It wouldn't surprise me if the original menu was in English, because a lot of Japanese games on old consoles with minimal text used English to save space because most Japanese people know some English and the all-caps Roman alphabet is barely half the size of the katakana alphabet, even before getting into hiragana and kanji.
Do you still have the game save? Can you dump the rom with the save so i could get it and play it?
If this game was two or three times as long it could be on PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16!
is this a fan repro or the orignal menu is in english?
It wouldn't surprise me if the original menu was in English, because a lot of Japanese games on old consoles with minimal text used English to save space because most Japanese people know some English and the all-caps Roman alphabet is barely half the size of the katakana alphabet, even before getting into hiragana and kanji.
Damn they really shouldn't have had any sound effect for your craft firing, just grates on the ears