Japanese vs. American manuals

That's the late 90s for you. Yeah probably the japanese one is a lot more tasteful.

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>>3506942
Compared to this, with nice hand drawn portraits (they really liked showing off awful CG in the 90s), beautiful fonts, complimentary colors, tasteful use of effects. Overall so much more care and taste were put in Japanese manuals.

>>3506942
Well, if I'm being honest, I don't believe many younger individuals at the time really noticed or cared much, so you can't blame the companies.

>>3506952
I'm sure kids didn't care but that's a bad excuse for doing a worse job.

>>3506942
cool futuristic graphics

>>3506948
gay anime shit

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Black and white with an excel spreadsheet.

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>>3507005
Full color with a beautiful portrait frame.

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Western manuals blow Eastern manuals away no contest. You will never find a Japanese game that has a manual with as much love and care into it as a game like Fallout, Arcanum, or Baldur's Gate.

>>3507016
>claims to contain 101 ways to cook a rat
>it dosen't
shit manual desu senpai

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>>3507016
You have to get some meaty J-PC CRPGs if you want detailed manuals with world backstory and humor. There's at least a few examples of this happening back when money flowed more freely in their boom economy.

>>3507059
Well beefy manuals in the 80s and early 90s aren't something uncommon in the west or east. And that's for a simple reason, it saved space on the floppy. Some of those manuals and story books were pretty cheeky too. Like for example irc Wasteland has a fake plot in the manual if you tried to read the dialogues from it without in-game references.

>>3506942
>>3506948
>>3507005
>>3507006
Konami is a terrible example as they have always cheaped out on their localizations. Another good example from them is the Contra Shattered Soldier booklet. The Japanese version had a short manga that wasn't in the localized version.

>>3507016
Baldur's Gate's manual is like 200 pages isn't it? Might and Magic also had a bunch of great manuals written completely in character.

>>3507086
BG2 manual is mostly the same flavor text you'll find in the game menus along with dozes of pages of spell stats taken from a d&d handbook.

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>>3507016

Behold, my favorite manual of all time. There's no good pictures of it on the internet - I'll get around to buying it again sometime. The manual-manual is fine, but Wings also came with a completely original, fairly sizable book about World War I aviation history and famous pilots and their stats, all kinds of awesome stuff. When I was a kid I read mine until it was dog-eared.

>>3507126
>Wings
Is that the wwI flight game with the third person view that had a pilot with a scarf? I loved that shit!

It's a product of the era, western computer games sometimes had gorgeous manuals and "feelies" because the target audience was older and had more money to pay the extra few bucks for the extra material.

Besides I think Japanese lost their shit over early era CGI like Americans did.

>>3507016
it's just a black and white text dump detailing 100+ functions of the keyboard

I remember loving the shit out of the Diablo 2 manual. It described every class like it was a story upon itself, and each and ever move you can learn had a backstory to it and how it functions written through the lore of the character that can use it.

>>3507005

I hated this shit about PS1 (and Sega games too), manuals were always in black and white.

>>3507450
Worse were the European mega drive manuals, which had on each page 1 English paragraph, 1 spanish paragraph, 1 Italian paragraph...

The books would be really thick but only 1 english paragraph per double page spread.

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Colorful, stylized art with cool concept designs.

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>>3507887
Black and white Windows 95 clip art.

>>3506942
>>3506948
The American one is a more realistic depiction of the overall quality of the game. The Japanese one is fantastical bullshit that doesn't represent the game very well at all, but it's prettier so I guess that's nice.

>>3507905
That's the point. So the Japanese one is better.

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best manual, american of course

>>3507890
YOU SAID THERE WOULD BE GOOD MANUALS EGGMAN

>>3507069
It served the purpose of copy protection.
Text doesn't take up a lot of space on a disk. Adding another disk when necessary was cheaper than printing the text.

>>3507905
Pretty much this. I'd much rather see what I'm buying than see what the developers are trying to depict.

