Thanks to Edia for the review code
Title: Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $53.00
Release Date: 02/14/2025
Story
A year after we covered the first two installments in the Cosmic Fantasy series, the second collection finally gets an english translation of the remaining three! From a prequel to the series in Cosmic Fantasy 3, to a grand finale in the two part Cosmic Fantasy 4, these RPGs are even better with their storytelling than their predecessors, with Cosmic Fantasy 4 in particular having really nice nods to those first two games, and Cosmic Fantasy 3 being a game you could even start with as your first one.
Presentation
Similar to most Edia collections, D4 Enterprise made this one, with another fine emulator wrapper. The games look and sound fine with the emulation, and the english translation is done via an overlay ala the first collection. More on the quality of those translations in the individual game breakdowns.
Still, you got the usual bonuses, with a Sound Test, cutscene viewer, translated manual scans, all of that is here and helpful to the collection’s cause. Unfortunately, there aren’t any extra video bonuses like with Valis III or Tenshi no Uta, which is a shame as the Cosmic Fantasy OVA would have been a spectacular bonus to this collection.
As how for the game presentations hold up, they’re rather solid, with the music getting a huge quality boost from the first two games, with Cosmic Fantasy 4 in particular having some phenomenal music thanks to Motoi Sakuraba being involved with the project. Otherwise, Cosmic Fantasy 3 looks pretty similar to the first two with the overworld sprites being simple looking, though the battles at least added character portraits to showcase expressions in battle, and Cosmic Fantasy 4 gets a major production bump due to the addition of an adventure game prologue with way more animation and detailed sprites, and the RPG portion of both games benefit from even more visual flair and more frequent voiceovers. The sprites in both parts look far more like you’d expect a 16 bit RPG to look compared to the basic nature of the first three, making CF4 as the games with the best presentation of the bunch by far.
Gameplay
Just like the first collection, you start on a basic menu with some options to check out before jumping into one of the included games. Scanned translated manuals, movie/cutscene viewers, and the ability to save/load a state if you so desire. All the in-game saving mechanics work just fine, as they did in the first collection, so no need to worry about that.
Cosmic Fantasy 3 The Chronicle of Rei– The prequel to the entire Cosmic Fantasy Series! Kinda. See, it does have plot elements that directly follow up from CF1/2, but mostly takes place in the past before those titles. There’s time travel shenanigans involved, but for the most part you’ll take control of Rei, a boy with magic healing powers who sets out on a quest to help a nearby town, only for it to spiral into a grand adventure with the founding of the Cosmic Hunters being the main aspect which builds into the first two installments.
Compared to the prior two games, CF3 is a little sillier, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. The cutscenes have more humor to them, and the enemies are completely wacky, gradually getting to foes that become more of a threat the further you progress within the game. Character banter is a bit more common here thanks to voiced, non-cutscene moments that pop up now and again, and these add to the character interactions just enough to make the temporary cast a bit more memorable than the companions you’d get in the first two games. Still a pretty decent story that ties into the first two and plants some seeds for the fourth entry, but easily the weakest of the series in that regard.
So, how about the combat? Well, CF3 still sticks with the typical DQ-clone RPG battle system, with you facing a set of enemies in first person, and picking between physical or magic attacks to deal with them as necessary. This time around, you can choose between different kind of physical attacks, such as taking extra risks by going for a Critical attack, choosing between 3 equipped weapons on the fly, or hoping for a team up to double down on an opponent. There’s also an auto battle system once again, and the great part about CF3 fights is they’re way faster than in previous entries, so if you run into a weak set of enemies turning on auto battle will make the fights lightning quick and non-intrusive.
Still, the battles ultimately amount to the usual DQ-style fighting, and can get pretty dull after a while, even if the speed of combat and a run button help to make traversing dungeons far, far less of a pain than in the previous installments. Once again dying will send you back to your last in-game save point, and unlike CF1 where I felt like I hit a brick wall when it happened there, CF3’s speed made backtracking far less of a pain, although you can just use the save state feature to save anywhere if you prefer. Ultimately, another fine, simplistic RPG, even if scenario wise it feels like a step back from CF2.
Lastly, the script. This game never came out back in the day despite some minor attempts to bring it over shortly after CF2, but the TGCD’s death meant it was not to be. So thus, Edia had to make a new script from the ground up no matter what, and just like CF1/2’s scripts, the translation in CF3 is fine. The cutscenes/voiced lines are done pretty darn well, and the story text is done fine enough to get you understanding of what to do, where to go, and so on. NPC dialogue is mildly amusing due to the nature of the game, and the wacky enemies all have pretty silly names as well.
