La-Mulana Classic dev commentary
Posted on 2022-07-27 12:51
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!