Mate, we the fans were wondering about you, too! I'm new here but have been scouting this site and similar peers for a while. It seems to me that this group rhymes with your everyday actions!
Regarding Minerva, I've found out that its producer
Rika Suzuki also produced many of those awesome investigative adventure games for the Nintendo DS, fortunately all of them localized for the West under the CiNG label. But sadly that company went bust before the 2010 release of their last DS game. So she (Yes, it's a female producer. Surprise!) founded
Bellwood Inc. to write online novels, but they're in Japanese only. It seems that that firm's main job is to
provide scenario planning for other companies.
Riverhill Soft Inc., the maker of both Minerva and the
Burai series also did a lot of awesome games for later consoles like the PSX, Saturn and Dreamcast in the 90's. But somehow they
stopped developing by the turn of the millenium.
Perhaps after your group finishes Minerva, Oni II and/or some other titles maybe you can look into doing the last two 'Burai' titles -
Burai: Hachigyoku no Yūshi Densetsu and
Burai II: Yami Kōtei no Gyakushū? We can safely ignore the first two Burai titles because they had constrained game screens, and horribly dated menu presentations due to their roots on the PC-88, PC-98, MSX & FM-Towns platforms. The 3rd iteration was released on the MSX, SNES, Turbo CD and Sega CD. Riverhill did the MSX & Turbo CD versions while Pandora Box later did the SNES & Sega CD ports. Naturally your group would gravitate towards the
SNES port but it quite sucks because it doesn't have the nice FMVs of the
Turbo CD and higher quality
Sega CD versions and has
other inferior aspects. The title screen is very drab-looking by comparison and parts of the gameplay view screens is constrained into smaller boxes, while the battle scenes have only a black background with no details.
The screens of the Turbo CD port looks stretched vertically while the Sega CD's look natural. The colours of the TCD port may look much brighter and pop out but the Sega CD port is more detailed with nicer colour graduation. Moreover The TCD port has dated menus with a tiny boxed-in game screen whereas the SCD port's gameplay visuals almost fills the whole viewscreen's perimeter. So the Sega CD has the edge in all areas and that's why I'm hoping for any romhacker to look into choosing this one over the SNES port. Will Dynamic-Designs have the skills to build new tools for or port the SNES-oriented tools over to the Sega CD platform and make a translation patch for the Sega CD port? Additionally you could even use these tools to do
many other Sega CD games. As for the
4th Burai title it is much better on Turbo CD than the 3rd title's one with the
gameplay visuals filling the whole view screen and a different and more colourful menu presentation.