Showing posts with label merchandise. Show all posts
Showing posts with label merchandise. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

2400dpi Scans of the 1986 Hyrule Fantasy Bandai Board Game


You can find the high resolution files here and I will be adding more of this higher-res art to the gallery at some point in the future. I just need time away from scanning to clean it all. For now all I have updated is the boss cards. 

I also cleaned up Ganon's boss room and faked a card for him, so we could have a nice little set. Also want to thank JairulNait for scanning Aquamentus, because my set is missing his card. It is at 1200dpi though so, if anyone could get it for me at 2400dpi one day, that would be awesome! (Send me the RAW, if you use the auto adjustments on the scanner sometimes it blows out the colors) melorasworld@gmail.com

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

The Final Volume of the Twilight Princess Manga is Now Available in English!

 



I'm so excited for this. What a wonderful milestone! The final volume of Zelda: Twilight Princess manga by Akira Himekawa is out in English! (April 11, 2023.) There are 11 volumes total. And this only happened because fans & the artists pushed so hard for it for so long. Please support the amazing artists behind it & show publishers its, once again, worth listening to fans!

Thanks to my good friend, om_nom_berries/Louisa of Indie Zelda, for reminding me this was out today. I thought I pre-ordered it, lol, I guess I didn't. You can find it via VIZMedia through Right Stuf Anime or other bookstores

Here is a link to all 11 volumes on sale at TRS for $6.99 each.
(I have been ordering from then since before there was an internet, they're a great business to purchase through and are responsible for keeping a lot of anime from being lost to time.)

Volume 7 was out of stock with them when I last checked, I'm sure it will be back in stock soon, but you can find it on Amazon for $9.99 if you are in a rush.

I also can't lie: I have a little bit of humbled pride right now. I know I'm only a very tiny drop in the bucket but seeing a Twilight Princess Akira Himekawa manga happen was a big goal of mine & I spent a huge amount of time hyping, writing publishers, & pushing for it to exist. It was one of my big early efforts/campaigns. I'm so happy!

I do feel weird bringing that up though, but then, if I don't: then maybe someone wont realize what they could see come to pass if they push through their doubt. If you want artists to be able to work that you know you would love: Push hard to support them in the eyes of fans & publishers!

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Hyrule Fantasy Bandai Board Game Art!


This is a really beautiful little board game that was produced by Bandai in 1986.
While I have this, and plan to make bigger scans at a later date, I wanted to upload the art for people to enjoy and also so myself, and everyone else, can keep track of what we have and what is missing. You can find the scans in the Zelda 1 Art Album.

Amazing cleaning and editing done by: Alberto Vitali https://boardgamegeek.com/user/sbaracleto 

I did a 2nd pass on the map and cover to remove some more text.

Scanned by an anonymous donor and sent to Derrick and Bludd at https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/769070/hyrule-fantasy-total-conversion-project

If you would like to learn more, or play this game, you can find it here: https://historyofhyrule.blogspot.com/2021/09/hyrule-fantasy-board-game-fully.html

If you would like to play other pysical Zelda games, check out this link:




And here is an absolutely beautiful Hyrule Fantasy (Zelda 1) map from the same Bandai board game that I just posted. This set has incredible art. I'll make higher res scans at a later date but this was mainly cleaned by Alberto Vitali & then I did some too: flickr.com

 

Monday, November 29, 2021

Artbook: My page by page look at The Akira Himekawa: Original Drawings artbook (2021)



Here's a quick video since I won't be making scans of this for a long time. (It's still technically for sale and I wait a while afterwards to respect the artists and publishers)

Akira Himekawa: Original Drawings -A Look Back at the Manga "The Legend of Zelda-" 2021

This is a page by page look into Akira Himekawa's Legend of Zelda exhibit artbook. This is currently only for sale at the Kyoto International Manga Museum while their show runs; which, as of this posting, is from September 8, 2021 until December 26, 2021. I hope they are able to do a full international release eventually. It's just over 10x7 inches in size and the paper quality is amazing

This features promotional art not found in their comics, some of their best cover and character art, a few of their official art pieces like the stained glass windows from The Wind Waker, as well as their Ocarina of Time promotional manga that was originally only released on the web in Chinese. It has now been translated to Japanese. 

It features art for the games: Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time, Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages, Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker, Four Swords, A Link to the Past, Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, and Skyward Sword.



Thursday, November 25, 2021

Publication's List: Help me make it accurate for all of us!

