Aconcagua was one of the last big blockbusters to come out on the first PlayStation. Developed by Sony itself, the game was published in June 2000, a few months after the launch of the PlayStation 2 in Japan and about to launch its successor worldwide. It was never published outside of Japan.
Today an unofficial translation has been released that brings the game to English, which tells the story of the survivors of a plane that crashes on top of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in Argentina. Hilltop, which recently also translated Racing Lagoon, Square Enix’s eccentric car RPG; can be found on his Patreon.
The game stands out for its cinematographic ambitions: the story of Kato, your avatar, and his descent down the mountain accompanying the activist Pachamama, is told without skimping on cinematic scenes, with up to 80 minutes of videos scattered throughout the game, an amount nothing negligible for the time. Playably, his approach to the catastrophic (an entire subgenre, perhaps not the most prestigious but one that remains active to this day, with Disaster Report as a great veteran) ends up being closer to the traditional graphic adventure, with a little more presence of action scenes.
If something defines Aconcagua, it is precisely the ambitions of all kinds: technically it is more than remarkable, especially with a new console already on the market, and voices were even recorded in English and Spanish, and although in the end it did not reach going out of Japan it seems that there were plans to release it. Hence, in the video above these lines, the patch launch trailer, there is so much dubbing; that part of the work was already done.
Although games continued to come out for the first PlayStation until 2004, Aconcagua was one of the last big first party productions that Sony worked on. It’s not the company’s most well-known project, of course, but surely a translation of this kind can help this interesting piece of PSX history reach more people.