All Things Shining: Shining and the darkness gaiden

[Siel]

Chapter 17: http://pastebin.com/Qpdw9PDM" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I wasn't sure what to do with the chapter title, so I left it simple for now. Is it supposed to be something more abstract? Maybe related to the cycle of Samsara?

Chapter 18: http://pastebin.com/k8MSdmMq" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

re: [spirit of fire] & [Force], I wasn't able to read the furigana above them describing them. Is there some named being of fire in FEDA or something? All I can make out for that one is that it probably starts with a K sound and has an N sound in the middle/near the end.

Since they're getting scattered across the pages, I'll gather the rest of the links together here for the moment: re-edited my first post with a list of all links so far.

[TheUnknownMarine]

Well she's casting a fire spell there, so I'm guessing it's just the SF equivalent of FFT's spell chants.

I'm guessing the Force is the same... as...

Wait.

Didn't one of the various Shining games have the Shining Force be the name for an actual force, and not just a military unit? I could swear I remember something like that, in one of the translations maybe?

Edit: Maybe it was in the SF Manga?

[NekomeKozo]

EDIT: Based on the way the story is going and the repeated appearance of character designs identical to those found in FEDA, I did a little digging. A cursory investigation reveals that FEDA was supposed to be the SNES Shining Force, which figures, but going further, it seems that this manga was supposed to set things up for it. IE, Killy is supposed to be Ain, the human with the gun is supposed to be Raven/Stinger, Chris is probably Sonia, etc. etc. Killy being destined to lead the "Warriors of Light" seem to confirm this...

Honestly it really seems that the SF1 team had a pretty clear idea of where to take the Shining series after 1... and that it differed dramatically from what we got when SEGA canned them.

That.... that really makes me mad. Don't get me wrong, I liked SF2, but I loved SF1 for its unique mix of technology and magic, humans and demihumans, post-apocalyptic and fantasy... SF2 just doesn't have that same feel.

To find out that they were going to continue and then were stopped by SEGA...

That's just... goddamn.

Pardon me, first time poster, but would you mind elaborating on this, or sharing your sources?

I am curious to know what became of the early Shining team, between Climax and SSP/Camelot and the many, many smaller contract devs that spun out from Climax over the past two and a half decades.

(Who knows, maybe Yanoman would be willing to put up the rights to FEDA for sale. They don't seem to be doing much more than puzzles and toys these days, anyway.)

[Siel]

Her incantation seems to invoke some being of fire, so I was hoping its name showed up in FEDA too as an incantation or somesuch so that the text blank could be filled in.

Spoiler

Looking at "Force" again above, it almost looks something like ファン〇ー or フォッ〇ー. Or that supposed last bar might just be artifacts and it's simply 4 characters long, making フォース, or "force", itself a possibility. But at the same time, that fourth character looks like it might have a dakuten　( ゛ ), which would dismiss that possibility, and its shape doesn't really follow that of ス. In other words, I'm still clueless.

Chapter 19: http://pastebin.com/sjc0DgFT" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[TheUnknownMarine]

EDIT: Based on the way the story is going and the repeated appearance of character designs identical to those found in FEDA, I did a little digging. A cursory investigation reveals that FEDA was supposed to be the SNES Shining Force, which figures, but going further, it seems that this manga was supposed to set things up for it. IE, Killy is supposed to be Ain, the human with the gun is supposed to be Raven/Stinger, Chris is probably Sonia, etc. etc. Killy being destined to lead the "Warriors of Light" seem to confirm this...

Honestly it really seems that the SF1 team had a pretty clear idea of where to take the Shining series after 1... and that it differed dramatically from what we got when SEGA canned them.

That.... that really makes me mad. Don't get me wrong, I liked SF2, but I loved SF1 for its unique mix of technology and magic, humans and demihumans, post-apocalyptic and fantasy... SF2 just doesn't have that same feel.

To find out that they were going to continue and then were stopped by SEGA...

That's just... goddamn.

Pardon me, first time poster, but would you mind elaborating on this, or sharing your sources?

