Reading record 23.2(ish)

 Maybe only 23.1?  There was almost no text whatsoever. 😭

Anyway, the book I finished reading (looking at?) just now was Legend of Mana - Art of Mana - 30th Anniversary SPECIAL ISSUE.  And yes, that whole thing is apparently the title.  What little text the book had was just image caption by Masaru Oyamada, the producer of the Seiken Densetsu series.

As an art book, it was actually more focused on the remaster/reissue of the game in 2021 than it was on the original release from 1999.  (The 30th Anniversary part must be for the series as a whole...which means at least three different major game series started in 1996, in addition to the two biggest JRPG series starting in...wait, really?  1986?  Dang, that's...I hadn't thought about just how early that really was.  (Though it took three years for the first Final Fantasy to be translated into English and released in the US.)  Back in 1986, I was still playing text-parser-driven adventure games like The Black Cauldron and the early King's Quest and Space Quest games...)  Wait, maybe the earlier book from 2018 was the thirtieth anniversary and that's why this was a "special issue"...?  'Cause there's no way both 2 and 3 would have been on the Super Famicom if the first one came out in 1996--the Playstation had already been out for at least year by 1996!

I really loved Legend of Mana back on the PS1, but I've never had the nerve to pick up the new version; I know it got a mew translation, and I'm afraid they wimped out and changed all the elemental's names back to the mistranslations and shortened versions they had on the SNES version of Secret of Mana.  Which may sound like a dumb reason to avoid the remaster, but...it was really frustrating playing Trials of Mana and hearing the Japanese voice work saying the proper names and then seeing the butchered SNES versions written on the screen.  Especially since I know the real names better, having played Legend of Mana so many times!

Anyway, this art book was a little disappointing because it was mostly filling in gaps that had been left out of an earlier whole-series art book (of which I was unaware at the time and thus do not have) and focusing on the remastered art that hadn't been made yet during that earlier book.  Also, it has the dippy-looking male player character on the front instead of the awesome-looking female player character.  😭

Oh well.

An expensive chunk of brief nostalgia, I guess.

Original language:  Japanese