Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 4
Translation notes:
This is the last boob joke. We're free at last.
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.
uh oh. i hit image limit for the first time and i don't wanna remove either of these pics. more notes on a reblog later.
Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 5
Translation notes:
All enemies so far were recognizable from the game, but here they seem to be original.
This might be Boken?? The only character in the game with a big backpack and hair. And he does show up in Dragonia in-game.
About the Ancient names. Mega Max is clearly alliterative in both languages. Giga Cain is almost that. K sounds in japanese become g sounds once you add a dakuten (ﾞ), so they're associated. And in english it kinda works out accidentally, because a G is basically a C with extras too.
Vega Darksol though? No link. The pattern is lost. I'm kinda mad about it.
From an author's comment:
"These two also appear in Tanuma-sensei's Shining Force (lol). Are they official members?"
Yuichiro Tanuma is the artist for another Shining Force manga, Descent of Great Intention, whose scans I only found today (warning for a lot of ecchi/nudity/nsfw, i'm still going through but what i've seen is pretty horny already). And yes, these background characters also appear there. This manga was published before that one, though, so this is their first appearance.
"But Claire you're dodging the main topic, Cain just did exposition of the whole lore" yes yes, the similarities between it and the GBA version are what made me interested in this manga to begin with, but I've decided there's so much to compare between all versions of Max and Cain I'll make a whole huge ass post about it instead. Look forward to that.
I will mention however that Cain's bodysuit here reminds me a bit of the manual picture with Max being brought into Guardiana for the first time.
I did say we had to talk about Prompt (and then promptly forgot it in the first draft of these notes). Like Waral, Prompt is not seen anywhere in the beta map. And here, it is depicted as only ruins instead of the country it is in the final game. That in itself wouldn't mean much, however, Chapter 7, where Prompt is, has a lot more weirdness in it. It has peculiar unused content implying a whole deleted cutscene with Cain, Adam, Chaos and Darksol in Metapha, and it freezes the Debug Mode's Battle Test any time you Egress (also, Chapter Selection won't even load it from a save file of another chapter, which doesn't happen for any other chapter). Of course, I don't know the actual code of the game, but this gives me the impression that this Chapter 7 had some other Egress point that got removed later. Basically, if there's one part of the game you can expect to have changed late in development, it's Prompt and Metapha, so it could have been only ruins as the manga depicts here, and as I mentioned in the last chapter, some place or machine called Tenochtitlan could have existed.
Oh boy I keep forgetting notes this time! The goddamn chapter title. Both times the Chaos Breaker is mentioned here, it is written with the usual katakana, but also the kanji 対暗黒魔法剣 (Anti-Darkness Magic Sword) as furigana. I felt it was too clunky to mention both sword names in the dialogue, especially when Cain was already pushing the limits of a lot of speech bubbles this chapter. But anyway, yeah, it's supposed to be a bit of a title drop there.
I. forgot. yet. another. note. When Otrant recognizes the robot using an explosion spell, the manga actually says 核爆烈, a mix of 核 (nuclear) and 爆烈 (explosion). However, I couldn't find this exact wording in dictionaries, only fictional works, so it might just dramatic flavor, since nuclear explosions Don't Work Like That. I kept it ambiguous in the translation to not raise questions in the middle of the action, but it's worth noting since both the aforementioned Descent of Great Intention manga and the UK Sonic the Comic version of Shining Force bring up nuclear themes at some point.
my sins are undone, I've translated the Chaos scene. I guess I had posted this one here before, but who cares, it's better on the website. look at my tragic robots (you actually don't get to look at the tragic robots because screenshotting chapter 7 without having the saves ready is a pain and i'm not doing it)
Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 3
Translation notes:
So, uh. Elliot's name is rendered with two t's in the og game, but a single one in the GBA version. I had never paid attention to that at all until I had already edited all these pages, and I don't care enough to change it.
Cain's sword causes an explosion here. In the game, it is indeed capable of summoning flames.
This is a perfect illustration of how I feel about these names, but I do wonder what the actual intention was, since Cain is supposed to be already gone. The original image is even cut off weirdly in the middle of the text, and i don't think it's a problem with the scan, since every scanned page has a black border showing that the paper itself doesn't cut there. I wonder about the production of this thing, but i'll wait until i translate the author's comments before saying more.
