Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max

Final Translation Notes:

• Yodobashi Camera is apparently a japanese electronics retail chain, hence the label on the editor's bag.
• A volume with 40 pages only feels very weird to me, but I couldn’t find any other possible translation for what he says here. Besides, the structure of this thing is already wack anyway, chapter 1 has like, 10 pages while chapter 4 has almost 30.
• In any case, I get the feeling that this manga got robbed of an official publication, and this volume is an independent work of sorts thrown together by Ono. Might explain why the printing is wack and cuts panels at points. Still very glad it exists, because I doubt scans of the original run would have ever surface on the internet otherwise. Actually, I appreciate this whole afterword so much, it’s a lot of info I would have never found out by myself, and god knows video game stuff does not keep any track of its own history overall. Any recorded info helps.
• Tao indeed appears in Tanuma’s manga with the same design as here. I will not be translating that thing, but Tao’s couple of appearances are pretty much all I liked from it, so here:
  
• Ono also refers to that manga as only “Tanuma’s version”, which I feel is the main way JP fans refer to it, but since the artist’s name had already been mentioned, I used the subtitle as well, which I feel is the best way to specify it.
• I don’t know what a Game On is, nor what a Game Dome Harumi Shop is :( Those are very unfortunate names to try to google (in fact, the latter only gave me results for this very manga lol). Let me know if you know anything.
• The fact Ono has worked with Masaki Wachi later however is interesting to me. I assumed through most of my notes here that some odd elements of this manga, especially Max and Cain’s backstory, could be hints of things changed late in development, and brought back for the GBA version. I still think that’s the most likely explanation, as at least one of the GBA-only flashbacks is very similar to unused content in the game itself. However, I eventually did figure that something else should be considered. Perhaps certain similarities between this and the GBA version are also things Wachi liked from the manga and wanted to add in the remake, since the two continued to work together somewhere. Who knows?
• The wife. For the longest I’ve been reading her name as Sega Blue, which was an easy reference to parse, but while joking ten seconds ago I realized I was misreading it. I’m not sure if Brel is supposed to mean anything or be read a different way. Oh well. We still have the second name for an easy laugh.