I’m also pleased to report that the battle dialogue doesn’t suffer from the abysmal mistakes made in CF1’s translation, where the battle dialogue was completely reversed and never got fixed. Here, attacking an enemy tells you that you attacked the enemy, and vice versa. Same goes for magic, too! The weird oddity with combat dialogue in CF3, and one I can’t quite understand and wonder if it may have been a quirk of the original game, is sometimes if an enemy or you target something that transformed or changed or is no longer around/able to do anything, the target is named as a completely different character/enemy, even if they aren’t in your party. At one point, an enemy tried to inflict a status condition on me when I already had one, and it instead told me a different enemy not even in my encounter pool was already affected. Completely bizarre.
Still, if you were able to enjoy the localizations from the past two games in CFC1, then CF3 will be just fine. It’s more akin to CF2, and nothing broke in the script during my time with the game, which I can’t so much say for how the localization of the other titles fared…
Cosmic Fantasy 4: Prelude to Legend– So CF4 decided to get really big. Some of the final non-pachislot games Telenet would ever make, both releasing in 1994 split into two parts. An OVA was put out between Part 1 and 2, and sadly it wasn’t included in this collection, but you can still understand the story fine without it. In this first part, Yu and Saya from CF1 go on their own quest to help a planet in need of help with their princess, and their ordeal on that planet soon grows to one that intersects with another conflict for one big climatic battle.
This one manages to up the ante even more than CF3 did, with the game not even opening up as a RPG! Instead, you play a mini digital comic, with Yu going around his ship and talking to various characters, learning more plot details, and eventually ending up heading to the planet and starting the RPG portion. The Digital Comic intro is OK, but doesn’t have anything remarkable going on in it, only briefly noting some stuff that comes in play later and was also touched on in the third game a bit, so you’re probably already anticipating that stuff anyhow. Still, a genre shift this early on shows just how bold Telenet were in trying to make CF bigger and bigger with each entry.
Once you get to the planet, you’re given money to buy your starting equipment, and then head out into the world to complete tasks and figure out how to help out the planet and stopping the monsters that have risen up in it! Going into the options, you can see the ability to increase the movement speed, and yeah, this applies to the overworld as well, making movement even faster than in CF3, which already had a run button! So traversing is no longer slow, and in fact you might have to tone it down a bit if you find yourselves constantly missing the exits and such.
Once you run into a random encounter, you’re in a first person DQ-like battle again, but with a different setup. No more physical attack variations, nor a traditional turn based combat system, but rather something trying to copy the ATB format from the SNES Final Fantasy titles. A meter fills up, allowing you to attack or use magic spells once it reaches full capacity, but if you hold off on combat just a bit longer, it can charge up yet again, allowing you to use a second tier of stronger magic spells. On one hand, this means you can deal big damage to opponents with enough patience, but you’ll be wide open to the enemies while you wait around, so there’s a risk system involved. You can turn on auto battle and customize it as you wish, but you still have to wait for the ATB bar, so battles are a tad slower than they were in 3, unfortunately.
While I still found the battles pretty darn enjoyable even with the speed decrease, I quickly realized something was very, very wrong with the game’s scripting when it came to enemy behavior in battle. See, sometimes an enemy may evolve or split into another enemy, or cast a special magic spell or use an ability, and the game would respond by vomiting untranslated Japanese at me. Yes, they didn’t even translate everything in the battle system.
This is beyond ridiculous and makes even less sense for reasons I’ll get into later, but despite being able to still understand what was going on during the times the game decided to just speak to me in Japanese, the fact it not only happened immediately after my first encounter when an enemy dropped an item, (and yes, all enemy item drops in this game are untranslated) but in future battles and boss fights when the enemies would pull of special techniques or do something out of the ordinary battle loop really indicated to me they forgot to subtitle those extra bits in this first part, which really hurt the battles as a whole if you can’t read a lick of Japanese. So that’s already a bad sign.
Still, I can say the story/NPC scripting here is still solid. The plot is way more interesting than CF3, but moreso a plot that you’ll enjoy if you happened to find CF1 as your most favorite, due to the characters involved in this entry being the same protagonists from that game. Annoyingly you may have to talk to a NPC more than once for them to spit out further info, but they still have lots of hints and things to say, and of course, a lot of voiced lines and cutscenes are sprinkled throughout the game, which seemed to work out OK.
So you have faster traversal, a slower, but still decent (if partially untranslated) battle system, and a game with a bit more openness than CF3 had starting out. Pretty decent RPG fare, though this one takes a bit to get going and the difficulty can get pretty nasty, especially with the boss battles. While it’s no CF1 in terms of frustration, this is definitely not a game you can just curbstomp through, and I honestly liked that aspect after finding most of CF2/3 pretty easy.
Unfortunately, this was the game I had the least desire to make progress in because the story didn’t pick up as quickly in terms of interest, and the untranslated battle dialogue made things a lot more annoying, plus my attempt at hoping for a fix never amounted to any positive results. CF4 Part 1 ultimately feels like a half step between 3 and the next part of 4, which refined some stuff more and feels like a true sequel with a better plot.