The map in the previous chapter was very accurate to the beta map of the game. The smaller map here showing Rindo however looks off, the coast is different, and there seems to be a river directly to the north of Rindo, as opposed to the path to Shade Abbey. Perhaps fitting since Shade is skipped here.
Metaphaluna, huh? Needlessly to say, the country of the gods/Ancients is called only Metapha in the final game. Also, in this panel, it pops up as an alternate reading for 前世紀 (ancient times), not the name of a country specifically.
I chose to romanize the last part as "luna" for three reasons. One is that the continent of Rune is actually rendered as Lune in at least two guides. I take romanizations from JP guides with a grain of salt since they sometimes look bad/unnatural, or are inconsistent (Pelle's name for example has been romanized as both Peil or Payle depending on the book). I checked though, and town names however are consistent in both the books I've seen romanizing things.
The second reason is that the beta map used at this point has a fairly noticeable crescent moon shaped island right in the middle. In the final game, we can't know exactly where Metapha is, because you only teleport there. But I wonder if this island had something to do with it at some point.
The third reason is simply I saw no better reason. Metaphalna and Metapharuna would be just as valid, but don't have any meaning to them.
Update: I didn't know back when I translated this, but it turns out the names "Metaphaluna" and "pseudo-magic" are also mentioned in Doom Blade, a spinoff manga done by Yoshitaka Tamaki himself (character design and one writer of the original game). This implies that these terms were really created by the game's staff, even if they are not mentioned in the actual game.
The biggest equation next to Tao as she explains the magic types is very clearly a E=mc². Look close.
I've retranslated Elliot's scenes from the game thinking it would be relevant to these notes. Now I feel it really isn't, but you get more content so you should be happy.
My main point with that is that Elliot does not say anything about Cain in the game. In the GBA version, Balbazak does try revealing Max, Cain and Darksol's identities before dying, but that's not a thing in the og. So yeah I really translated a bunch of stuff for nothing this time! Except not because Darksol is awesome in that scene and everyone should get to see it.
Now let's talk about Otrant. I have mentioned before that Otrant's gender is never explicitly said, and they speak in a mostly gender neutral way (I feel like there's a few masculine patterns in some lines, but I'm not confident enough to say for certain). What I hadn't noticed is that they also use lipstick in the games, which is probably what sparked these observations to begin with, but i'm uh, occasionally not smart.
In any case, if any of these aspects were done at this point in development the artist here sure ignored them, and drew a regular old man who gets called an old man. They hate to see an androgynous boss winning.
I don't recall Otrant's third eye being called "Eye of Truth" anywhere else, but the manual of the game does say it can see the past and the future.
Otrant's naming of the Shining Force is a bit more elaborate here, but the wording is very similar to the actual game.
Finally, let's play spot the cameo!
We've got Gong, Zylo, one of the birds, and probably Anri. Easy.
Here, besides the obvious three who were actually introduced in the story, we again have a bird, Anri between Ken and Hans, Gong to the right, and Mae and Gort behind Luke. If you read the pre-release page you know that Gort was meant to be Mae's servant at some point, so this might be why they're together, or it's just coincidence because they still join around the same time in the final game.
More importantly, to Ken's left we have...
Some guys. Who are these. They could be made up by the artist (there will be another case of this), but I find it curious that the artist had to do that when there are so many character to pick from, and he clearly wanted to depict official characters here. For one, there's evidence that Earnest was already designed at that point in development. However, that link also shows that Vankar didn't have a portrait by that time at least, and Vankar would have already joined by this point in the story. So could the bald centaur here be a beta Vankar, or the artist's interpretation of Vankar via unfinished art? Maybe, but just a guess in the end. Mostly I'm just fascinated by how detailed this guy is compared to even Mae and Gort's cameos. The other guy isn't so i don't think about them nearly as much.
The Runefaust army planning to take over the world, led by Emperor Ramladu, is organized as seen in the diagram below. They have brought suffering to peaceful countries and also to the force standing against them. The five subordinates of Ramladu listed below are also all cruel and strong opponents!
