Without so much as a press release, MAGES. Inc. dropped a Japan-only PS2 visual novel compilation onto Steam. There was no trailer campaign, no fanfare, no flood of coverage. A game that had sat effectively unplayable for twenty years simply appeared on a modern storefront, as though it had always been sitting there.
The release in question is My Merry May with be, a 2005 compilation whose title looks like somebody fumbled the keyboard. They didn’t. The package collects My Merry May from 2002 alongside 2003’s My Merry Maybe, and it has now officially arrived in the West for the very first time.
The trilogy that never was
Originally a Dreamcast title before it migrated to PS2, My Merry May was designed as the opening chapter of a trilogy. Those plans collapsed. Once it became obvious a third installment was off the table, My Merry Maybe served as the send-off for the series instead, and the compilation arrived three years after that, sewing both halves together with a few enhancements along the way.
Every one of the three releases stayed exclusive to Japan. Not a single one ever got an official English translation.
What makes the vanishing act sting is that the 2005 release was critically acclaimed and had a genuine fanbase behind it. Twenty-three years have passed since the original came out, and up until now, actually playing it required hunting down hardware and discs that most people simply don’t own.
There’s a catch, and it’s a big one
Yes, both games are now on Steam. And yes, both games remain Japanese-only.
For this genre in particular, that’s a brutal restriction. We’re talking about visual novels. The text isn’t one component among many, it is the experience. Read no Japanese, and what you’ve got is a gorgeously preserved story locked away from you.
Passing on a translation for a remaster built entirely around text is an odd decision. Somebody did the preservation work. Nobody did the localization.
Why so many PS2 games vanished
The PS2’s catalogue is gigantic, and therein lies the trouble. A huge number of releases simply got smothered by the volume of everything else launching around them. A portion of them are now flat-out unplayable, their physical discs fetching eye-watering sums on secondhand reseller sites while the odds of a remaster look slim to none.
This was the console that defined a generation’s worth of platformers, JRPGs and third-person shooters, and the mark it left on the industry, and on the developers who grew up with a controller in hand, goes deep. A good number of the best PS2 games still hold up against modern releases.
With this launch, My Merry May with be becomes part of a wider run of PS2 titles receiving remasters throughout 2026. Publishers have worked out that exhuming dead games from earlier generations costs very little, and that nostalgia handles the marketing on their behalf.
This case stands apart, though. There’s no brand recognition being cashed in here, no safe bet. It’s a Japanese-only visual novel compilation from 2005 that literally nobody was asking for, pulled quietly out of obscurity and posted to Steam without a single press push. Let’s hope the rest of the forgotten PS2 catalogue gets the same courtesy, preferably with subtitles attached.