There's this Tumblr account called 90sfantasyanimestuff that posts - well, guess. Not everything is literally from the 90s, but it all hews to the same SNES RPG aesthetic. It's one of the few Tumblrs I still check out regularly.
The account posted a couple images from the 1989 Ultima: Quest of the Avatar manga I translated and an industrious Ultima fan by the handle of Blu3vib3 had used to create a scanlation. I don't really use my Tumblr much anymore - I don't know what to do about the AI problem, and though I miss a good number of people on there, the toxicity of the platform itself is not something I miss in my life - but I thought to give a link to the scanlation, just in case anyone wanted to check out the manga.
When I went to retrieve the link from my page, I discovered that Blu3vib3's site is gone. I found the scanlation on one of those manga piracy sites, but as far as one reliable, reputable place for it to be stored - no, no longer. (This also goes for The Fall of Magincia, the original story that has Katrina impaling the main villain with the prow of the ark God commanded her to build because his opponent, the hero of the manga, is a pirate, and he needed a thematically-appropriate weapon for his dramatic killing blow. I see my site has this scanlation listed as "partial," and as all of the pirate sites end the story midway, I imagine Blu3vib3 never got around to finishing it.)
I didn't think to download the scanlation back in the day, not only because it was uploaded page by page as individual images vs. one PDF, but also because...well, as foolish as it sounds, finished translation projects becoming undone, in a manner of speaking, just wasn't something that occurred to me until now. It should have, particularly in this age of an ever-centralizing internet and the death of the personal webpage (not to mention Game Informer being wiped from the digital earth, which happened as I was writing this entry), but I suppose I figured that the scanlations would always be extant somewhere out there, particularly given the internet's passion for archiving and pirating video game stuff.
But Ultima is of a certain age, and its relevance and cachet have naturally decreased with time, and preserving its ancillary media might no longer be much of a priority - even within the Ultima fandom itself, which contains a great many creative and friendly folks but, due to the period in which the franchise had its heyday, has a lot of the old-school PC diehards who've never grown out of the RTFM mindset and consider console games illegitimate and view the Japanese end of the fandom, with its cutesy NES ports and its heart-shaped paladin shields and its idol songs and those big-eyed manga, not as something to taken in stride or as an unserious source of fun but an outright malign influence. Anger-making. (One of my all-time favorite responses to my work was prompted by one of those Ultima fans replying to a translation announcement; like Blu3vib3's site, it seems to have been eaten by time, so I cannot repost it verbatim, but it went something like: "I have never once read a single Japanese manga or comic book that ever made any sense.")
(ETA: Thanks to a kind soul with serendipitous timing liking an old post of mine on Tumblr, I now have the exact quote, which is even crankier: "40 years of reading comics and I have yet to find a single manga or anime that makes any damn sense.")
Plus, since Ultima, unlike many other RPG big guns, originates in an English-speaking nation and not Japan, some of its U.S. fans look skancewise at the whole fan translation scene for OoP stuff, as it's not part & parcel of the fandom as it is in, say, Final Fantasy or Persona. To them, it's not a preservation effort or an attempt to bring unreleased parts of canon to markets deemed financially-unfeasible or otherwise negligible by the franchise's publishers; it's just a bunch of punks doing legally-sketchy garbage. (I recall Blu3vib3 and me answering questions and talking about project details in the comments of one fan-run site discussing the manga, and the maintainer popped in to announce that he wasn't sure anything like...someone translating and editing a comic outside a corporate project? had ever been done before, and he was going to check to make sure we weren't getting in over our heads. Yeah, you do that, buddy.)
Anyhow: the Quest of the Avatar scanlation is extant, in a tenuous manner, but those manga sites come and go, cycling their content in and out like the wash. So if you want it (or Fall of Magincia) for posterity, grab it now!
(This reminds me: I've had the final book-length manga, The Maze of Schwarzschild/Schwarzschild's Labyrinth, for probably over a decade now but haven't translated it because a) it was a miserable sequel to a book that ended well just because Seiji Tanaka wanted to draw a space manga on the franchise's dime and b) it drew heavily on the '70s movie The Black Hole, which is basically "what if Jack Chick wrote Star Wars?". No one in that decade has stepped up in the meantime to translate, despite an appeal on HG101 that nonetheless doesn't bother to credit the person who translated the first three. I would say "if I don't do the work, it doesn't get done," but I'm familiar with the monkey's-paw inversion of that.)
Everybody's raving about Crow Country, the new old-school survival horror title set in a defunct amusement park with N64 visuals and FF7-style environments. Nitro Rad loves it! Pat and Woolie love it! Vinny Caravella...well, he said on the Nextlander podcast that he didn't play much of it, as is the general Nextlander habit nowadays, but he made vague noises of approval toward it and indies in general!
So everyone loves it! Except me. But I guess the title kind of spoiled that. Hello. I am the one person in creation who doesn't adore Crow Country.