Emperor Ramladu - Emperor of Runefaust [the diagram shows Darksol and Elliot under his direct command]
Darksol - Runefaust's advisor [the diagram shows Balbazak, Mishaela and Cain under his direct command]
Balbazak - General of the Runefaust Army
Commander of the Magic Beast Corps - {Priests, Hellhounds, Brass Loaders, Skeletons, Sea Bats}
Mishaela - General of the Runefaust Army
Commander of the Monster Corps - {Dullahans, Manarina Mages, High Priests, Horsemen, Belials}
Cain - Runefaust Army
Commander of the Silver Knight Squadron - {High Priests, Dullahans, Manarina Mages, Gargoyles, Golems}
Elliot - Runefaust Army
Commander of the Cavalry Corps - {Brass Loaders, Priests, Skeletons, Pegasus Knights, Lizardmen}
[Note: the Brass Loader was localized into Artillery in the english, and Priest into Dark Priest. The change in this last one is kind of interesting and happened with other enemies so i decided to not use the localized names and point it out.
Also, there's no enemy called Manarina Mage in any version. It's either a mistake or an implication that every mage you fight in the game is from Manarina, which feels kinda nonsense.]
A being completely shrouded in mystery!
Darksol
Occupation: Runefaust Army's advisor
Species: Unknown
Gender: Male
Age: Unknown
Height: 236 cm
Weight: Unknown
Place of Origin: Unknown
Starting Level: Unknown
Starting Weapon: Unknown
The emissary of darkness who obtained Ramladu's favor and authority
One year ago, he suddenly appeared in the country of Runefaust, ruled by Emperor Ramladu, and became the real authority behind its politics and military affairs. There is pretty much no information on him, all that is known is that he is researching how to resurrect the incarnation of evil, Dark Dragon. While his whole identity is shrouded in mystery, there are rumors that he is capable of using the dark magic "Demon Breath".
The swordsman with a tragic past
Cain
Occupation: Commander of the Silver Knight Squadron
Species: Human
Gender: Male
Age: Unknown
Height: 181 cm
Weight: 83 kg
Place of Origin: Unknown
Starting Level: Unknown
Starting Weapon: Unknown
The rumored strongest swordsman among Runefaust's knights
An amazing swordsman who hinders the force in their way, challenging them to battle. He hides a power representing darkness that is necessary to stop the awakened "Legacy of the Gods". He is caught up in Darksol's plan, being controlled through the power of a cursed mask, but in reality he is someone with a huge connection to the protagonist.
He has the Sword of Darkness, and ordinary swordsmen have no chance to put up a fight against him. Remarkable skill will be needed to defeat him.
_____
Dark mage of bewitching charm
Mishaela
Occupation: Commander of the Monster Corps
Species: Dark Elf
Gender: Female
Age: 198 years old
Height: 180 cm
Weight: 55 kg
Place of Origin: Dold Forest
Starting Level: Unknown
Starting Weapon: Unknown
She attacks the force with high class techniques!
The Commander of the Monster Corps, she set off from Guardiana to monitor the movements of the Shining Force, by orders of her direct superior, Darksol. However, angered by the defeat of her "Marionette" built with a piece of her own soul, she went to face the force herself.
She's the only woman in the Runefaust army, but her magical power is among the greatest there!
A real soldier who stick to his principles of justice
Elliot
Occupation: Commander of the Cavalry Corps
Species: Dragonewt
Gender: Male
Age: 231 years old
Height: 255 cm
Weight: 324 kg
Place of Origin: Garth
Starting Level: Unknown
Starting Weapon: Unknown
A brave commander who acts thinking of his country and people!
The highest ranking swordsman in Runefaust. Tales of his deeds as a soldier have reached all the way to the distant Guardiana. While he knows of Darksol's ambitions, he worries for the people in his country, and thus challenges the Shining Force to battle.
He is not a man of many words, but is a genius when it comes to
battles.
_____
A bio-magical beast of unknown species!
Balbazak
Occupation: Commander of the Magical Beast Corps
Species: Unknown
Gender: Male
Age: 79 years old
Height: 193 cm
Weight: 206 kg
Place of Origin: Surgo
Starting Level: Unknown
Starting Weapon: Unknown
Frenzied and merciless! A challenging powerful fighter!!
