Ultima 4 Manga
Blu3vib3, one of the contributors at the Codex, dropped me an email to announce her newest project: an effort to scan-late the manga retelling of Ultima 4, with the help of someone with the handle RCapowski (who is handling translation).
Here’s the cover page:
Presented sans comment.
Thus far, she has the first chapter or two uploaded, with more presumably on the way. I haven’t read more than a couple pages myself, but it’s certainly a very…stylized version of the Ultima 4 story from what parts of it I have seen.
It is a neat project, though, and something I’d recommend everyone check out. As some of you Dragons and Dragonettes are no doubt aware, Ultima had a very strong and interesting following in Japan for a number of years, which resulted in the creation of all sorts of interesting bits of content, far beyond just video games.
40 years of reading comics and I have yet to find a single manga or anime that makes any damn sense.
I hesitate to venture the following thought, but perhaps it is the case that manga is not meant to make sense.
I’m pretty sure the token furry companion and futanari villain will show up in subsequent chapters. It resembles one of those obnoxious Japanese cartoons complete with it’s own Pokemon type pet and useless damsel in distress character ( Iolo or rather Io ) who has a crush on the hero.
Oh, and Mr. Julia the Tinker… sheesh.
My little brother … AN AVATAR!?
manga … ugh
I forgot for a moment these are read right to left. Anyway, it’s always interesting to see what Ultima related things are out there.
Just a corrective note for the article: Blu3vib3 is a she, not a he.
As a fan of anime and manga since my high school days, it’s exciting to see this find the light of day. After all, it was the FCI/Pony Canyon port of Ultima IV on the NES that brought me to the series.
WtF, please nuke my comment if it blasphemes the sanctity of IP, though I think it’s okay to pass around this sort of material as it’s deader than a horse beaten half-way to China.
Ultima III: Exodus Japanese soundtrack (Kyoufu no Exodus):
http://darknut.com/?p=20110122-Exodus
http://www.ultima.rabbitslair.de/ultima3_mix.htm
http://www.eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/ultima/music/
Of course the very idea of IP has a way of striking fear into the hearts of otherwise good people, so who knows. Anyway…
While anime and manga are of a vastly different culture than that of our familiar Europe and the Americas, similarly a lot of it is crap and a lot of it is awesome, too. I grew up on manga by Rumiko Takahashi, Katsuhiro Otomo, Masamune Shirow and my favorite Hayao Miyazaki who drew Nausicaä. Miyazaki used hatching and cross hatching, his work almost appearing as etchings in wax or wood like Escher or the like.
Unlike traditional American “comics”, these are generally works by single artists with singular visions. They’re not factory made, passed from manager to manager with a slew of underlings to do menial things like “drawing”. So despite all that crazy garbage that comes from Japan, as it does from everywhere else on the planet, I object to the comments about the medium in general.
I also kinda dig the art style in the cover. Reminds me a bit of the Ys IV character design mixed with Leiji Matsumoto’s stuff.
Sanctimonia: I might shy away from personally hosting any files you link to, but I don’t automatically refuse to link to stuff because there’s a chance it might violate copyright. I keep it at arms’ length, is all. (You’ll note that I still link to both of the canned Flash-based Ultima 4 remakes, even though there’s nothing at either destination.)
On that note: thanks for the music links! I’ll also check out your portraits video here; it’ll likely be news for later.
Dominus: You are probably right about whether this project is ultimately a copyright violation or not. and like you I suspect it is. So while I don’t mind having the cover page saved locally to use as a preview image, I won’t be hosting any additional files from the effort.
Of course, I also don’t know what Japanese copyright laws are like in regard to this issue, so for all I know this effort won’t land anyone in hot water at all. I really need to see about finding a couple of lawyerly Dragons and inviting them to post comments here.
Terilem: Thanks for that; I’ll correct accordingly.
Blu3vib3: Relatedly, my apologies.
Correction to my own (awaiting moderation) post:
When I said, “After all, it was the FCI/Pony Canyon port of Ultima IV on the NES that brought me to the series,” I meant “Ultima III” not “Ultima IV”. My bad.
I appreciate Blu3vib3’s work, but this manga is a streaming pile of shit, like all Ultima mangas. Their writer(s) must have been really high when he/they wrote it.