Cosmic Fantasy 4: Return of Van– Now this is the one the western fans will fall in love with. Sometime after CF2, Van is having nightmares about his time during CF2, and starts to miss his old friends from the past. Then when one of them rams into his crew’s ship and lets him know the planet of Idea is under hostage by a new evil, it’s up to Van and his crewmates to head to his old home planet and protect it, all while Yu is off figuring out his family issues. Once again you start with a digital comic, and then head out for the final RPG adventure.
So yeah, we have a direct sequel to CF2, and unlike CF4 Part 1, we even spend a good chunk of time in the world from the previous game, with old NPCs and characters reuniting with Van, and everyone being able to see just how the planet has evolved in the years since the fall of Galam. So not just a neat little set of nods to the 2nd entry, but a cool way to revisit parts of that game’s world with the new CF4 mechanics.
Of course, the battle system is exactly the same as in Part 1. First person, ATB meters, and now four party members you start out with. This helps make the battles go by a lot quicker since you have more people from the start, but the starting enemies are far tougher than in Part 1, and you’ll need to buy and equip better equipment ASAP to survive them. Yep, there’s grinding, but like Part 1 the fast traversal helps to make it less of a pain, and all across this trilogy of RPGs I didn’t find grinding levels or money to be a hassle at all. 3 was by far the easiest to do it in, and both parts of CF4 still give you means to do so safely without being a pain.
Unfortunately, while CF4 Part 2 is pretty similar in a ton of ways to Part 1, I was really hoping the untranslated Japanese wouldn’t be one of those traits. Yet, here we are with some parts that were untranslated in CF4 Part 1 being translated, and some stuff like the auto battle toggle that were fine in Part 1 being untranslated here. It makes no sense whatsoever and drove me absolutely insane, although I didn’t notice it as frequently in this part compared to the first, such a massive error is absolutely unacceptable.
Which is a huge shame, since of the three games in this set, CF4 Part 2 has the best story by far! It directly follows the game with the best plot up to this point, has some satisfying moments of character growth and seeing just how much Idea has handled the passage of time, and it ties together earlier plot elements from prior games, including CF3 in such a neat way! The NPC dialogue and other text/voices for the story are still handled fine enough, and I didn’t notice anything major that was missing a translation or spat out Japanese during these cutscenes!
I’d even go as far as to say despite a lot of mechanics staying exactly the same between the two parts of CF4, part 2 just feels a little more refined all around. Bosses that are slightly more enjoyable to fight, enemy pools that are tough but fair enough to not make me pull my hair out, some very minor UI/QOL tweaks here and there, so on and so for. It truly does feel like the ultimate Cosmic Fantasy game despite being the second part of a bigger entry, and that’s why it just infuriates me with how these translations ended up. Sure, the main stuff is fine and dandy, but if parts of the battles spit Japanese out at you, that ain’t a good sign of quality control. All in all, A very good RPG and nice sendoff to Telenet as a whole as one of their final major games, but a disappointing translation for this collection. Still, if CF2 was a big favorite of yours growing up, this is the one of the 3 to check out without hesitation.
Conclusion
I was excited to finally play these three obscure entries in the Cosmic Fantasy series, yet pretty darn disappointed by the execution of the localization. As much as I’m glad we aren’t mixing up battle sequences like in the first game, I do not think untranslated lines of Japanese getting spat out at the player is any better. In fact, I’d argue such a mistake is much, much worse, especially when two very similar looking games have completely different errors despite how you’d think they’d try to be unified!
Part of this I feel is due to the increasing complexity of these games, evidenced by how Cosmic Fantasy 3 ends up being the less problematic of the bunch and came out rather unharmed. It still is a very basic translation that can be a bit rocky at times, but it won’t completely break on you and is indeed the long awaited way to play CF3 in english, leading to a very solid experience if you decided to go deep into that one. As for the two CF4 games? What should be stellar translations of the climatic finale just end up feeling like a mixed bag of inconsistencies.
Inconsistent errors and untranslated dialogue of shared lines between both games. Very stilted or weird paragraphs that do technically make sense, but can be a bit strange to read. A bunch of weirdness mainly stemming from how the entire collection and their localizations are done via overlaying the English text, which works for basic games like the first three games, but as the series evolves, it becomes abundantly clear how CF4 was a massive undertaking for localization. I’m just glad none of the actual cutscenes and voiceovers appear to be broken in the same fashion, with those subtitles showing up just fine, and being well done enough to make the plot still hit in all the right ways, but it really sucks the mood out of the combat when you’re fighting a boss monster and it uses a special technique that they didn’t subtitle.
While I’m happy CF4 still gets a translation of some kind and offers a decent conclusion to the overall story, the sloppiness of the localizations for that two parter does leave this collection as a lot to be desired, which is a shame considering how as RPGs, the three Cosmic Fantasy games in this collection are miles above the quality of the first two, making this the better RPG experience overall on a playability front, with the increased movement speed and general QOL made over the years. It’s just a huge shame this collection as a whole couldn’t have had a better localization, and it seems unlikely to be fixed anytime soon.
I give Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2 a 5 out of 10.