I am curious to know what became of the early Shining team, between Climax and SSP/Camelot and the many, many smaller contract devs that spun out from Climax over the past two and a half decades.

(Who knows, maybe Yanoman would be willing to put up the rights to FEDA for sale. They don't seem to be doing much more than puzzles and toys these days, anyway.)

I'm half asleep right now, but will do so later.

On another note, "1000 years after Dark Dragon battled the Shining Force." We finally have a concrete place to put SitD in the timeline.

[NekomeKozo]

Very much appreciate it.

I'm especially curious about Kenji Orimo, he's maintained a pretty consistent career* between SF, Landstalker, FEDA and the Alundras. MobyGames is by no means comprehensive or entirely correct, there's likely more out there that he hasn't been credited for.

The last credited company he worked at, Matrix Software, started as a Climax spinoff and now functions as a Squenix contractor. Would be nice to get ahold of him again, somehow.

Yasuhiro Ōhori (Landstalker, "Subscript" for FEDA, Alundra 1+2) and Yoshitaka Tamaki (all of the above plus SitD, minus Alundra 2) also seem to be closely related. There's definitely a core group sticking together through these titles, with a very distinctive style to them.


EDIT: * — one problem with MobyGames listings is that each developer profile only lists the last position listed in the credits for a given game, rather than every position for each game. Orimo, in this instance, is credited as "Director" and "Scenario" (this should be "Subscript") for Shining Force, but his developer profile only lists him as "Scenario". Similarly, he's credited for three different positions in the complete credits for Landstalker, from creative director to original story writer to chief map designer, but the developer profile only lists "Original Story".


EDIT 2: Yoshitaka Tamaki's Salamander Factory still exists, though the page of Tamaki's illustrations is no more. A single thumbnail from RPG Tsukuru 4 (part of the RPG Maker series) is all that I can find from the Internet Archive, at the moment. The company itself presently does sound production and, if machine generated translations are not mistaken (HA!), iOS app programming.


EDIT 3: More FEDA works from darker depths of the Archive; Image09, Image12, Image13, Image16. All retrieved from this index of images from early 2004.


EDIT 4: Yet more details, credits filled in for various team members. FEDA 2 credits seem hard to find.


EDIT 5: For completion's sake, neither Orimo nor Ōhori are credited in any of the other "Stalker series" titles listed by MobyGames (Lady Stalker, Dark Savior, and Time Stalkers/Climax Landers). Tamaki only gets a credit for "Character Design" for Lady Stalker and Time Stalkers/Climax Landers, but no other roles in creative.

Strictly speaking, this core team is not behind the "Stalker series" as identified by Yasuhiro Taguchi, besides Landstalker.

[Siel]

I got occupied with other things for a while, but here are the last 2 chapters:
Chapter 20: http://pastebin.com/HziYpwhu" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Chapter 21: http://pastebin.com/NtcbrdkQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I unfortunately have blanks in these too, although it's mostly just spell names for chapter 20.

[TheUnknownMarine]

Much appreciated Siel.

As a much delayed response to Nekome, I couldn't find my sources aside from a Wikipedia blurb talking about FEDA... it's possibly my memory's in error, it's been almost a decade since I did all of my Shining research and I haven't bothered to refresh my memory since then. If I stumble on it again I'll post it here though.

Edit: Well, it seems like whatever they were planning never went through since 'Killy' there either never showed up or got turned into the wolf-knight dude in SitD. Interesting that Chris was descended from the SF though, wonder who got hitched to a dark elf.

[Antman 537]

Very nice work! It is a bummer alright that it didn't end up meshing with the story of SitD. It'd be interesting to see how things were supposed to play out

[ShadowDragon]

any chance of the translated script getting edited into the comic itself like a "scanalation" kind of thing? I loved the Doom Blade manga when I "read" what I could of them in Megadrive Fan magazine, and liked how it tied SATD to Shining Force I.

[NekomeKozo]

As a much delayed response to Nekome, I couldn't find my sources aside from a Wikipedia blurb talking about FEDA... it's possibly my memory's in error, it's been almost a decade since I did all of my Shining research and I haven't bothered to refresh my memory since then. If I stumble on it again I'll post it here though.

