MAGES. Inc. put a Japan-only PS2 visual novel compilation on Steam and told almost nobody. No trailer push, no fanfare, no wave of coverage. Just a game that had been effectively unplayable for two decades showing up on a modern storefront like it had been there the whole time.
The game is My Merry May with be, a 2005 compilation with a title that reads like a typo. It isn’t. The pack bundles 2002’s My Merry May and 2003’s My Merry Maybe, and it just became officially available in the West for the first time.
The trilogy that never was
My Merry May launched on Dreamcast before making its way to PS2, and it was built to kick off a trilogy. That plan fell apart. When a third entry clearly wasn’t happening, My Merry Maybe wrapped the series up instead, and three years later the compilation stitched the two halves together with a handful of enhancements.
All three releases were Japan exclusives. None of them ever received an official English translation.
The 2005 title earned critical acclaim and a real fanbase, which makes its disappearance sting more. It’s been 23 years since the original released, and until now, playing it meant tracking down hardware and discs most people don’t have.
There’s a catch, and it’s a big one
Both games are on Steam. Both games are still exclusively in Japanese.
That’s a rough limitation for this particular genre. These are visual novels. Text isn’t a supporting element, it’s the whole thing. If you can’t read Japanese, you’re staring at a beautifully preserved story you have no access to.
Skipping the translation on a remaster of two text-driven games is a strange call. The preservation work happened. The localization didn’t.
Why so many PS2 games vanished
The PS2 library is enormous, and that’s exactly the problem. Plenty of releases got buried under the sheer volume of what came out. Some have become completely unplayable, with physical discs commanding steep prices on secondhand reseller sites and remasters looking like a lost cause.
The console shaped a generation of platformers, JRPGs and third-person shooters, and its influence on the industry and on the developers who came up playing it runs deep. Many of the best PS2 games still hold up against modern releases.
My Merry May with be joins a run of PS2 games getting remasters in 2026. Publishers have figured out that digging up dead titles from past generations is cheap and that nostalgia does the marketing for them.
This one‘s different, though. It’s not a safe bet trading on brand recognition. It’s a Japanese-only visual novel compilation from 2005 that nobody was demanding, quietly rescued from obscurity and dropped onto Steam without so much as a press push. Here’s hoping the other forgotten PS2 games get the same treatment, ideally with subtitles.