The Commander of the Magical Beast Corps, who fights with an artificial body, made several times stronger than a normal one by Darksol's magic. He came to Uranbatol, north of Guardiana, to support the invasion of West Rune building a fort. He is the strongest warrior among the Runefaust army's commanders, his fierceness in battle knows no bounds. Even his allies don't know how to deal with him.
[The other guide had no qualms claiming Balbazak was a human. But perhaps that doesn’t matter much anymore when you’ve become a bioweapon of the unholy sciences.]
Dwarves
Muscular warriors who attack with huge axes. Their distinctive beards grow independent of gender, and they strike with superior strength.
Snipers
Masters of the bow who shoot down their prey with surefire accuracy. Their precise, calculated attacks leave opponents at a loss.
Skeletons
Dead warriors brought back to life through magical arts. They attack with fast, hard to follow movements.
Huge Bats
Their strength lies in their fast movements and sharp fangs. They intimidate opponents with their huge wings, creating openings for attacks. Their area of action is very wide.
Dark Mages
Dark mages skilled with magic. Can cast high level spells with the staves in their hands. They have no physical strength, and thus only attack with magic, but since they can strike in a wide area it's tough to approach them.
Armed Skeletons
Skeletons of giants upgraded with machines. They've been remodeled for field battles. The strongest enemy soldiers, built by Darksol with technology of the Ancients.
[This is the only enemy here where I stuck with the localized name, because I can't make sense of their japanese name, ブローバー(buroobaa), and I've yet to see someone who does. As you can see the romanization given here is "biouber" which, ??????]
“But Claire didn’t you have a world book to translate?” Yeah! And then I had to check a tiny detail on another book, and saw something weird, and TCRF wasn’t helpful, so I went down a 140+ page long forum thread and downloaded a ROM editor. It happens. And now you’re gonna hear about it.
So, usually i gloss over the gameplay data on these guide books because I assume people have this information elsewhere already due to hacking and FAQ and the like. That might have been a mistake though, look at this peculiar entry on the encyclopedia’s monster data:
Mephisto
Movement: 6
Weapon: none
Uses Demon Breath. As a boss monster, regenerates HP every turn.
If you don’t know/remember, Mephisto is the JP name of the Shining in the Darkness final boss, later revealed to be Darksol and Mishaela’s kid. Looks like he skipped on helping his dad here.
The encyclopedia notes the HP regen of every other boss, but none use this specific phrasing of “as a boss monster”. This makes me think he was gonna be a boss on some battle, and then a regular enemy later on.
The cut feels understandable to me though, he and Darksol are pretty much identical, no point in having both in a game. And if there was any idea already of establishing a lore/connection between the characters as well, putting him as a regular enemy would ruin that. Given that there’s no artwork to go on, it’s also possible that this was actually a generic demon enemy, and the name was just a coincidence and would be confusing. I kinda doubt this possibility though since there’s plenty of other connections between this game and SitD, at least when it comes to design. Hard to believe they’d forgot or ignore the big bad.
Sadly that’s all the info we have to go on for this guy. I’ve looked over with the editor and found no trace of him. Most I can say is that there are a couple Yogurt placeholders among the enemy map sprites, and a couple unused data entries for Dark Mages. But that could be anything. Unless there’s some oversight with the editor, Mephisto was either fully removed, or never implemented to begin with, and the guide book just published out-of-date info by mistake.
The next monster is the opposite, though
Green Golem
Movement: 4
Weapon: none
Can move on water, and has high attack.
I’m legit afraid that this is an enemy from the game that i just forgot and am embarrassing myself here, because the beast is complete. Graphics, data, you name it.
By graphics I mean it is just a color swap of the regular Golem, as its name implies. Stats wise, it has -3 attack and -2 HP compared to the Golem, meaning it’s an weaker enemy. Makes sense since it’s likely made for the naval battles in chapter 5, while regular Golem debut in chapter 6. Still, with how hard Golems are to hit in the regular game, i’m very glad they did not put a thing with the same defense in the previous chapter.
Well, not that glad. On the other hand, according to the editor...
Its localized name is Weed.
And I kinda need to see this in an actual screenshot right NOW.
I do need to finish this post first. Here’s the last, smaller oddity in the encyclopedia’s monster data:
Storm Rover
Movement: 6
Weapon: Swords
Be careful as it can attack with lightning.
