Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max

Translation Notes:

• (page 5) 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.

• (page 6 onwards) “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 to Max as just 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.

• (page 7) 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.