Neocities.org

kind of a big update today, feel i should start noting what i did in times like this, so: 1) added a few more retranslated scenes (the intro, the dialogue with Darksol at the start of Chapter 8, and the epilogue). I feel that with this the whole main plot is retranslated, all that's left is NPC and more filler-y battles, and I'm unsure if i wanna commit to all that.

2) added the volume 2 of the Shining Force Neo manga to the list of things i desperately want scans for, the first volume is already scanned and picked my interest. or a lesser note, i couldn't even find the JP manual of this game, which is kinda sad. I don't care too much about it, but stuff should be preserved, you know? 3) added a few links to translated scenes where was relevant, minor stuff

Excellent work! I'm really starting to realise how little of the localisation actually adds up the more I play like the king of Alterone's dialogue making no sense ("you promised that Alterone would not be involved" when he had already directly involved himself) and its wild how much dialogue is just nearly the opposite of what the original script is. Just finished up the bit with Otrant in my playthrough.

Out of curiosity, any ideas about Otrant's gender? It seems in the English localisation the NPCs refer to them as he/him but their face looked more androgynous/femme to me (not that that inherently means not male of course, after all I'm a femboy) and I noticed you used they/them pronouns in the notes. Are they more ambiguous or enby in terms of gender in the Japanese script?

Otrant's gender is a bit more ambiguous yes, mostly because it's easier to avoid pronouns in JP. A few of their speech patterns do come off as masculine, and I just noticed their name is in blue in the manual (yes the names are color coded for gender). However, they are never referred to explicitly as a man and clearly use lipstick, which is peculiar in a series usually far more stereotypical with its genders.

so i'd argue Otrant is either a gnc man or a wonky attempt at writing a gender-neutral character, so I've been using neutral language to be safe. I have seen japanese players be confused at their gender as well, so I don't think I'm misreading anything.

another thing worth noting is that Shining Force 2 has a few characters listed as genderless/unknown in the encyclopedia, despite using even more masculine language. So this may be a case of writers using masculinity as neutral (this series is unfortunately not that great to women). Though those characters are also non-human, so the gender unknown could be more of a physical thing