I've been needing to update the info and works that are still missing from the publication's section of the site. Problem is: there's a lot to add. So I'm making albums on flickr to more quickly organize the information. I'm also doing this so it's easier for all of you to help me figure out this mass of information. These will contain everything I know about:

Good news is that Mases of Zelda dungeon is doing most of the work on the guides. He's making scans of his whole collection and is working on at least adding covers and info until he can get to everything that massive task entails. 

So what can I use help with? Any one of you can probably help with something here:
  • The thing I need the most help with is, if you know Japanese, help me make sure I have the correct titles, author's and illustrator's names, publishers, etc, in both Japanese and English characters.
  • Double check my info against what's written in the volumes (I'm dyslexic, I make a lot of type-based mistakes)
  • Help me find links to the best scans and info online*
  • Help me find auction links to things I'm missing. If it's guides or merch I can get them to my friends who collect that and will get us scans. If it's manga, Japanese books, or artbooks, I'll probably buy them.
  • (More to come, I'm out of time today to keep writing)
*An FYI: I'm not going to publicly post links to free downloads of anything still in print, (just links to sales pages.) If you can't afford to purchase the volumes, etc, I totally understand, this isn't judgement on that. But, the way I use this platform, is for promoting purchasing any still available & only the scans for things that are not. Especially for manga; I really want a BotW series and good sales make that more likely.

I'm doing this, in large part, because my end goal is to try to have every piece of official and semi-official Zelda art online. But it's too hard to do if you don't check things off a list as you go and if you're dealing with bad scans only to get good scans after you've already done a ton of editing work. So this is the leg work to creating an awesome gallery. The added benefit is, obviously, we should have a great resource and merchandise catalog when we're done that also helps up properly credit the people behind the series we love.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Zelda Game Night: All the non-console games (And some that are playable online)

This is kind of a random post but I wanted to keep track of them somewhere. I assume these come and go as C&D's happen, but it's cool to see what fans have done! If you have any others to add to this list, just let me know!



I posted about this before, here


 

And I posted about these before too, here








Here are some others:

Zelda Milton Bradly Boardgame

Zelda Clue

Zelda Monopoly

Zelda Uno

Zelda Playing Cards

Zelda Chess


I worked on some art for another fan who wants to make an online version of the the Nelsonic Game Watch so hopefully that will be playable at some point in the future too: 



And there are actually a lot of Game Books but, unfortunately, most have never been translated. I will work on getting high res scans of all of them online though:



I've fully scanned this and hope to have it uploaded soon




I've fully scanned this and hope to have it uploaded soon








I've fully scanned this and hope to be updating it soon








Friday, September 3, 2021

Hyrule Fantasy Board Game, Fully Translated into English, and Playable on Steam

 I can't believe I forgot to post about this here back when I posted about it on Twitter.


If you want to play it for free on Tabletop Simulator, find that here!

If you would like to download it to play manually, here's the link to all the files! 

If you would like more information about playing this, find all of that in this thread, here.


Update: If you would like to 3d print the Link figures from this board, Keshi Corner has scanned them and has the data you need uploaded. Find it from this link. Or from this file




First, you can probably guess why I've always been on the look out for this: This board game for the original Legend of Zelda, Hyrule Fantasy, has some of the most amazing art. It's basically a crime they didn't make a piece for every enemy in the game. When I was working on the LoZ1 gallery I tried really hard to track it down and, luckily, thanks to Sergei the Sage, I eventually found it. Alberto, who did the original editing and cleaning, was kind enough to send me the cleaned up, high resolution, images. He didn't send me the original scans because the person who originally made them is a collector and didn't want the completely authentic images on the net because they could be used to flood the market by allowing people to make perfect fakes. So we found a perfect middle ground: he sent me the images that already had the text edited out. So much less work for me, not having to clean things myself, and Alberto was a master at the work he did. I haven't added the images to the gallery yet, because the translation project took precedent, but I should be doing that soon.


As far as I can tell, here's where the credit lies. Over at Boardgame Geek, on this thread:

Evan Derrick originally organized the project
Bastian Baum perhaps continued the project
Gliiterberri translated the game
Alberto Vitali did the image cleaning and editing

And a lot of other people helped! It looked like a big group effort that I truly appreciate. 

Tabletop Simulator Screenshot: 



Play newly translated Zelda games that have never been available outside of Japan!

