La-Mulana Classic dev commentary
La-Mulana is a game I like a lot and that inspired me a bunch. I really enjoyed the second game, especially its soundtrack, but when it comes to the first, I always preferred the “classic” version, i.e. the original MSX-like game, over the remake. The remake looks great and adds a metric ton of quality-of-life upgrades, but the original has also a great style of its own and honestly I quite prefer the soundtrack there.
Anyway! When there was just La-Mulana classic, I found a random website that listed a bunch of info about the game, as well as a download link to the game’s official jukebox. This being La-Mulana, a special password was required to unlock the full soundtrack even inside the jukebox. I’m not sure I would’ve had the patience to find it on my own, but luckily for me the password was listed on the website. I haven’t been able to find the jukebox on the internet later, once the remake came out; I wonder if it’s still available via some official means?
A cool detail about the full jukebox was that it features dev commentary from Naramura and Samiel for every song. The commentary is in Japanese, and in the past I ran into the problem that if I tried to copy the text from the jukebox, differences in encoding would render it unreadable. A Japanese-speaking friend helped me solve this some years ago, but I never bothered extracting & re-encoding the entire commentary until now.
I’ve now extracted the entire thing and run it through Google Translate. The results aren’t very convincing, but maybe I can eventually get an actual translator to go through the Japanese text to get a better version. For now, I’ll link both the Japanese text & the Google-translated versions here. Note that all songs titled “Extra” (as well as some words the end of the final “fearless challenger” song’s title) were in Japanese, but because they were on a drop-down menu, I wasn’t able to copy-paste them in order to get their re-encoded versions; I decided to instead just make up placeholder titles.
Here’s the Google-translated version.
Here’s the Japanese version (UTF-8).
Here’s the version with the original encoding.
Enjoy!
As a fan of the original as well, this is cool! I recall that someone did a machine translation of the jukebox strings and put them in the first iteration of the La-Mulana wiki (the super-turbo.net version, archived here http://web.archive.org/web/20100704210453/http://lamulana.super-turbo.net/wiki/index.php5?title=Main_Page), but that has apparently disappeared at some point before being replaced by the remake wiki and a resurrected freeware version wiki.
The fan translation was made by the people from aeongenesis (https://aeongenesis.net/projects/lamulana), and I remember reading some pastebin about the translation work with some mention of the jukebox, although that has apparently disappeared to the void, probably when the aeongenesis website was redesigned.
Thank you so much for this work! I love to see the original game get attention for little things like this, and being able to read it in English is a blessing.
I have a suggestion – I’ve noticed that Google Translate tends to chew up the meanings of Japanese text sometimes. When checking out JP-sourced material, I’ve been using the DeepL engine alongside Google’s translation and comparing the results. DeepL doesn’t have a 100% success rate, either, but it seems to be a bit stronger when it comes to picking up nuance and figures of speech. It may be worth running the whole thing through it, one block at a time, and comparing the two manuscripts.
An example of output —-
Google Translate:
Earth Wind:
NARAMURA
A song that I like soberly. The song that the data itself existed from the pre-release version and was firmly in the folder, but the demo did not make it in time and it did not flow to the completed version. At the end, I thought I should make a phrase for you, so I used the stage clear song of Elgiza’s seal as a motif. I think I changed it quite a bit. Haha is a coincidence.
DeepL:
Earth Wind:
NARAMURA
This is one of my favorite songs, although it is not very popular. The data itself had existed since the preliminary release version and was in the folder, but the demo was not ready in time, so the song was not played until the final version. I wanted to make a final phrase, so I used the El Ghiza seal stage clear song as a motif, but it’s just the way it was. I thought I changed it a lot, though. Haha, coincidence, coincidence.