Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max

Translation Notes:

• (page 63) This is the last boob joke. We're free at last.
• (page 65 onwards) Here's the retranslation of every scene with the Spring of Recollection in the game. Overall, her speech here is fairly close to what she says in Waral in-game, with a few details from her final appearance sprinkled in, like her care for Cain. It does misses a few nuances though, like the Legacy being more than just Dark Dragon.
• I don't think I've ever seen art of the Spring, but notably, she gets a portrait in the GBA version, and it looks a lot like the manga design, with the slightly wavy hair and especially the blank eyes.
  
• Obviously, the manga rushes through the plot since it's short, thus a lot of places are skipped. I didn't even feel like pointing them out before. However I will point out Waral not being here this time, because Waral happens to not be in the beta map either, and it has very contradicting lore between the ASCII guide and the World Book, meaning it might have not been well developed. Besides, Chapter 5 is very weirdly structured. You get two ship battles that are basically the same, you get to Waral by accident, you advance the plot by going to Ring Reef for no reason and everyone telling you it's off-limits while letting you waltz in anyway, and hardly anything happens in the shrine besides you hearing about the Manual, which is not even a big deal because you get to Rudo by accident later (two ship accidents!! why repeat this plot point!!) and would go to Dragonia anyway to help Bleu.
  Basically, I obviously can't prove it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the ocean shrine was initially thought off as only a plot scene, and the battles/town added much later for gameplay reasons.
• Perhaps worth mentioning, the GBA version also makes a point to mention that Max got lost in the shrine alone, and everyone was worried about him, which does remind me a lot of the ship scene here.
  
• (page 70)
  
  Hi Anri. Unlike Shell of all people you were not important enough to name apparently, but I appreciate the cool staff.
• (page 71) The Conga Basin isn't mentioned in game as far as i know, but it is labelled in the beta map and also mentioned in the ASCII guide. It is the place where the Tower of the Ancients is located.
• (page 72) The GBA version does add in scenes where Cain clearly struggles trying to remember Max.
  
• (page 77) The flagship Tenochtitlan. First of all, no one saw the version of this where i misspelled it in both panels despite checking the wikipedia page multiple times. Shut up. Also, I'm not the only one with spelling issues. The manga writes it as テノティテトラン (tenotitetoran), but the dictionary and wikipedia both give only the spelling of テノチティトラン (tenochititoran), which does feel closer to the word. However, I could find japanese texts using the first spelling, so it might be just uncommon, not wrong. Or it's just commonly misspelling. It's beyond me to answer this. All I know is Shining Force, which is why all I can tell you is that it's not too random to bring up a latin american name into this lore.
  
  Cannot blame the localization for not getting this one. I too would never get it without further references, though there is the Nazca ship in SF2 of course.
  Still, kind of wild to name a whole ship that isn't in the game and match the thematic of something in game, huh? Could this mean the ship or something else called Tenochtitlan existed at some point in development? The answer is always "maybe", but I'll elaborate when we get to Prompt next chapter.
• (page 78)
  
  Gonna be real with you. Personality-wise, this is so unrecognizable as Diane that I took her as some weird choice to make Khris an elf first time I read this. Looking now though, the hair matches Diane perfectly and the hat is the same as Hans'. The clothes don't match, but Hans' were changed as well. So I guess it's Diane, but not in any way that matters.
• (page 80) Told you that Lowe seeing Max as a big brother was important. Turns out it's reciprocal. Also, as I always like to remind everyone, japanese language usually makes the age relation between siblings very clear with a single word. So every instance of Max and Cain talking about a brother is actually specifically "little/younger brother". It doesn't flow well in english though, so i simplified it in some points.