I've known about Pier Solar for a loooong, time, yes. It is, by far, the most ambitious hombrew project I've ever seen. It does something that no other game has done. If you have a Sega/Mega CD, put in the disc and you get PCM-generated music during the game (the game still boots and runs from the cart). No Sega CD? Cart-based music which is still very, very good. The game's main programmer once took a video I made and digitized it so it would play back on the Sega CD. That was crazy-awesome.
As for the lack of Japanese language in the JP-styled package, who cares? If it really mattered to people that much, then someone who is good at Japanese would have stepped up as a proofreader (a lack of one is why the language got canned). So I doubt there will be too many Japanese players.