#this is not a manga translation blog! this is shining force phd thesis central!

[claire-starsword]

Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 1

First, a small preamble on what's this. This manga adaptation was published monthly by Shogakukan from March to August 1992. In other words, it started at the same time as the game was released. According to the artist, they began discussing the work in January 1992, and he got to play a in-development version of the game then, which gives us some interesting insight into things that might have changed before the game's launch, especially when it comes to Max and Cain's backstory. Really, if you like Cain you should read this, I'm doing this for you.

Scans of this complete book (only published in 1994) can be found on the Internet Archive. I did not find scans of the magazine issues it originally ran in. The artist is Toshihiro Ono, of the infamous Electric Tale of Pikachu. Thankfully it isn't as weird about women as that one, but that's a low bar. You will see a couple of boob jokes, alas.

I currently do not have the energy to typeset and clean up 130+ pages, so i'll be nevermind! i'm incapable of half-assing things lmao, will be cleaning and typesetting everything to the best of my ability (i've never translated a manga before. be nice to me).

Now, let's enjoy the story together.

Translation notes:

Even the title already requires some explanation. The way is it written in this book at least (シャイニングフォース正伝聖剣士MAX) doesn't make it clear which part is title or subtitle, so I've seen other places translate it as "Shining Force - Authentic Biography of Saint Fencer Max". I feel my version is more accurate though. As for the "Saint Fencer" part, this english reading is given by the book itself, while writing it as 聖剣士, which I feel would be more accurately translated as "holy swordsman", especially when 剣士 is already the swordsman class in english. This is likely a case of non-english speaking artist picking out a random reading from the dictionary just for style points, just like Max's name also get rendered in latin letters just because. So yeah I considered changing it, but you know? This manga is already so goddamn weird. Why not make that obvious from the title itself.

Cat panel!

Did you know that there are unused cat sprites in the final game, which show up multiple times in early builds of Guardiana? This is a deep cut reference! Or not, maybe the artist just wanted a cat independently, who cares I need everyone to know about the cat, we were robbed.

"Well, Claire, is Lowe being a small child some sort of scrapped content too?" Ahahahaha. NO. Lowe's design and role were announced way back in October, in the earliest coverage of the game. I have no clue why the artist decided to do this. I assumed for months that this was fanmade because of this. The same goes for Lou, I have no reason to believe a love interest was ever in the cards for Max in the game. The writer probably just wanted to fall into some common fantasy tropes of "man who fights to protect family".

Speaking of, Lowe usually refers to Lou as just sister (nee-chan) and brother (nii-chan). This doesn't sound natural in english so I usually ignore it and use the character's names, however, there's little else establishing that he and Lou are siblings in this chapter and I wanted to get that across already. It will also be important to establish that Max is a big brother figure to him, but there'll be time for that in next chapters.

Max's "alright!/yes!" is meant to be kind of a catchphrase. According to the artist, it was inspired by a magical girl anime called "Yousoko Youko". I don't know about it to comment, though.

Runefaust's name being rendered as two words is also something that shows up in some earlier coverage of the game as well. It will already go away by the next chapter, but I wanted to point it out.