Sega’s PAL manuals were so bad

I have been waxing nostalgic about PAL versions of games lately but I will acknowledge that in some regards we did get the short end of the stick. As much as I fond of the slower version of the game’s music I don’t think Sonic the Hedgehog running one sixth slower than it was designed to was a good thing and the game manuals we got here seemed to be made as cheaply as Sega could get away with.

Let’s compare manuals of the Japanese, North American and European release of the same game, called Ragnacënty, Crusader of Centy and Soleil respectively in each region.

This is fairly typical of what European Mega Drive manuals were like. Fully black and white, printed in in a landscape orientation, arranged in thin columns, having little interior artwork other than screenshots that are so squashed down it’s hard to tell what they’re even showing and cutting everything down to the bare minimum details. The character bios aren’t included at all. This little bit of narration from the perspective of the protagonist is the closest thing. The whole manual is only 17 pages compared to 30 for Ragnacënty and 40 for Crusader of Centy.

And Soleil’s manual’s layout seems downright roomy compared to a lot of games. You might have wondered why the manuals might have that strange multi-column landscape layout? Well Soleil had separate manuals printed for each language the game was released in but that wasn’t always the case. Compare it to Tails’ Adventure for the Game Gear which across each pair of pages has separate columns in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Dutch.

But even this is still worth preserving. Soleil and its manual were precious artefacts for me for a very long time. I still had the game cartridge and manual up until a few years ago when I did a big clearout of all my old games (mementos are precious, but so is space and I live in a small house) but even when I sold it on I actually cut out the cover of the manual as a keepsake. Had I known as a child the stark difference between those pages and that of Rangacënty I might have held it in less regard, but it was still a piece of my childhood and worth preserving along with the other versions.