Translations

In memoriam: Final Fantasy

by Glenn, The Twilight Mexican August 31, 2014 0 comments

Well, it ended up taking me a couple of weeks instead of one to follow up on my last article and get this done. Sorry about that.

Here at last is the fulfillment of a promise almost two years old: Scans and translations from the FF 25th Memorial Ultimania Vol. 2! Which covers FFVII, FFVIII and FFIX.

First, I just want you to marvel at how big this book is. This is my copy laying next to the North American Limited Edition DVD release of Advent Children:

And here is my hand next to Cloud’s profile page:

So, yeah, this book is ginormous and beautiful.

All but one of the scans in these articles — which account for nearly all of their images anyway — come courtesy of espritduo at the Final Fantasy Wiki, who took the time to scan and upload them. You may also remember him as the owner of the amazing collection of Final Fantasy guidebooks we featured almost two years ago. He’s an awesome fella, and has done his fellow Final Fantasy fans many a service.

Of the three images that aren’t scans, two of them (the early Seventh Heaven field maps in the FFVII article) were captured from FFVII International’s bonus disc by Shademp, while the one remaining image (the screenshot from early in FFVII’s development featuring Locke from FFVI) is a photograph that I took with my cell phone. A scan of this was not available.

Clicking on most of the images will pull up a larger version for you to examine, by the way. Not all, but most.

You may wonder why I didn’t include nearly as much material for FFIX as I did for the other two games. The answer, quite simply, is that much of the artwork for FFIX has been available since that game was released back in 2000. Even in North America, we had “The Art of Final Fantasy IX.” There is some new and interesting stuff here for FFIX, but not as much as for FFVII and FFVIII.

Finally, all of the translations in these articles are mine unless otherwise noted to have been conducted by hitoshura.

Actually, not quite finally — I will have one more article coming with a little more material from this book. I don’t want to make any promises as to how soon it will be, given that getting this posted took a week longer than expected (meaning it was twice as long as expected), but the concluding chapter to this trilogy of Ultimania posts I’ve been doing will be coming soon. I guarantee it.

Without further ado, I’ll let the scans and translations take it away from here. Hope you enjoy.

• Final Fantasy VII

• Final Fantasy VIII

• Final Fantasy IX