Publisher Notes: Hello everyone, this is Rhydon here to give the first publisher notes on the old information that we have recovered for The Caster Chronicles. I am a HUGE fan of Saaya’s Adventure. Back when I was first getting into The Caster Chronicles, seeing the care and passion that was put into even a small webcomic like this really made me happy and sparked my imagination. A couple interesting things to note is that these first two issues of Saaya’s Adventure reads from Left to Right, instead of Right to Left. This goes against how most Manga are created and is instead in line with Western Comics. The reason I can assume as to why is that the Force of Will company (the first makers of The Caster Chronicles) really wanted to push this brand as an international one when it was first getting launched. Over time, this appetite for international appeal would wane considerably. One more fun fact before we go, did you know that the Japanese name for the game is not “The Caster Chronicles”? If you translate the above comic yourself, you’ll notice that the game is called “Magical Girl the Duel” which is frequently shorted to “Mahoel”.Publisher Log: So you may have noticed, dear reader, that things get … strange… with the comics at this point. First off, the comics now are all in black and white rather than color. Secondly, the comics now read from right to left rather than left to right. As for the elephant in the room, what’s with the strange borders and social media button looking things? Well, as I mentioned the website for The Caster Chronicles was deleted before we were able to secure the rights to the game. This means that a lot of data is, as far as we know, completely gone forever. Sadly these 5 chapters original and high quality versions were one such casualty of this data loss. All we have left are the twitter versions of the comics that were uploaded to the official account. It’s frankly a little heartbreaking and a fantastic example of why the act of preservation for games is so important. I am just grateful that some version of these comics were managed to be recovered at all. That aside, I love how Saaya’s story progresses. The fight choreography is fast and fun and I love that Glow Desire uses a Goblin deck! I’ll be talking about the localization efforts that I have made on these comics and the game at large in more detail in future notes, but I had a ton of fun doing the translations. Figuring out the best American way to convert Japanese phrases and slang is like a puzzle. It’s just fun for me. So when the two girls were playing Rock-Paper-Scissors, I kept the sound effects boxes the same as I figured people would still be able to follow what was happening, but had Saaya say “Snip! Snip!” to mimic the sound of scissors rather than just having her say “Scissors!” I figured that would be more faithful to the spirit of this original text, but let me know what you think! I did my best 🙂 Saaya’s Adventure continues! One thing that I think is interesting is that you can see that both Saaya and Glow Desire play mixed color decks. Saaya uses Ignis/Solis and Glow uses Luna/Aqua. I personally think that these chapters have some of the best artwork. And that’s the conclusion of Saaya’s Adventure! Maybe for now??? We will see. Wasn’t it fun to see Soul Bond? We won’t be exploring that mechanic for a while yet in the rebooted game. So, for now, just think of it as a fun teaser for what is to come and a nostalgic look at the past of this incredible property. I would love to be able to do more with these characters in the future. There’s still so many questions left to answer. For example, this was just a test game and Glow Desire didn’t give Saaya her Caster Card. That means that Glow is still out there somewhere, waiting for revenge. Also, who is the Sawawa that warned Saaya? Why are the cards real? I hope to explore these questions one day. But for now, I hope you all enjoyed Saaya’s Adventure.