This is really awesome, beyond awesome actually. So in the 80's and 90's there was obviously a lot of Zelda merchandise in Japan that never came out anywhere else. Including some physical games, like board games, and we've never been able to experience them. Until now. A while back my amazing friend, and Zelda collector extraordinaire, linksliltri4ce, and I decided we would pool our resources together and get some stuff done. She scanned some of her rare collection and I edited them to make cleaner versions of the game pieces using the official art gallery I've amassed. Well, now it seems that Steam user Hitotsumami has found, translated, edited, and programmed some of these games via Tabletop Simulator and has uploaded there them free to download. Links below. So what are these games?





Translation of the bonus dice mode of the Barcode Battler Legend of Zelda game. The Barcode Battler itself is not necessary.


This game also has some really great enemy art that Beno donated to the site ages ago but can't be found anywhere else.  Like this piece of Ganon.



Party Joy Guidemaster Series #6 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past


This is a board game recreating the experience of playing the first half of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It goes up until the point wherein you reach the portal between Hyrule and the Dark World. However, this is not a mere game. In addition to that, you can use this as a sort of strategy guide for how to play the video game itself.

The game begins from the point where Link has rescued Zelda from her cell in Hyrule Castle and has delivered her to the Sanctuary. To defeat the High Priest Agahnim, who is trying to sacrifice Zelda in order to open the seal to the Golden Land, you must first acquire teh Master Sword. To that end, the priest of the church has instructed you to first go to Kakariko and visit the Elder Sahasrahla. Putting the Sanctuary behind you, you begin your adventure.

Small bonus: There's actually a 3rd game, but it's a really short and simple one:


This comes from a pencil board set with stickers that were cut out and used as tokens.



This is all so cool, I hope you enjoy them!

A small example of the work linksliltri4ce and I did:


Edit: More information and links to other games are in this post: https://historyofhyrule.blogspot.com/2021/10/zelda-game-night-all-non-console-games.html

Sunday, August 29, 2021

8 Out of Print Volumes of Zelda Manga are Going to be Re-published! (Updates)

Update 2022-04-17: Yes, they are taking a while but the publisher is still releasing issues every month as promised. 


There's so much info below but first: I want everyone to make a really big push to see all of these localized in other languages by the publishers. I led that same kind of push for years, from History of Hyrule back in the early 2000's, to make that happen with Akira Himekawa's manga, and then over a decade later, when we got word Nintendo was finally going to be doing a real artbook, I worked so hard, and led an even bigger fan effort, to get the hype and interest going to get that localized in the US and other languages as well. They did and it ended up topping the best selling charts on Amazon and the New York Times. (It even beat out Twilight for a while.) Job well done, everyone!


And here's the reason: if these do well then other companies that produced a lot of old Zelda manga, like Enix, will hopefully be encouraged to do ebook releases of their out of print content too. We need to make that happen! If these do well publishers might even pay more artists to do more Zelda works. So let's get hyped about it again guys and when these drop let's hit the ground running.


To do this let's do what my friends and I did for the Himekawa manga and Hyrule Historia. Let's get some translations done so we can all read along with the books when they come out, then write all the companies like Nintendo, Viz, and Darkhorse about getting the rights, start campaigns, and when those Japanese ebook sales jump up because we pound that "buy it" button: I will bet you they'll do it.


This also means I need help finding translators. I have 600dpi scans made specifically for translation, they are not for distribution though and are not posted publicly right now. I have generally only hosted pages on the site that are large enough to comprehend but not big enough to discourage people from wanting actual copies if they become available for sale. More on that needed translation help below.

Example of the scans for translations


Now, back to the meat of it: One Pack Comics, also known as "Wanpakku Comics" or わんぱっくコミック, was a serialized monthly manga magazine that I believe ran from 1985 to 1989. As far as I know, in it's history, it produced 3 different Zelda series for Hyrule Fantasy, (the original Legend of Zelda,) and the Adventure of Link. I'll post info on them below. They were collected into 7 volumes, with the 8th and last volume of Ran Maru's Adventure of Link manga never officially being turned into a book because the publisher closed right after the artist finished. Those last 7 issues, that would have been the final volume, can only be found online because someone Xeroxed the pages from the final year of the magazine to make extra copies. And thank goodness they did even though they're not great. Someone else later scanned them. If you've seen the popular GTV Japan YouTube video, it's using those same scanned Xeroxs that I've had on my site for around a decade. (By the way, I love his videos. I do technically disagree with how he interpreted the ending though, we had a nice conversation about it, but you know how fans will have different takes: I just think SPOILER it's clear Zelda comes back to life at the end and that it's part of the main story, not tacked on. The Salamander that dies in the same place her body falls into, comes back at the end, with the same flute that fell in too, and then we see a female with Zelda's stature come out of that same lake .Link threw the Triforces into it as well. It seems very clear to me what happens)


