1 What about the Big O theme that was lifted lock, stock, and barrel from Queen? ;p

2

The less I remember about the Big O, the better. I caught a couple of episodes on Toonami back in the day (which is why I've never seen the factory-installed OP/ED, until just now). It was enough to convince me I did not want to see anymore Batman with mecha.

3

Which version of the Big O's theme?  There was also one lifted from the old UFO series.

Have to actually finish the Xenosaga trilogy.  It's my favorite, which is why I have been spending too much time building up my characters rather than advancing the plot.

C.T.

4 Well this is the one I found immediately (and it does have that Queen sound).

Xenosaga is my favorite RPG series, with Xenogears taking top honors in the stand-alone category. It's a shame they had to truncate the plot of XS. There's plenty of room for a continuation. Unfortunately, Monolithsoft is now owned by Nintendo while the XS series is firmly in Namco-Bandai's grip.

I've been thinking of going back to work on my own translation of Perfect Works (I did a few pages for class projects back in in college). It is not light reading material and is a mother to translate.

5

Wow, you want to translate Perfect Works?  And you got a copy to do that from?  Wow.  I mean, just wow.  There were some other people doing it, back when the Zenosaga website was still up, but that effort seemed to have disappeared.

Last time I checked, though, Namco-Bandai was not platform specific (After all, they gave the world Idolm@ster for the XBox 360.).  And given Nintendo's history of letting subsidary development studios get bought out by other parties (Cough-Rare-Cough)...Well, we did get Xenosaga on the DS.  Since Xenosaga is my favorite video game series (Never played Xenogears though.), I still hold hope that we shall see something come from it again one day.

Funy thing you mentioned it, since over at AOD, there was a conversation on whether Yoko Kanno had done the same thing, or was simply a case where certain taste and styles produces similar results.

C.T.

6 I've had my copy of Perfect Works since about 1999/2000. Even at that point it was hard to get. What was supposed to be a 2-4 week ship turned into 3-6 months. I have a few of the translated PDF pages "int" put up on zenosaga.com. I'd like to do something similar, but I'd have to wreck my only copy to do it (and they're getting $200 for copies on amazon). It was a damned shame when he decided to shut the site down (of course I'd been through the same thing a few years prior when Dark Warlord shutdown xenogears.org.). There's a fairly complete history of things here.

Nintendo bought up Monolith specifically to make them RPGs (Batten Kaitos was one of the few on the Cube), but given the poor sales of the XS series, I don't see them making the effort to work out a deal with "Bamco" to re-ignite the series. Tetsuya Takahashi has now tried twice to tell this story, and both times he's run up a huge tab and taken too much time getting product on the shelf. He needs to just write a novel or three and get it over with. I just don't think he has what it takes to develop video games. And given the way Soraya Saga was treated by all parties involved, she certainly won't be getting involved again.

7

Shrug...Well, given the dearth of games available for the Wii, you would think something might be worked out.  In any case, that is water under the bridge now, and I have been waiting for both Gust and Tri-Ace to release their latest titles.  Tri-Ace, especially, since Star Ocean (The only reason why I would touch a PS3) and Valkyrie Profile have titles under development.  As an aside I thought it was Tri-Crescendo who developed Baten Kaitos?

Anyway, I would not be eager to rip apart the copies of the Japanese books I have either, given the scarcity value of some of them.  I think I might had read seen some of the translation you had for Zenosaga if I remember right.  Never really could understand them, even after they were translated, probably because I never did get into Xenogears.  Thanks.

C.T.

 

8

Wikipedia says both were involved, but I don't know how the work was split between them. Monolith's name has been the one I've always heard linked with the BK series.

I never submitted any of my translations to Zenosaga. Those PDFs were all done by them. I haven't looked at them in a while, but as I recall, they were only slightly better than Babelfish quality in places. It looked like they fed the text to a machine then cleaned up the output with mixed results. The book is also full of technical jargon that is really hard to translate. It took me a half-hour working with my Japanese instructor (who had little to no science background) to work out the differences between the three words (elevation, absolute altitude, and AGL) the Nelson dictionary translates simply as "altitude."

If you can find Xenogears for anything less than a small mint, get it. There is so much going on in XS that hearkens back to XG that I've always thought people without the extra background weren't getting the full experience.

9

Ah, that clears it up then.  I never did see more than a handful of scans on Zenosaga so I probably was not missing much.

Oddly enough, I have seen Xenogears, back when Gamestop/EB still carried PS1 games, at pretty good prices (~$20).  I was tempted to buy it the last time I saw a copy, but I was quite happy with Xenosaga by itself than trying to read too much into a backstory that even Monolith Soft commented had spiritual connections with the Xenosaga series. (Just to complete things - I have no opinion on Soraya Saga/Xenosaga situation.  Almost all the stuff I read seemed to be a lot of hysterics and not a lot of facts.)

C.T.

10 As few as he had done, they were easier in the eyes than raw text. But int quickly locked them away from the general public, limiting access to only those people who put in ridiculous amounts of time in the Z forums and whatnot. Can't say I liked the guy that much.

11

Oh, so that was it.  I always suspected something like that, but my interest in Xenosaga at the time was not that devoted.  Now it is much higher (As a quick assessment of the Xenosaga merchandise I own will report.), but that attitude always irked me a bit.

Just as well I was more into naval matters on newsgroups back then.  Either everyone could find out about a piece of information, the information was made-up and therefore non-relevant, or you would not be able to say anything about the information you knew because it was classified...

C.T.

1 Have you ever heard the Weather Report version of Birdland?

I don't know where to find it, but check it out if you get a chance.

2 That's the original, and it's on the album "Heavy Weather", and I'm quite sure he's heard it.

3

Yep, I'm familiar with it. When we were first handed the music, the director played a recording by Manhattan Transfer to give us a feel for what we were up against. (And then they went and did a recording together)

Over time I've grown more fond of the brassy versions than anything else.

4 The Wikipedia article says that Buddy Rich did a version of it. I bet that was awesome. Presumably that would be more like what you guys did.

5 Well, only three Buddy Rich recordings came up in a quick youtube search. I can't say the audio quality in any of them is particularly good. This is the best sounding of the three. It is a lot closer to the version we played, but it was only junior high, so we were playing a simplified arrangement.

6 Obviously you guys weren't going to be playing at his level.

7 I have a HQ avi of "Battery Battle" from Blast here at Pond Central; the Phantom Regiment is from Duckford, and has their Tryout Camp at Duck U., so I've gotta be a drum & bugle corps fan.

There's something about walking out of the Duck U. Bookstore and having the Regiment's drumline slamming away ten feet from your car that puts a zip in your step after a long day at work...

8

Little late to respond on this one, but I just remembered something. On the soccer fields adjacent to where we play our city-league softball games, occasionally a local drum corp rehearses in the afternoons. I think it's The Academy, but a buddy's girlfriend was rehearsing with their color guard, and I'm pretty sure she's older than the DCI limit of 22. I can't think of who else it would be.

9 That video is the pinnacle of marching band nerdom.

No offense or anything, but really, it's hilarious for that very reason.

Nevertheless that was a really tight song. And then there's birdland being another one of "those" songs we all have to hear. But anyway it's good to find another eclectic blogger who's into anime and jazz.