Storm Rover is the JP name for the Shellfish enemy of the naval battle. In the final game they can poison, not attack with lightning. It seems the naval battle went through a lot of changes at some point.
Saying they equip swords is also weird but there’s a lot more mistakes about weapons in this guide, like saying the dragonewts use swords and the conches uses spears, so these might be just mistakes. Anyway still shows that this list is goofed and was probably printed by mistake.
That’s it for enemies, but there’s a few more unused NPC sprites, i think.
I don’t remember any of these in game, but do let me know if i’m wrong, it’s hard to remember all NPCs. I will be kinda mad if the cat is in and i just forgot, given that it’s cute as heck, and cats were my first act of hacking in a Shining game. Why was the SF2 cat not like that to begin with.
Now, on to text data. The thing about text data is that it is a list of 2000+ strings. And even though the event data is beautifully organized in diagrams in this editor, I cannot emphasize enough that it is a very elaborate editor, it’s still tough to sit and comprehend all that, especially in a single day. So I can’t say I have fully checked everything out for now, but you know me by now, i definitely did try. Here’s what I’ve noticed.
Lines 41 and 42 here from Simone’s introduction seem to go unused. To be fair, they don’t add anything.
Alef has a line set up for the boat HQ, even though she isn’t available until after the boat battles. The other late game characters (Torasu, Lyle, Bleu, Musashi, Hanzou, and Adam) all have empty strings for this instead. [Update: I have since investigated and this is an issue in the english version only. Shoutout to whoever in the localization loved Alef very much.]
Khris seems to have a surprised line set up for if you manage to enter Alterone’s castle before the merchant puts in a good word for you, which should not be possible in regular gameplay. [Update: I have since investigated this one too and it can be seen with walk through walls cheats, showing Khris is also in a different position of the map as well. The JP version is even more scandalous.]
Anri also seems to have an extra line to continue to reject Max when they meet for the first time, but from what i recall, Nova immediately comes up to convince her he’s telling the truth. Perhaps you were meant to do something to convince her instead.
Otrant also seems to have a line reacting to Max being turned into chicken, however from what i recall, his room is inaccessible when that happens.
Plenty of other inaccessible NPCs seem to have lines set up for this as well, however they are just reusing lines from the NPCs you do talk to. Those generic lines like “what’s a hen doing here?” and such.
Update: I’m sorry for Spreading Misinformation Online, you can explore all of Manarina as a chicken in this game so these lines are not unused, you can even heal yourself off the chickening by leaving Manarina or entering the next battle. The GBA version fixes this oversight by locking you out of a good chunk of the map so i got confused.
But enough of these minor details. We’re here for deleted content. We’re here for plot lines being dumped in the trash. Bring in the kings.
That’s right baby, it’s Adam and Cain losing plot lines again, it’s not just the localization that did it to them. Ever noticed how Adam do not get the usual “character has joined the force” message, and kinda just appears in your team during the Chaos battle? Yeah, that might have been a hasty fix. There are traces of a bigger scene here with Adam, Darksol and Cain, upon which Adam would join the force with the proper message.
Only a single line of these events has survived, in which Adam urges Max to take the Chaos Breaker. This might mean you would have the sword before fighting Chaos, as the pre-battle dialogue with Chaos is right after this in the data. The remaining lines have been wiped, though the code referring to them remains there along with the code for loading character portraits, which is how we get the handy diagram above.
Unfortunately I don’t know enough of this editor to check if there’s leftover animation data on this cutscene. Sprite data relating to it does seem to be present in the map though, check it out:
does this remind you of something?
:)
put this one in the pile of “the GBA version is just what the devs intended all along” with the others. Granted, “intended” might not be the correct word since they did cut it. Why? Who knows. One possibility I see is that they might have felt a flashback would be confusing, the game doesn’t do any kind of perspective change, unlike the GBA version which does hop between Max, Narsha and Ramladu’s POVs every chapter. While Adam loredumping in the og version might be a more boring way of conveying the plot, it is also more in line with the game’s presentation. A flashback might have also posed technical difficulties, like adding a sepia tone to the screen when no other scene requires it, etc. Though SF2 does have a sepia scene, so if that was the case they figured it out eventually.