Extended chuckles. Streaming pile of shit is a new one for me. Like YouTube but with incremental delivery. Awesome.
But in all seriousness, are there other Ultima manga? I also heard there was an anime.
Enjoy my favorite song from Ultima III on the NES. Not the weird Japanese soundtrack version, but the chip tune from the actual NES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR2w0MN-rFU
I’ve also fulfilled the promise of providing a video of the recent additions to the facial feature library.
Hmmm… anime may not be to everyone’s taste, but to generically state, “all manga suck”, is as ridiculous as stating “all Renaissance artists suck”, or “all rock music sucks”. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean there aren’t some inspired and excellent works to be found in the genre. Even if this may not be one of them. 😛
There are actually four Ultima manga. You can find more details on the Ultima wiki there:
http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Ultima_Manga
Exodus notably sounds batshit crazy.
It’s nice to see some scanlation of this, I’d love if somewhere down the road there would be a translated version of all the Ultima manga, albeit that seems unlikely 😛
In any case it does demonstrate how popular Ultima was in Japan back then. A lot of people don’t know this, but Ultima really was Yuji Hori’s main influence when he imagined Dragon Quest (which in turn inspired Square to create Final Fantasy) – so Ultima really was the granddaddy of JRPG as much as CRPGs. Of course this is also why so many Ultima were ported to consoles and they created its own consoles subseries with Runes of Virtue.
I don’t believe there ever was an anime based on Ultima. There was plan for an animated film based on UO2 a decade ago, but nothing from Japan AFAIK.
@Sanctiomnia – I gotta I never could stand the music of the NES version of Exodus: it just hurts my hears! I like the music of the NES Ultima IV though…
Yes, calling all mangas bad because of the few one saw is ridiculous. There are awesome mangas and there are bad mangas.
Nice to see those, though I have to say this is without doubt a big copyright violation. Wtf, better not host these on your site…
I don’t think posting about this is a crime but scanning those books and offering them for download is one without a doubt…
And sorry to post ot again, but could you add a “subscribe to these comments/blog” for logged in users? Itend forget to check the “notify me of followup…” and this would be nice so I don’t need to post something like this to get subscribed 😉
Dominus: What happened with the subscription plugin is that WordPress 3.1.x breaks it.
I’ve installed a new version; let me know if the functionality has returned.
This is evil!
Anime is the enemy!
Doesn’t anyone remember having Ultima vs Final Fantasy arguments in the past? Not only has Final Fantasy now outlasted Ultima, but Ultima has been anime-ed! The horror!
I am excited about this! I picked up the Ultima manga the last time I went Yahoo Japan auction crazy and have been waiting for someone to translate it.
I have been jealous of Ultima fans forever about all the cool (if bizarre) Japanese stuff. I’d trade anything to find secret Wing Commander comics in some foreign country.
There’s no doubt a scanlation is a copyright violation, altough it seems unlikely this would lead to troubles for the translators… because I’m not even sure the publisher JICC still exists.
As a matter I’m not even sure who would hold the copyright of this stuff.
Capowski and I actually agree with the analysis that this manga is pretty awful (Reading her original translation is somewhat akin to seeing this MST3K style). Still, I think that its an interesting piece of Ultima history that has long been inaccessible to a non-Japanese audience, and when I stopped getting so hung up on how *wrong* everything was, I found the narrative sort of enjoyable – in a campy, so bad its good, kind of way.
The “Terror of Exodus” manga (which I someday hope to tackle) is honestly worlds better, albeit just as wackily divergent from cannon.
@LOAF – Well Wing Commander didn’t had some crappy obscure manga but it had an animated series, a movie (I liked both :P) and novels!
Which reminds me I need to get they Lynn Abbey Ultima novel someday
We do have some neat stuff! Even a few Japan-only ports (FM Towns, PC9801 and so on) of Wing Commander games… but they aren’t anywhere near as fascinating as things like the full speech Ultima 6!
I wish I was a crazy enough Ultima fan to tackle the Japanese stuff. Especially the CCG–doing the (American) Wing Commander one back in the day was one of my favorite things ever.
I finally picked up the Lynn Abbey Ultima novels last summer–she was signing books at Dragon*Con and I figured what the hey. I haven’t actually read them yet, but they’re… in my pile.
