Return to Arcadia

I recently came across a Chinese version (printed in Hong Kong) of the Eternal Arcadia Perfect Guide. I think it translates (if the kanji mean the same as in Japanese) as ‘Complete Strategy Guide’ – so the same as the Japanese copy.

The cover is very similar to the original Japanese copy – except for the publisher logo and title. Notice that the Chinese copy is slightly less wide.

The rear of the Chinese copy is much nicer though with the SoA logo against the blue.

Here are the sides. The Chinese version has less pages.

However.. inside it’s completely different. Err.. ok the next pages onwards are completely different.

The character info pages are at the front of the book, but that’s about the only similarity. I can’t read Chinese but you don’t need to in order to recognise the difference. No stat boxes with info and the images are different too, so it seems completely independant of the original. I started to wonder why the cover design was copied if it isn’t affiliated in any way to the original…

Here it lays out the game’s mechanics and features.

Further on, the story outline.

EDIT: After doing some brief translation of parts of the book, it looks like it’s purpose is mostly to provide a guide for playing in Japanese so that Chinese speakers can understand the gist of the story. There does seem to be basic walkthrough parts too, informing the player where to go and how to approach battles etc.

Then towards the back, the map pages. I noticed something interesting here – バルア (Valua) is in Japanese. Some of the map text also seems to be in Japanese…. I wonder why it was left like that.. Unless it was forgotten.

EDIT: On closer inspection, there is Japanese after the character names also in brackets after the Chinese titles and all the screenshots show the game in Japanese, so the Japanese must be for reference for the user to identify names and places etc whilst in-game.

For comparison, here are some photos of the original guide. The layout is much more professional and there is a lot more detail. I love all the ship stats and the maps are amazingly accurate.

Admittedly, I have not had a chance to go through the Japanese guides yet, but I plan to translate all of them eventually.

Finally, above is the back page with the credits. As you can see, no mention of translation, just copyright SEGA and Overworks. I suspect they cheekily copied the Japanese cover design without permission.

Anyway. I hope you found this as interesting as I did. This Chinese copy is the only one I have come across, so I wonder if there are many in Hong Kong / China…