Another reason might be that avoiding this scene helps hiding how messy it is. Cain and Chaos get beaten up and corrupted, which makes sense. Max on the other hand also gets beaten up enough to get amnesia, and yet does not get captured or killed, but instead, blown across the ocean??? Somehow???? The GBA version adds the concept that Cain’s armor can warp space and teleport, though seemingly putting a heavy strain on the user’s body. While it’s not explicitly said, we can assume Max’s armor is the same, and that he used it to escape, making his injuries and amnesia not just from Darksol. I’m still connecting a lot of dots on my own here, but it’s something of an explanation, while the classic game had no foreshadowing for this. Even if the deleted dialogue here explained, it would feel more coming out of nowhere.
That’s all speculation though. There might be more clues on unused lines of the japanese version, but i don’t have an editor for that. I have heard tales of a debug mode though, so i’ll look into that. For now i leave you with this monster of a post
Found scans of what I think is the best Shining Force guide in terms of lore, so I’ll be translating and discussing some stuff here for the next days. Let’s start with the two characters you’d expect:
Protagonist [Human]
Class: Swordsman -> Hero
The young hero who faces battles, spurred on by destiny
***
As protagonist of the game, he's the young hero who leads the Shining Force. One year ago, he lost his memory, and was found unconscious by Lowe in the coast near Guardiana. After that, he continued to train his swordsmanship in there. His real identity (?) is descendant of the family entrusted with the duty to protect Dark Dragon's seal.
***
As revealed in the later half of the game, he is the younger brother of Cain from the Runefaust army, and the two were fated to fight Dark Dragon.
The black armor (reinforced clothes?) he wears after changing class to "hero" were designed for this mission, much like Cain's white armor. It seems the armor itself has been among his belongings even when he was still in Guardiana, but before becoming "hero" class, he didn't know how to put it on, and thus could not use it in battle.
_____
Mae [Centaur]
Class: Knight -> Paladin
The crimson fighting spirit galloping through the battlefield! Shining Force's offense captain!
***
The only daughter of Varios, captain of the Guardiana knights. She's very proud of her class and species. At the start she was prejudiced against the protagonist because he was an outsider, but once the castle fell she realized their duty, and vowed to cooperate with him. After that she became the Shining Force's main fighting power.
***
In the game she's the focus of the event with Varios, and thus it isn't mentioned anywhere, but of course, Mae had a mother as well. Her name was Allia, and she was a female knight who fought alongside Varios in her youth. However, she died of an illness when Mae was young.
Her popular (?) strong personality is in part due to having her parents in mind. Ever since she was young, she dreamed of becoming a knight like her mother and helping Varios in battle.
_____
Notes about Max:
The armor thing is a detail mentioned only by this guide, but Max's backstory and family are explained in the original game, the english localization just did away with all of it because it is uh, Bad, to put it mildly.
"My name is Adam...
I am a mechanical soldier created to help you in battle...
You and Master Cain have the blood of the ancients in your veins...
You were fated to fight Dark Dragon since you were born...
Darksol...
He plans to resurrect Dark Dragon, and found out about the both of you.
He schemed to manipulate you in order to obtain the key to the seal and the Book of Secrets.
Master Cain fought to give you a chance to escape... But he was defeated by Darksol...
And you suffered terrible wounds. Because of that you lost even your memory."
[The official translation uses "manual of the seal" for ひでんのしょ, but "Book of Secrets" (used by the GBA version) is a more accurate translation.]
Lowe finding him at the shore is mentioned both in game and in the manual from what I recall, and the interesting thing is, the manual contains a pixel art illustration of Lowe carrying him into Guardiana. It's the only time I've seen a pixel art scene in these extra materials, so I wonder if it was made for an intro in the game itself and got cut.
Notes about Mae:
Mae's initial distaste for Max is also clearer in the japanese version.
“Don’t get too full of yourself just because you’re training with my father. You’re still an outsider!”
Mae talks about her mother in the GBA version, and it matches this backstory perfectly, with extra details on how she became a knight and married Varios. Her name was however changed to Arisa (アリサ in the JP version). I chose to romanize the original name here as Allia to avoid bad implications, but throwing アーリア in the online dictionary gave me a lot of result related to aryan race and similar things, so this might be why they changed it, and I deeply support that change. The new name might also be an homage to Alis of Phantasy Star, but that's just me speculating.