Well the Full Speech Sega-CD version of Wing Commander I is almost as fascinating to as the Full Speech Ultima 6… though it had the merit of also being released to the US. (In a way it’s weird they never released an “Enhanced CD version” for PC with this stuff)
I wonder how the speech sounds in that one though. It can’t be as bad as Super Wing Commander’s speech… (or can it ?)
Speaking of which SWC is one of this stuff to make an Ultima fan jealous too – I mean we never really had such a full blown remake of any Ultima game! I which I could have played it when it got release, I think it would have became my definitive WC1 version (I played the Mac version on an Emulator when I found a used copy last year – it was pretty neat but it just doesn’t have the charm the KS version has. Haven’t completed it yet either actually… playing with Keyboard was kinda painful :P)
Finally!!
Now if only I could find the NES Ultima IV Cluebook, that is also done as a manga… which I have seen no mention of anywhere.
Good point about the SegaCD version. The speech is better than Super Wing Commander… but, and I say this as Wing Commander’s biggest apologist, what speech isn’t?
The SegaCD version was done under license by someone else, Origin may never have had the assets to put into an updated Wing Commander I. Wing Commander II, though, was designed to let them slot in full speech easily… they just never recorded it.
(Erin Roberts has a story about doing the full speech Privateer CD that may explain why Origin’s talkie games were so random. Apparently the game was cancelled and resumed over and over during its (fairly short) development–sometimes multiple times in one day. It was becoming so stressful for the team that he decided to stop checking his messages and finish it regardless of what the folks in charge decided.)
(There is another finished full speech game out there–Pacific Strike CD was done but never released. Origin was VERY strict with their budgets by 1994 and it had some odd effects, like that one, Bioforge Plus and the unreleased Wing Commander 2 SNES being finished but not published because the numbers suggested they’d just lose money. It boggles the mind that they never put them out as cheap ‘classics’ CDs years later… and now they’re lost.)
(I think maybe your Super Wing Commander is the Playstation Ultima Underworld–that’s a weird fancy remake, right? Kilrathi Saga’s sales probably did doom the Ultima Collection to being a shovelware package, though… so, sorry about that. :))
@LOAF – It’s crazy this number of completed stuff never released. I kinda wonder if the Enhanced CD Version of Ultima VIII was not amongst it as well since there were evidence voice recording had been done, and I would have expected it to be planned roughly at the same time as the Lost Vale which we knew for a fact had been completed.
And yeah… I’m not sure I could name voice acting worse than SWC (I think my favorite part’s gotta be the killed ennemy count after each “Maverick, you have destroyed FOUR ennemy craft” with the number said in a completly different voice :P), though what I’ve heard of the FM Towns version is probably quite close in term of badness. This actually baffles me SWC sounds so bad, because other talkies Origin games were generally decent as far as speech went.
I’d really need to check out the Sega CD version just for kicks 😛 I like trying out odd versions of old classics.
I wouldn’t call the PSX version of UW1 a “fancy remake”, it was pretty much a straight port – graphics for the most parts just reused the PC assets even – except that for some reason they replaced the 2D sprite based NPSs and monsters with butt-ugly 3D models.
SWC though was very much a complete reimagination… it had a completly different eathetic wheter for characters, ships designs, the inside of the Claw and also dropped the whole colored feel of the original for something which I guess is more consisted with later WC games. I was amused to see some Privateer assets reused actually (That’s not a Salthi, that’s the weird Retro hybrid ship from Righteous Fire!). And it had its new Secret Mission 1.5 campain (even if I’m baffled they didn’t include Secret Mission 2 in it) which is the main reason I really should complete SWC someday.
If I hadn’t been a broke teenager back then, I could probably have bought a 3DO solely to play SWC – I’ve always a big WC nut even if not as as much as an Ultima nut (or else I guess I’d be doing a fan based WC game and not an Ultima). I was very pissed when SWC came to the Mac but never on the PC.
It’s really a shame Kilrathi Saga didn’t sell well, because it really was an awesome compilation. I think I bought it around the time Secret Ops was being released online on some obscure NZ videogame shop (my copy has a big “Do no sell outside NZ or Australia sticker”) and that was certainly worse every penny. I really admired that they went to the trouble of improving the game and not just put a compilation of the DOS Versions. LucasArts did a similar thing with X-Wing and Tie Fighter (a “XWing Collector Series” compilation which included remakes of both games with CD music and graphics using the improved XvT engine)… but I think it sold poorly as well. Alas I don’t think they’ve ever been doing a lot of these improved port/remake stuff… altough it seems to be coming back with XBLA/PSN and those HD PS2 games.
