– Sheexy is busy today, but he told me to tell you about these neat deals. First there is this Seiken Densetsu 3 Prologue Book, it has a lot of nice Seiken Densetsu 3 art in it, as well as the cards required for the Seiken Densetsu 3 Card Games.
There are also two Seiken Densetsu 3 Basic Guides (One, Two) that come with a lot of neat art that isn’t in the Prologue book.
That’s all! See you next week!

Just so no one thinks I’m going to ignore the Bestiary again for another year after saying I’d work on it, here is proof I’m working:

Elemental Enemies, Eyes, Golems, and Griffin Hands are all up-to-date now.

I also found I completed two more before than I thought I had, so the official count is 34 done 28 to go.

I want to give a huge shout out to Nick, nick912012 on the forums and news comments, for getting me the Sword of Mana and Children of Mana sprites for the Bestiary! They’re not in there yet, but I’ll get them added when I add the information for those games into the pages. Thanks man!

Today I walked on a different road to get to school.

Different Road – Hiroki Kikuta
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So, it’s been a year and 8 days since I said I started up on the big Bestiary Overhaul I’ve had planned… and it’s still gotten nowhere.

The problems with the Bestiary are as follows:

• Broken images everywhere due to the gallery being moved.
• SwoM, CoM, DoM and HoM aren’t mentioned on most of the pages.
• Anchor tags need to be added into every mention of monsters.
• I am incredibly lazy.

That’s a lot of work considering how many pages there are, but I’ve got 27 of the pages completed now, and only 34 more to go, so that isn’t really that bad. The “finished” pages do not, however, have summaries of the monsters from SwoM, CoM, DoM and HoM. They only list the monsters, and that’s all they will do for a while.

But I have a new plan for this section:

I will get as many of these pages as I can to a “finished” version of themselves and then upload whatever I have done at the end of each week until each of them no longer contain the problems I listed above.
After that, since they will still not have summaries from SwoM, CoM, DoM and HoM I will go through them each in alphabetical order and add all the necessary details, fix a few bits and bobs here and there, and even add in new information I’ve learned from the monsters from the Japanese guides. I plan to do one of these a week, and not all the pages will need this treatment.

Anyway, just letting you all know that the Bestiary isn’t dead, even though I’ve ignored it for over a year.

Also… I need to do the merchandise section… but that’ll come a bit later.

– Alright, let’s go guys!

– What, what is it? Is the server on fire?

– Hey, that’s not funny, that actually happened one time, remember? You are hereby banished from Shopping Channel updates for today, go on, get out of here!

– Look Sheexy I found this Legend of Mana Postcard Book, I can stay right?

– Yeah Neko, you can stay. That’s a pretty rare find too, nice! Here is a Secret of Mana Poster/Map that is pretty cheap right now. Or you can get the Nintendo Power Secret of Mana Poster if you’re into that sort of thing.

– You can also buy the Secret of Mana Nintendo Power Issue where they first talk about the game. Keep in mind it doesn’t have the Secret of Mana poster though.

– Well, that’s actually all we have this week, eh Neko?

– Yeah, things are kind of slow. Please check the older Shopping Channel updates if you want to find more deals that might still be around.

Today’s news starts with a little lesson about what Seiken Densetsu means. Most of you will already know this, but for those who don’t let me enlighten you.

To the right is the Japanese logo for Sword of Mana, or Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu as it is known in Japan. The two little Kanji at the top are “shinyaku” together, which means “New Testament,” but that isn’t important. What we are looking at is the main part “seiken densetsu”.
There are four Kanji, “sei” means holy, “ken” means sword, and the final two together, “densetsu” mean Legend. So basically we can say it means Legend of the Holy Sword.

Now let’s look at the logo for the original Seiken Densetsu. Not the one you know and love as Final Fantasy Adventure or Final Fantasy Mystic Quest though. The game for the NES that was cancelled and really had nothing to do with the Mana series we know and love today. It was going to be more similar to Final Fantasy following a turn-based fighting system, and was to be released on the Famicom Disk System. But that never happened and the name was eventually used for a new game Square was making for the Gameboy, known as “Gemma Knights,” which is the first Mana game we know today. But I digress, onto the logo:

See that, “Emergence of Excalibur” there? That’s important here too. The Seiken Densetsu series has taken a few lines out of the various stories surrounding this legendary and maybe even holy sword.

