WAYO-024~5: ActRaiser Original Soundtrack & Symphonic Suite

[Spirit_Chaser]

This is nice. My old copy broke.

[CHz]

Worth noting that this album is another release of the New Japan BGM Philharmonic Orchestra performance from 2018, not the old Symphonic Suite from ActRaiser, so if you're looking for that exact arrangement & performance then you won't find it here.

[BoneSatyr]

Started shipping yesterday, I'm adding that as release date.

[Chris Porter]

I added images for this one: digipak (front, back, inside left, right), tray (both trays use the same image), both discs, booklet (front, back, pages), mini shikishi (signed).

[Blaqthourne]

What was labeled as Digipak Interior Right is actually the Exterior Left. The Interior Right is the Disc 2 Tray, which is the same as the Disc 1 Tray. I've changed the description and uploaded a scan of the entire Digipak Exterior as one image.

[zierts]

Made some minor track list adjustments as per the booklet. I did the same for the vinyl release as it most likely uses the same titles. They weren't very consistent, though, writing "BloodPool" for disc 1 and "Bloodpool" for disc 2 (um...and "Blood Pool" for disc 1 on their website). And they seem to have problems telling an en dash (1.10, 1.24) apart from a hyphen (1.07, 1.08, 2.03, 2.04).

Wasn't the original symphonic recording the first ever orchestral game music CD? A bit sloppy for such a seminal release. Still, getting the album out is much appreciated!

Oh, and safe for the localized titles and the mistranslated "Avarice", they basically used JTurner's and Despatche's translation of the track list on VGMdb! Does this happen a lot?

EDIT: Whoops, it was actually this album from where they got the English track list. But the point still stands as that album must've got it from here. :9

[Aifread]

Originally Posted by zierts

Wasn't the original symphonic recording the first ever orchestral game music CD?

Nope, not even close.

[zierts]

Whoa, thanks for clearing that up! Hm, I'm not sure where I got that from but I recall reading somewhere that it was some kind of first. Maybe the first game orchestra CD where the composer owns the rights to the music?

[dancey]

Originally Posted by zierts

Made some minor track list adjustments as per the booklet. I did the same for the vinyl release as it most likely uses the same titles. They weren't very consistent, though, writing "BloodPool" for disc 1 and "Bloodpool" for disc 2 (um...and "Blood Pool" for disc 1 on their website). And they seem to have problems telling an en dash (1.10, 1.24) apart from a hyphen (1.07, 1.08, 2.03, 2.04).

Wasn't the original symphonic recording the first ever orchestral game music CD? A bit sloppy for such a seminal release. Still, getting the album out is much appreciated!

Oh, and safe for the localized titles and the mistranslated "Avarice", they basically used JTurner's and Despatche's translation of the track list on VGMdb! Does this happen a lot?

EDIT: Whoops, it was actually this album from where they got the English track list. But the point still stands as that album must've got it from here. :9

Just was alerted to this.

No ASCII-equivalent Unicode in English tracklists, i.e., no em/en dashes, brackets, braces, parentheses, apostrophes, ellipses, etc. Only Unicode with no ASCII equivalents like hearts and stars.

[zierts]

Not going to go on war on this but it wouldn't be good database design to expect users to replace Unicode characters with ASCII equivalents when they're usually expected to replicate an album's track title contents verbatim, all-caps and typos included.

I respect your feelings on this and you make some valid points but I don't think there's a strong case for eliminating Unicode in English track lists in the long run if the goal is to replicate album data on VGMdb. Ideally, features and applications that cause problems should be programmed to take Unicode characters into account (such as allowing to ignore the distinction between ASCII and Unicode for the search function).

Edit: Eh, perhaps not a war but maybe a little sparring. VGMdb's advanced search function has since been amended to ignore the distinctions for apostrophes, hyphens and en dashes, it seems.

Originally Posted by dancey

Additionally, the Unicode apostrophe I so blatantly have an issue with is never an apostrophe in tracklists. It's almost exclusively U+2019 "Right Single Quotation Mark", which is just wrong. An apostrophe is not a quotation mark.

A wise man once said: "That so-called 'ASCII apostrophe' is nothing but a single quotation mark!" The ambiguity is there in both standards, even less so in Unicode which offers more distinctive characters for some of the uses covered by the ASCII apostrophe. I should also note that I'm not putting the ASCII standard at fault here. Rolling all the different uses into a single character was a necessity born from physical typewriter and 7-bit limitations that our modern computer keyboards just happened to inherit. The shortcomings have since been rectified by the Unicode standard which allows digital text to adhere to typographical standards that have been around since before computers came into use.

We use the ASCII characters for convenience when composing everyday text messages and program code but professional publishers really shouldn't be using these early-computer-age substitutes in their printed material. And if VGMdb keeps its mission of replicating track lists as the publishers put them, I think it's best to use ASCII characters when the album prints ASCII characters and Unicode characters when the album prints Unicode characters. Use what the album does seems like the simplest possible rule in the long run. I do understand however that there may still be certain functions on VGMdb or elsewhere that cause problems with Unicode characters until the code is amended.