Super Wing Commander was a strange project all around. I bet there’s a story to be told about how it came about (you just know that at least one person must have been pretty unhappy with EA tasking the studio with developing for Trip Hawkins’ game console…). I spoke to one of the artists recently and he mentioned that he was specifically told not to look at the ships in Wing Commander I–hard to figure what they were going for. (The Salthi model actually started life in Super Wing Commander… and if you dig into Righeous Fires’ TRE files it’s actually SALTHI.IFF.)
I’m pretty sure the decision to drop Secret Missions 2 in Super Wing was all Chris Roberts, though. He’s the reason you never really see the “Firekkans” again outside of mentions in manuals and novels–he wasn’t happy with the ‘all the aliens look like Terran animals!’ trend.
SWC never made it out for the PC because EA was adamant that it was going to sell 3DOs for Trip. I guess it did sell me one… damn!
I bet your Kilrathi Saga has the cool ‘spiral bound’ manual? I think that was an Australian exclusive.
(I never liked the last X-Wing and TIE Fighter updates–I hated reading the music off of the CD and losing the interactive MIDI… and the textures just seemed to muddy up the really clean lines. For my money the best version is TIE Fighter as it was released initially and the CD update of X-Wing they did around that time with the TIE Fighter shading added.)
yes, you can now subscribe, the downside is that
– you receive an email for confirming the subscription even if you check the mark when you write something
– the follow up email and the subscription confirmation mail come from “WtF Dragon ” instead of “Ultima Aiera ” as it used to.
Okay, I’ll look into it. New plugin, new config…I probably missed something(s).
How about now?
I’d definitly be curious as to how SWC come to exist. But I’m really puzzled that it came to MAC though. I mean who did games for Mac especially then ? 😛 (*waits for WtF to cite Bungie and Monolith*) And the Macintosh doesn’t strike me as a logical market for Wing Commander games. I can see the theory of wanting SWC as some kind of big 3DO exlusive… but a Mac Port: what the eck ?!
I can’t say I miss the Firekkas though, they did look silly! But what was cool about Crusade is that it introduced Hobbes as well as Jazz and Doomsday (altough my understanding it that SWG introdces these two as well). They could probably have put it in it without ever having us see the Firekkas methinks. Oh well.
Regarding XW and Tie Fighter I kinda agree. I think the graphical update were really an improvement personally… but I do miss the interactive music. This is even more true for TIE Fighter which unlike X-Wing used a lot of completly original music and themes. I’d love to be somehow able to have the Collector Series improved graphics but with the original soudtracks. Perhaps this could be modded in somehow, but the XW community was always stuck on woriking with XWA and nothing else.
I do like that LucasArts kept upgrading the X-Wing games however. You mentionned how the CD version of X-Wing brought the Gouraud Shading from Tie Fighter, but the CD version of Tie Fighter also improved the graphics by offering a SVGA graphics mode which was neat (that and of course it included the second addon pack which was never released on disk).
I’d love a new X-Wing kind of game too 🙁
I got a mail update and it still didn’t come with the [Ultima Aiera] bit.
For all the talk about “Secret Missions 1.5” being another story it actually reuses big chunks of SM2–all the elements that lead into Wing Commander II are still there (Bossman dies, Hobbes defects, Spirit’s fiancee goes missing and so on). (They had hoped to do a Super Wing Commander 2.)
Origin supposedly saw some success with the Mac ports, which had a seemingly alien sales strategy in the mid-1990s (Mac games didn’t have big product launches like PC games… but instead would guarantee more steady sales numbers over a longer time). All three of the Macintosh Wing Commanders were done affordably by an initially Mac-specific company called Lion Entertainment. Lion was in Austin and employed lots of former Origin people and the two groups got along very well. (Other outsider console ports didn’t really have anything to do with Origin directly–either they’d sell the license to develop a port outright like the SNES and Sega WCs or Electronic Arts would assign a port to a specialized team somewhere else, like WC3 PSX.)
