VICL-40046~7: Shin Megami Tensei LAW & CHAOS DISC

[Ramza]

I made an edit to the album title, based on the spine (the thin strip along the spine). I know the obi front says LAW DISC/CHAOS DISC, but then along the sides of the front and back tray you get "LAW & CHAOS DISC."

Not sure which should be considered more official... Thoughts?

EDIT -- yes, working on scans now.

[Eirikr]

Beat ya to them.

Actually, I hope this gets to you before you do too many. I've dragged my feet on these for months and I don't know why--I literally only had a couple more to do!

But there's some cool stuff in these scans, in particularly the 4 pages detailing Kaneko's sprite drawing method, which have been scanlated by a colleague.

[Ramza]

OH MY GOSH! I only had 5 scans left to do of the booklet when I saw this. GAH!! :P

As for the scanlation, that's awesome and thank you for the link. Has anyone else done any other translations of the book? Looks like there are track-by-track commentaries, as well as ... a short story, I think?

Thanks much Eirikr.

[Eirikr]

Originally Posted by Ramza

OH MY GOSH! I only had 5 scans left to do of the booklet when I saw this. GAH!! :P

As for the scanlation, that's awesome and thank you for the link. Has anyone else done any other translations of the book? Looks like there are track-by-track commentaries, as well as ... a short story, I think?

Thanks much Eirikr.

Well, I'm glad you didn't do all of them.

I'm not aware of any other translations of the liner notes. That one was probably only done because of the relevance to and popularity of Kaneko's design work. And I guess because I cherry picked those two pages and posted them on my tumblr because I knew they would be gold. And they were!

But I've posted the link to the scans, so hopefully it may grab the attention of someone who's interested in doing a translation. If that happens, I'll post a link here.

Now, what about SMTII's scans...?

[Ramza]

Originally Posted by Eirikr

Now, what about SMTII's scans...?

I don't own that one. I'm counting on you.

ALSO question for other admins: booklet pg. 27~30 (2 images) ... each set of 2 pages has a bare nipple on a woman (one is a smiling girl with blue hair pointing at her breast with her finger ... the other is a woman covered in large snake/serpent as her only garment). Should we mark these as NSFW images?

[Eirikr]

All right. Hopefully I'll get to 2 before another few months pass. It has THREE separate booklets, which is crazy. Companies sure had the budget to blow on promotional merchandise in those days.

[XISMZERO]

The drum work on "Wandering" is simply phenomenal on this progressive fusion track. Drums by Kozo Suganuma, Electric Bass is by the late, great Tomohito Aoki. "Guitar distortion" appears to be have been done by arranger Nishiwaki on a Yamaha SY77 FM Keyboard.

From what I can make out based on Page 8 of the booklet, under Disc 2/Track 2's commentary, "Drum ni Suganuma Kozo" followed by "Electric Bass ni Aoki Tomohito".

[BlazingAbyss]

I thought that it be worth mentioning that in the official IOS English translation of SMT1 translates "カテドラル" (the final dungeon of the game) as "Basilica."

However, it's also worth mentioning that the official English version of the MMO SMT: Imagine also featured a area titled "カテドラル" (a location within the Holy City of Arcadia,) but simply translated it as "Cathedral." Granted, I don't think these two locations are meant to be the same place, since the one in SMT1 was located on Tokyo Bay while the one in SMT: Imagine was located in Shinagawa. The dungeon version of the Cathedral from the game's 8th Anniversary event did use a remix of the SMT1 Basilica theme though.

In addition, the aforementioned IOS version refers to "邪教の館" as the "Cathedral of Shadows" instead of the "Mansion of Heresy." I noticed that the majority of other SMT soundtracks used the localized name for the English tracklists, so I just figured I'd mention that as well. Come to think of it the fact that they already had the Cathedral of Shadows is probably why they decided to change the last area to Basillca since otherwise it may have sounded redundant.

[Aifread]

I gotta say I really dislike using "mansion" as a translation of 館 for both tracks 11 and 17. 館 usually refers to buildings with a high purpose: libraries, museums, embassies. And of course there's also religious uses of it and it's fairly common to see it attached to names of buildings in Buddhist temples, which is especially apt for track 11. "Hall" or "palace" would fit better.