I was originally going to title this post with part of supergreatfriend's rant (Zero Escape spoilers in link) about the big twist in Zero Time Dilemma upon its revelation ("That is by far the dumbest thing that's been in any of these games! That's dumber than a David Cage plot twist!"). This is an extremely stupid plot. Like, levels of stupid previously plumbed only by Axe Cop, the comic written by a literal five-year-old - and not by design or with self-awareness, as it is in that book. Crow Country also falls down in tension, combat, and environmental design in a functional gameplay (though not aesthetic) sense. After the credits rolled, I found myself asking if it were better than Clock Tower: The Struggle Within and concluding that it was really kind of a draw.
Two things happened after that point to soften my opinion, however. One: After beating the game, the results screen told me I had unlocked for New Game+ this seemingly-nifty quest to find a bunch of crystal crows hidden throughout the environment. Though my reservations about Crow Country were numerous, I did enjoy the FF7-style cluttered, character-filled environmental design, and the game is by no means long. So after beating Crow Country and holding my head, I took the only course of action evident to someone who's spent dozens of hours of her life retranslating Phantasy Star III: I went back immediately and beat the game again.
The second is that I learned that Crow Country was made largely by one guy:
Now, I thought the game did not succeed in most of the elements for which I play survival horror. But it is an accomplishment to pull off and put out there a project on which you've toiled for years and have brought into existence just by your own sheer, dogged, long-unrewarded persistence (some with which I sympathize keenly at the moment). And for all the accusations I, the lonely detractor, would level at Crow Country, I do think the game succeeds very well in a few areas. It is also - like Final Fantasy VI, another critical & popular darling about which I have severe reservations - a game that is getting me through some tough times, and after completing it twice (and coming off the high point of the reward for the crystal crow quest), I now have a certain attachment to it, despite standing by my criticisms.
So let me start by enumerating the major things I like about Crow Country:
To commemorate *huge sigh* Vay Day...
- If you'd like to learn a little more about the circumstances of this game's production, Shaun Musgrave at Touch Arcade has you covered. Musgrave is quite possibly the best-played, best-spoken game writer out there, and his weekday column on new Switch releases (and Patreon) has become my most reliable source of gaming news.
- As I noted on Tumblr, one of the trailers functions basically as a showcase for the game's soundtrack - which was a good move, since it reminds you that Vay does, despite its faults, have some bangers: the overworld theme, the boss theme, the final (well, penultimate) dungeon.
- Speaking of that not-final castle: its organic horror provides the most memorable location in an aggressively nondescript game. It took years before I played FF5 and discovered its predecessor in Exdeath's Castle in FF5.
- I'll agree with those in the thread that announced tidings of Vay's revival in that a) HD fonts do not mesh well with non-HD titles and yet b) even the resuscitators of Vay chose a better, more-readable font than was used for the FF Pixel Remasters.
- One of the villain's lieutenants is an engineer named Betty June, who captains a ship called the Charnel. That was memorably badass to me. I'd always thought the name "Betty June" was a reference to something, but I guess not.
- Vay was my first exposure to the Hitchhiker's 42 joke, via an NPC. I thought Working Designs had written a pretty good joke. I no longer think that.
- Vay's voice acting (with exceptions, noted below) usually sounds very stilted and oddly-timed against the in-game anime cutscenes. That's not unique to the Working Designs version, though: the original Japanese release, oddly, has the same problem.
- Apparently, though SoMoGa just inserted the Harmony script for their version of Silver Star, they capitalized on Vay's lesser prestige to create their own Working Designs-style comedy localization. ...That sounds dangerous. Fans who think that kind of stuff is funny generally aren't good writers.
- One thing that is top-rate: the opening narration in the Working Designs version. It's excellently-written, perfectly timed to the visuals, and superbly-narrated. (Don't let the unique premise get your hopes up, though; Vay wastes most everything it's given. I remember how Robert Schmitz, author of the Shining Forth fanzine, lamented that it was a crime there was no animation once the hero reactivated that legendary armor. There is a part, though, where one of the medieval characters is talking about the dread "legendary" technologies they don't understand and mentions that the old world was destroyed by "New Clear Power," which I thought was pretty good.)
- Switching to spoilers for this last bit, so highlight to read: the most memorable event for many was the death of the child mage Pottle, who's shot through the heart with a crossbow by the evil emperor and subsequently falls off a bridge for good measure - which was indeed a gutsy move, killing the child character. The boldest and most memorable death for me, though, was not Pottle but the hero's love interest, Elin. I've wanted to write about it, but, particularly for such a visually-klutzy game, the presentation is uniquely memorable - Elin falls silently dead in the hero's arms, no sad music, no twee visuals - it's slow and respectful, but set against a black void and silence, with nothing answering his protagonist's bewildered, shocked, and then frenzied and anguished calls. He's screaming at Elin to fight the villain, fight for her life, and there's, with disconcerting realism, just nothing - she's already gone.
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