There was a Macintosh port of System Shock, too, and I believe they did some work on a Mac UO client early on.
Interesting. So basically you could say the “Secret Mission 1.5” is just a whole big retcon of Crusade. I certainly wouldn’t have minded a SWC2! (Had it been done I wonder if they’d have renamed Armstrong as Blair in this one since it would have come out after WC3 :P). BTW how does SWC actually controls on the 3DO? You mentionned how WC3 basically adapted the gameplay and made it more arcadish and controller friendly, but was this true of SWC or did it had the same sort of “clumsyness” the SNES and PSX ports had ?
I didn’t know Mac ports worked actually… well actually I didn’t know there were other Wing Commander ported for Mac :P. I guess it makes sense a way that Mac versions would bring a steadier income on account that well… the Mac didn’t have as many games coming out as PC so they would sell longer in time.
Oh and forgot to answere this bit, but yeah my Kilrathi Saga manual is spiral bound, it was really cool :D. I liked the way they did WC manuals most of the time in any case, altough it was somewhat underwhelming that WC2 and WC4 didn’t have the equivalent of the Clawmark manuals. I loved how this basically put you straight in the universe just like the Ultima manuals.
@wtf, concerning subscriptions, comment update email is from ultima aiera again and I didn’t get a confirmation mail for subscribing to a news entry. BUT the page where you confirm that you want to subscribe is a bit OFF. It features the confirmation with my email, then the u4 cluebook scans news, then your “My CV”, then another news item and slowly loading didn’t scroll down…
Yeah, seems to be an issue with how it generates that page. I’m…hmmn. I’ll see if I can cook up a workaround, but that one is a bona-fide stumper. I’ll probably have to dig through the PHP code to see what he did wrong, or what the heck is causing my page template to do that.
Update: I think I figured it out. How’s it look from your end?
Yeah–SM1.5 tells a different basic story (the Tiger’s Claw is hunting down the shipyards that built the Sivar dreadnaught) but they work most of the same plot-by-description into it.
The Armstrong thing is bizarre–the two games were in development at the same time… you can even see some test footage from Wing Commander III that is on the 3DO disc for some reason if you play it through the debug menu. That aside, though, they’d been calling the character Blair as early as 1992 internally…
Super Wing Commander on the 3DO is much smoother than the SNES port, but it suffers from the same refusal to simplify the controls. You’re still stuck needing to remember elaborate button combos to do necessary things (like request permission to land). (The 3DO had its own version of the Flightstick Pro that was pretty much identical to the PC joystick… if you have one of those, both games are vastly improved.)
Not sure what happened with the manuals on 2 and 4. I *know* there’s a story behind the Wing Commander 4 manual, which is clearly a last minute job (even the sample from the novel it came with is bizarre, the text is different from the published book in strange ways). It’s one of those things I never remember to ask anyone–Origin had some strange editorial requirements at times.
(Take the Privateer manual! There was always something off about it–it has that huge prose story in the middle that’s pages and pages of text and all the illustrations were screenshots from the game… then a few years back we found a folder of artwork and correspondence. Origin had initially paid an outside artist to do the whole thing in the Claw Marks style–line drawings of the ships and weapons, sketches of the action to go with the text story and so on… all the work was done and then they just dropped the whole thing at the last minute for some reason.)
Since someone mentioned that Ultima III’s music sucked on the NES, which I strongly disagree with, here is an example from Ultima IV for the NES. Overall, I think its music was far worse, but this song is excellent:
http://www.eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/ultima/music/
Ultima IV, by FCI. Arranged by Kevin Fishburne for a Roland SC-88, which was later arranged for LMMS with infinite SoundFonts.
Yeah that was me about the U3NES music 😛 Altough to be fair the horrific NES sound chip doesn’t help.
Well I’ll give that it’s better than U5 NES’ only music track!
I think U4 NES is one of the rare NES game I can stand playing, altough U3 was admitedly closed to its PC counterpart.
Hey, thanks Sanctimonia! Those actually sounds pretty neat when they’re not coming from an NES. I’ve never seen those files before.
You’re welcome. I collect video game music like dragons collect treasure. So far I have 1481 complete soundtracks, 119 PC Engine CD soundtracks and OverClocked ReMixes 1-1900 for a total of 248 GB of music.