That's fine, thank ye.

I was curious if there was anything else on this particular team since an Xbox project two of the three did that died in planning called Runebrid, but not really. It seems that those two may have left the games industry entirely after that project and the other one, Yasuhiro Ōhori, gets special thanks credits for Matrix Software's FF remakes.

I tried asking around to see if I knew of any connections, but nope. I don't know enough old folks in Japanese software development. (or any, really. the few connections I have are too darn young.)

If somebody could find a way to interview them, though, for their time with Shining and since then, that would be incredible.

[MXC]

Link here. You'll need winrar or 7zip to unzip these (I compressed TUM's files further). Let me know if this doesn't work for some reason.

I've been hosting this for a few years but need to clean up my files. I'll leave the link for a few days if anyone needs it or want to host it elsewhere.

[rid1ey]

Thanks to everybody that contributed to this!

[Babel1027]

Hi everyone! I wanted to post an update on this, but I'm locked out of the landstalker account. I was able to reach out to the author Yoshitaka Tamaki and got him to answer a few questions for me, this is what he responded about the DOOMBLADE story:

Me:You made a gaiden manga for shining and the darkness (Doom Blade) was
it ever supposed to be part of the shining games?

YT:
→That's right.
However, time has passed, I will try to make up for the missing parts. I
could not do it for games.

ME:Was FEDA a result of the DOOMBLADE gaiden manga?

YT:
→I am no longer official, but I think that I think that it is a story in
the same world.


I think it was pretty obvious, but its cool to get it from a source.

[rid1ey]

Arms makes a cameo in Shining Soul II running the battle colosseum and the weapons dealer is noted to be from the same tribe as Ein/Killy (Hash) from Shining and The Darkness Doomblade Manga and FEDA in the Japanese guide book.

[TheUnknownMarine]

I stickied this because having a translation for a rare Shining series work deserves to be easy to find.

It totally isn't because I searched for an hour for this before I remembered where it was.

[rid1ey]

RAO's World in TimeStakers/Climax Landers is that of FEDA's I'm gonna guess it could not be officially stated or refer to FEDA but Yoshitaka Tamaki crept it in there!

[Blob Powers]

Hey everyone, been a long time since I've posted here. I recently discovered some scans of the "Mega Drive Fan" magazine where the "Doom Blade" manga was originally published.

I only found 8 of the 21 chapters, but these PDFs do include the missing pages from Chapter 4 and the fan page from Chapter 14. The PDFs are at a better resolution than the original files, so they may help with translating some of the smaller text.

In any case, enjoy some of Yoshitaka Tamaki's "Doom Blade" art in slightly bigger and better quality!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/2e4tmqam ... 6r2l7k6r1t

If you have any trouble downloading the files, let me know and I'll see what I can do to help.

Cheers,

[TheUnknownMarine]

These look fantastic, thank you!

[Kalkano]

Hey everyone, been a long time since I've posted here. I recently discovered some scans of the "Mega Drive Fan" magazine where the "Doom Blade" manga was originally published.

I only found 8 of the 21 chapters, but these PDFs do include the missing pages from Chapter 4 and the fan page from Chapter 14. The PDFs are at a better resolution than the original files, so they may help with translating some of the smaller text.

In any case, enjoy some of Yoshitaka Tamaki's "Doom Blade" art in slightly bigger and better quality!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/2e4tmqam ... 6r2l7k6r1t

If you have any trouble downloading the files, let me know and I'll see what I can do to help.

Cheers,

Thanks Blob!

Does anyone have a link to the rest of the files?

Edit: Nevermind. I just saw that MXC took their link down, so I thought that was it, but these older links still work, surprisingly:

ok, here is the link

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sy7eowrk5808unk/X74LAk082J" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

in case I did it wrong the first time, here is another link.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nlu55z21g8a95 ... 0Manga.zip" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

On another note, someone mentioned a SF manga early in the thread, but it never got posted. Does anyone have that?