibly diverse.

And these games still have a lot of stuff to say, some of which is even more pertinent now more than ever. (It's why I scream about WRPGs not paying attention to how dating sims solved problems with relationship mechanics!) But as Moon shows, the issue is often a linguistic one.

For most, the historical canon for games on a platform is determined by what's accessible. You can have important things to say like Moon, but without a voice people can hear, you won't get a seat at the table, even if other games inspired by it do get loc'd and get that seat.

It still bothers me 2019 passed and nobody outside Japan did a 25th anniversary retrospective on Tokimeki Memorial aside from me. It shaped Japanese games massively! Games like Persona crib from it so hard! We should've celebrated it, but we couldn't because it's not accessible.

And not to toot my own horn too much since this really is a lot bigger than any one game, but if you want a concrete idea of what I'm talking about, here's that Tokimeki Memorial retrospective in question that lays out its legacy in a contemporary context: https://twitter.com/iiotenki/status/1210940009106132992