First off is that in Final Fantasy Adventure, both in the Japanese and English versions the Rusty Sword does not turn into the Mana Sword, but rather it turns into Excalibur (XCalibur in the English due to limited typespace).

Secondly is that sometimes Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone are referred to as the same weapon. Secret of Mana puts the Mana Sword squarely into a stone at the beginning of the game.

So where am I going here?

For those of you who can’t read it, in the big characters known as Katakana it reads “Excalibur” and the Kanji below it you may recognize as reading “Seiken Densetsu,” so this is “Excalibur: Legend of the Holy Sword”.

Now look at that thing, it’s ancient, you can tell because it’s on VHS and no one uses that anymore. Who knows what mysteries could be locked away in this tape? Could it hold the secrets to “Seiken Densetsu: Emergence of Excalibur” and what that game was like? Could it be an anime retelling the story of Final Fantasy Adventure? Well, I’ve seen the contents of the tape and I will reveal all, continue reading to uncover the mystery of this tape.

Read the rest of this entry »

Heroes of Mana has some seriously amazing musical tracks in it.

Take this boss music for example, it’s pretty epic and it also incorporates the game’s main theme into it. That’s pretty neat I think, though I haven’t the slightest idea what the title is supposed to mean. Enjoy!

Time for the Mark to Ruin – Yoko Shimomura
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– Ok guys, the rule this week is no picking out items we picked last week, ok?

– Like this Complete Secret of Mana with free shipping?

– Good find, Mr. Moti! That’s a heck of a deal too!

– What about this Seiken Densetsu 3 Prologue Book with Seiken Densetsu Cards?

– It’s kind of expensive, but I applaud your effort Neko. If you can’t get enough of Legend of Mana pick up this Ultimania Guide full of more information than you’ll know what to do with!

– This Secret of Mana + CD is a lot cheaper than you can usually find it for! And… I guess that’s it?

– Yeah… not much new on eBay. If you read back through the old Shopping Updates you’ll find a lot of the items we listed there are still up for grabs though!

– Quality over quantity right? I think we listed some neat things this time. See you all next week.

– “See you all next week” aaaand?

– … and I’m still a cat.

– There we go.

Whoops, with me on dial-up and Kassidy in Spain the Mana Music Monday update for last week just never happened. But never fear, I’m back on a decent connection! Let the music updates continue!

Maker’s Gallop – Yoko Shimomura
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Possible updates from me later, but my summer course has ended up having homework everyday, so we’ll see how that goes.

– This is it guys, the last time I’ve gotta do this update on dial-up for a while. Let’s get this over as quick and painlessly as we can.

-If you like dancing to music I’ve got some CDs for you! Here is the Sword of Mana Premium Soundtrack, it comes with the original music from the game and a bunch of the game music played on Piano by Kenji Ito! This Legend of Mana Soundtrack comes with two CDs with all the game music, and this Seiken Densetsu Three Soundtrack has three!

– It’s a bit more expensive than the others, but you can also buy this Final Fantasy Adventure Sound Collections Soundtrack. It has all of the original gameboy music as well as an orchestrated collection of most of the tracks.

– If your room needs some pizazz you can spruce it up with a nice poster! They come in both the Sword of Mana and Children of Mana varieties.

– Get Legend of Mana and play it! You can come visit me in Polpota and watch me get scared by a ghost!

– Here is a good idea for you: buy a Complete Japanese copy of Secret of Mana and a Japanese Basic Adventure Guide to go with it!

– Why is that a good idea?

– I dunno, maybe someone else out there is a collector like me.

– I doubt it! Considering most weeks you’re shilling the same stuff!

– Hey, well they’re still good deals! Gotta get them out there for people to see them!

– See you all next week, when we do the exact same thing again.

– Hey! Oh snap, did I miss the music update this week? That’ll return next week!