>>3507917
So you like a manual that doesn't show what the actual game is like? Okay....

>>3507961
>>3507967
No dumbys, I'd rather have printed material that is pleasant to look at and read, with attractive art. I don't care how it reflects on the game. The Japanese manuals are better.

>>3507976
Then buy an art book to look at. It's a fucking manual for a game, it's job is to show you how to play the game. One that shows you what the game actually looks like is objectively better than something filled with a bunch of concept art that barely looks like the game. If you want pretty pictures there are far better places to go looking for them than manuals.

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OH BOY DID SOMEONE SAY AMERICAN MANUALS

>>3508000
Victor Ireland is a piece of shit.

>>3507976
Oh, so you're literally autistic

>>3507996
/thread

I suppose now these days kids are used to playing the manual.

>>3506942
Japs really gave a shit back in the 80s and 90s. I remember getting Ex-Ranza via Die Hard Gamefan import (when Julie was still there taking orders). The case had a beautiful handrawn painting of a mecha, complete with a gorgeous, full color manual. When Sega brought it stateside, it looked like the cover was drawn by the janitor and the manual was a Xerox'd black and white mess. This wasn't the only example either. Quo Vadis, Macross 2036, Dracula X, Front Mission Gunhazard, all had exceptional art and packaging.

>>3507996
Poor excuse for putting in a half-assed job.

>>3507996
Is there any evidence that the American manual does a better job at that?
The comment was a jab that the manual looks like shit is fitting since the game is shit.

>>3508056
Showing what the game actually looks like isn't a half assed job, it's doing the job correctly.

>>3508061
OP's post.

>>3508061
>since the game is shit.
Nah.

>>3508071
Those two pages don't seem that representative.
The game doesn't look like those renders.
Op didn't just criticize the art but also the page composition.

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>>3507016
The PC88/MSX2 Snatcher manual says hi. The Metal Gear 2 manual was ridiculously detailed with lore and development info.

Outside Kojima's early work, Tengen's Japanese manuals weren't so much instruction manuals as they were the equivalent of liner notes with plenty of development info. The Radiant Silvergun was incredibly detailed with development info.

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>>3507082
>Konami is a terrible example as they have always cheaped out on their localizations.
At least their localizations were not as bad during fifth gen (PS1/N64) as they were back in third gen/early fourth gen, where they would make up shit that wasn't established in the Japanese version and shoehorn in lame jokes.

I didn't know Venom Snake changed his Vermon CaTaffy later in his life?

>>3508119
Which one was it that had Highrolla Cockamamie or whatever?

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I miss those game boy manuals. They balanced information and length

>>3508071
>thinking the game manual needs to correlate to the quality of the game

Who's autistic again?

>>3508253
I told my boss at work "This thing's instructions are written in chinglish. It'll cause us nothing but problems" two years ago.

The machine he bought as been causing us problems for two fucking years.

>>3508027
>Oh, so you're literally autistic

Oh, here comes Autismo-guy

>>3508183
That was snake's revenge on the NES.

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>>3508183
That would be Snake's Revenge, the NES sequel to Metal Gear that was never released in Japan, which I'm assuming got canceled when Kojima decided to do Metal Gear 2 on the MSX2.

Speaking of which, the back of the box mentions Snake's two dead buddies, but nothing about this is ever brought up in game. I would assume they meant John and Nick, but they only die in the middle of the game and only one of them is confirmed dead (the other is captured and simply never seen again).

Also, they weren't allowed to use the Metal Gear name on the promotional material for some reason. In the box and manual, they simply refer to it as the "Ultra-Sheik Nuclear Attack Team", not to be confused with Sheik Toxic Moron from Laser Invasion.

this threads they come and go.

>>3509835
das how we do

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Double Dragon III manual
>Japanese version: cool ass manga prologue followed by gameplay tutorials provided by a cute chibi Marian.
>U.S. version: Boring text and screenshots that goes overboard with the dramatic tone.