EGGCONSOLE RELICS MSX2

A 1986 Bothtec oddity gets the official MSX2 reissue treatment

D4Enterprise is wheeling another obscure 80s Japanese title back onto modern hardware. Even by the EGGCONSOLE line's standards, this one's a strange pick. EGGCONSOLE RELICS MSX2 hits Steam in June 2026, porting Bothtec's 1986 cult action-adventure Relics in its MSX2 form, body-snatching "Spirit Ride" mechanic and all.

If you've never heard of it, that's kind of the point. Relics never had a Western release worth mentioning, and the MSX2 version specifically has lived on collector shelves and emulator ROM dumps for nearly four decades. The Steam page sits alongside D4's growing pile of PC-8801 and MSX2 ports.

You start as a ghost. That's the hook.

The premise still holds up. You're a disembodied spirit drifting through ruins that have erupted from the sea, and the game tells you essentially nothing. No quest log. No waypoint. No NPC drip-feeding lore. You possess enemies by killing them, inherit their stats, their attacks, sometimes their social rank within the ruins' weird ecosystem, and the puzzle becomes figuring out which body opens which door, literally and figuratively.

This was deeply weird in 1986. It's still weird.

You can argue it predates a chunk of design DNA that later showed up in Messiah, in Geist, and (stretching the comparison) in the soul-jumping bits of certain immersive sims. Bothtec didn't invent the idea. They just leaned into it harder than almost anyone else of that era.

What you're actually buying

The Steam listing is honest about its limits, which is more than you can say for most retro reissues. Main game and gallery screen, Japanese only. Menus and the "How to play" pages, translated to English. Everything else, including the in-game text and the cryptic discoveries you're supposed to be piecing together as the spirit explores, sits behind an unfamiliar language barrier for non-Japanese readers.

For Relics specifically, that's not a deal-breaker. The game communicates more through visual cues, animation, and the rhythmic ambient sound design (those crashing waves get name-checked in the description for a reason) than through text. But anyone expecting a full localization should adjust. This is preservation, not a remake.

Technical side: native fullscreen via Alt+Enter, Big Picture forces fullscreen, input handling built around Xbox/PlayStation/Switch controllers with keyboard fallback. D4 even documents the controller-to-key mapping right on the store page, which tells you exactly who they expect to buy this. People who already know what an MSX2 LS/RS button binding is.

Why EGGCONSOLE exists

D4Enterprise has been running Project EGG in Japan for ages, the subscription service that legally distributes old PC-88, PC-98, MSX, X1, and FM-7 software. The EGGCONSOLE Steam releases are basically carved-off singles from that catalog, packaged for international platforms. Recent drops: Hydlide 3, Thexder, and a separate PC-8801 version of Relics itself, which is worth flagging because the two versions are not identical. MSX2 hardware had different sound chip behavior, different color palette constraints, different scrolling capabilities. Buying the MSX2 edition is a specific aesthetic choice, not just a platform tag.

Community discussion around the line, especially in the Japanese retro-game video circuit, tends to focus on exactly that kind of granular comparison. Which port runs at which framerate. Which sound chip rendition feels closer to the arcade memory. Whether the rewind feature (mapped to the View button) is generous enough to make the harsher difficulty curves bearable. That's the audience.

The selling problem

Here's where it gets interesting from a market angle. A late-2026 Steam release of an MSX2 game that won't be fully translated, priced wherever D4 lands (the EGGCONSOLE line tends to run cheap, but still), competing against the entire firehose of indie releases hitting Steam that same week, has almost no chance with a conventional marketing push. Paid acquisition would burn cash. A general gaming-press pitch would land in a junk folder. Influencer outreach scattered across the usual mid-tier Steam reviewers would miss completely, because the people who care about Bothtec's 1986 catalog are not the same people grinding through new release roundups.

The buyers exist, though.

They're scanlation hobbyists who hang around MSX preservation forums. Retro-hardware YouTubers running CRT setups. Japanese-PC enthusiasts who already subscribe to Project EGG. Emulation channels that do hardware-vs-reissue comparison videos. And the small but loyal academic/historical games-writing circuit that treats releases like this as primary-source material. Finding those specific creators, getting Steam keys into their hands, and letting their genuine interest do the lift is the only honest path to visibility for something this niche. CreatorFetch is built around exactly that workflow, the connective layer between a studio sitting on a strange catalog and the hyper-specific creator communities who'd actually care that the MSX2 build's PSG-driven score sounds different from the PC-88 FM synthesis version.

Worth your time?

If you already know what Relics is, you've probably stopped reading and gone to wishlist it.

If you don't, the honest take is this: it's a historically interesting game with a mechanic that aged better than its presentation, locked behind a partial translation, sold by a publisher who specializes in keeping this kind of thing alive rather than modernizing it. Narrow appeal, and D4 isn't pretending otherwise. The June 2026 date gives them time to maybe expand language support, though nothing in the listing suggests that's coming.

For the people this is aimed at, it's already on the calendar.