I have been trying to track down those 7 magazine issues for around a decade now. Here's the covers and info on them. (I do still want them.) The ever-awesome Zelda collector, Ikhana, was helping me find them, (she actually found April's issue for me and I was able to buy it, it's being shipped as we speak. She's so good at this!) but in the process she found a press release from August 12, 2021 that stated Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd. (株式会社徳間書店, Kabushiki gaisha Tokuma Shoten), One Pack's parent company, was going to be re-release all of the manga at a rate of roughly 5 issues a month (mid month) starting on August 16th. Which was just a few days ago. You will be able to purchase these ebook volumes on these platforms:

  • Kindleストア(Amazon)
  • 楽天Kobo電子書籍ストア
  • BOOK☆WALKER
  • honto
  • ブックライブ
  • コミックシーモア
  • ebookjapan
  • Renta!(パピレス)
  • DMMブックス

The first 5 volumes have been released, as promised, but they are not for the Legend of Zelda, they're just some of the many other works One Pack supported. But I am happy to see it's really happening. I'm not sure when they'll get to the Zelda ones, but it's promising to see that they're already rapidly releasing things. Again, they will release 5 volumes in the middle of every month.

Out of those stores I'm only familiar with Amazon.jp. To find the ebook releases you'll want the keyword わんぱっくコミック (One Pack's name in Japanese) or just use this link.

Now, what are the 3 Legend of Zelda series to expect, the 8 volumes:


My all-time-favorite Zelda manga is in this batch. A total of 4 volumes it was created by Ran Maru and ran from 1986 to 1988. It starts with one volume for Hyrule Fantasy/The Original Legend of Zelda and continues on with 3 volumes for the Adventure of Link. (The last one was the one I was talking about that was not collected into a book though.) One of the reasons I love it is for how the personalities of Link and Zelda are portrayed. They remind me of what I actually want from the games. The 2nd reasons is for all the firsts in this series: It's the first time we see things that appear in later games. A few small examples would be: Link with hot pink hair, Link riding into battle on a giant bird, his spin attack, and we even see Zelda using magic to transform into a male character in the intent to fool Ganon's minions to buy time while Link is missing in action. And the series is dark. It's actually very very dark.



The 1st chapter is in English.

UPDATE: FULLY TRANSLATED!!



The first chapter is in English! But we need to have the rest finished

UPDATE: FULLY TRANSLATED
but being revised, I do not have it yet





FULLY TRANSLATED!!


Now for the other 4 volumes:


The Adventure of Link, Volume 1, by Daisuke Shigoto

This is a pretty amazing work. While it has some original elements it's acts as a game guide for the Adventure of Link. It's really worth checking out.

WE NEED A TRANSLATOR FOR THIS
Someone was translating this with my scans for another site but it looks like they're MIA 



This is a continuation of volume one, it was just taken over by a different artist.

WE NEED A TRANSLATOR FOR THIS




The Legend of Zelda by Kobayashi Susumu
This is one volume that covers the whole first game and even acts as a complete game guide. The art in this is actually really good, this artist also did work that appeared in official Nintendo publications. 

WE NEED A TRANSLATOR FOR THIS

Again, I would like to try to find a translator for each volume if possible, to get these done quickly. I do have 600dpi scans to help you read them and we just need to make a script so people can read along with the eventual ebooks. Contact me if you have actual experience translating from Japanese to English.
melorasworld@gmail.com

And after this: We have around 35 other volumes of Zelda manga, 4koma, and novels that still need to be translated! I'm not kidding! There's so many no one has ever done.

Follow me on Twitter @historyofhyrule if you want the most current news and updates.
And I'll be on a backpacking trip on Monday-Wednesday so forgive me if I can't respond until then.





Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Dark Horse just released ALL the English Skyward Sword Prequel Manga Pages

Dark Horse has released all of the pages of the Skyward Sword "Prequel" manga, by Akira Himekawa, as a promo for the Hyrule Historia Book that's for pre-order now (Find out where to buy it here)

It seems to have been released via Kotaku, and I discovered the news thanks to GenGame. Their page reader shows the pages in the reversed order though, so I've put them in the right order, of first to last, below. Read them right to left, or "Japanese style." Enjoy!





































Please buy the book! It's going to be AMAZING! And it's SO CHEAP on pre-order.
Thank you Dark Horse!