Following up on
this post: I looked into the supposed difference between the "Arrangement" and "Arrangement Supervisor" credits in Smash Bros. Brawl, that is, if someone credited as "Arrangement Supervisor" didn't actually arrange the track themselves but supervised someone else's arrangement work.
Turns out that, no, there is probably no difference: I checked the
full song list (
also in English for reference) for Brawl and the list both uses 編曲者 (translated as "Arrangement", though literally meaning "arranger") and 編曲担当 (translated as "Arrangement Supervisor", though literally meaning "in charge of/responsible for the arrangement"). Within that list, individual musicians are always credited as 編曲者 or always credited as 編曲担当, so a single person is credited only as one of these two terms. That would imply that there's a difference between the terms.
However, there are also
news posts on individual tracks (
English for reference). In some of them, the arranger is called 編曲担当 while he or she is called 編曲者 in the full song list, oddly enough.
Listed as 編曲担当 in individual news posts but as 編曲者 in the full song list:
Hirokazu Tanaka. ex
おおくま けんいち Kenichi Okuma
ササキ トモコ Tomoko Sasaki
伊藤 賢冶 Kenji Ito
岩垂 徳行 Noriyuki Iwadare
桜庭 統 Motoi Sakuraba
Listed as 編曲担当 both in individual news posts and the full song list:
酒井 省吾 Shogo Sakai
高濱 祐輔 Yusuke Takahama
なるけ みちこ Michiko Naruke
尾崎 景吾 Keigo Ozaki
本田 晃弘 Akihiro Honda
須戸 敏之 Toshiyuki Sudo
瀬上 純 Jun Senoue
光田 康典 Yasunori Mitsuda
近藤 浩治 Koji Kondo
Listed as 編曲者 in the full song list but no individual news posts exist:
岩崎 正明 Masaaki Iwasaki
桃井 聖司 Seiji Momoi
甲田 雅人 Masato Kouda
福田 康文 Yasufumi Fukuda
福田 淳 Jun Fukuda
葉山 宏治 Koji Hayama
辻横 由佳 Yuka Tsujiyoko
Listed as 編曲担当 in the full song list but no individual news posts exist:
下村 陽子 Yoko Shimomura
伊良波 穣 Yutaka Iraha
古代 祐三 Yuzo Koshiro
吉冨 亮二 Ryoji Yoshitomi
増子 司 Tsukasa Masuko
太田 あすか Asuka Ohta
山本 健誌 Kenji Yamamoto
峰岸 透 Toru Minegishi
戸高 一生 Kazumi Totaka
景山 将太 Shota Kageyama
濱野 美奈子 Minako Hamano
石坂 健太郎 Kentaro Ishizaka
若井 淑 Hajime Wakai
西 隆宏 Takahiro Nishi
飯吉 新 Arata Iiyoshi
There's no clear pattern as to why they would change the credits for some people in the list but not for others, and as to why they would put a person in the group 編曲者 and another in the group 編曲担当. So, yeah, it seems there's no difference between them. Whether they're listed as 編曲者 or 編曲担当, they probably arranged the track themselves.
This is corroborated by the fact that the Smash Bros. Dojo also uses 作曲者 ("Composer") and 作曲担当 ("Composition Supervisor"). For example, it makes no sense for Akito Nakatsuka
supervising a composition for Ice Climber or Koji Kondo
supervising a composition for Super Mario Bros. when they were 後輩 to Hirokazu Tanaka and Yukio Kaneoka in the mid-1980s. That would make Nakatsuka and Kondo the ones who were supervised, if anything. Not to mention that they've long been confirmed as the composers of these games.
What's more, the German, Spanish and Italian language versions of Brawl seem to have opted not to translate the English version's "...Supervisor", "Arrangement" and "Composer" credits, while the
French version does its own thing altogether, muddying the waters further. So, yeah, the term 担当 is just inconsistently used and confusingly translated in the Smash Bros. series.