kitsunebi

Just another 276 pages of weekly content making Western mags look lazy.

The main stories this issue would probably be both the release of The Legend of Zelda and the Famicom Disk System, both of which were released on February 21, 1986 (don't forget - Zelda was an FDS game in Japan - it wouldn't be released on cartridge there until 1994.)
All these background images and maps stretching across facing pages make editing these a real chore. 😮‍💨
Remember, if you're seeing this:

that means you're doing it wrong, dummy.😝
Don't be a dummy.  Set your CBR reader to Japanese/manga mode:

Anyone interested in gaming history should take note: this issue not only features a first look at some game about a guy named Zelda (that's his name, right?), but it also features a very early discussion/interview between Masanobu Endo, the designer of Xevious and The Tower of Druaga, and some kid named Shigeru Miyamoto, who designed a couple of games I can't recall off the top of my head, but I hear he's done all right for himself.
*This issue is missing an 8-page pullout of maps for the game Challenger (pages 123-130).  You can still see where they were pulled from the mag, along with the note instructing readers to peel the pages off (they weren't stapled in, but rather affixed with a strip of glue.) 
**Also, as always, Family Computer Magazine is printed Japanese-style and read from right to left.  Your CBR reader must be set to Japanese/manga mode for facing pages to be oriented correctly.  Man, I'm getting tired of writing instructions on how to read Japanese magazines.  You all are smart enough to figure it out on your own, right?  If the text is printed horizontally, you read L-R just like alphabetic languages.  If the text is printed vertically you read from R-L.  Got it?  This is the last time I'm going to mention it! 🫡

The CD-ROM included with this issue can be downloaded HERE.

I started out thinking I'd just do the ads for the gallery and then ended up editing the whole thing.  This is probably the earliest Nintendo mag that's been scanned yet, but it's mostly interesting to me seeing how Famimaga itself evolved over time.  This issue has large b&w sections, quite a bit of which is manga, while by a couple of years later, Famimaga will become 100% full color and drop most of the manga, setting it apart from Famitsu, which at this point was still half a year away from launching.
Another interesting thing is noticing that some of the manga is based on Famicom games published by Takuma Shoten - which is also the publisher of Famimaga.  Famitsu had the same deal - it was published by ASCII, who also published tons of Famicom games.
How this worked and they were able to maintain any sense of credibility with Japanese consumers I have no idea.  Imagine if EGM was published by Electronic Arts and GamePro was published by Activision - who could trust them to treat the games they covered fairly?  Or if Nintendo Power was published by Nintendo?  Oh wait, it was.  But that proves the point - no one read Nintendo Power expecting honest reviews and uncompromising criticism, they just expected lots of colorful pictures and maps, and that's what they got.
In that sense, I guess Famimaga could be seen a bit as the Nintendo Power of Japan, since, like Nintendo Power, it was published by a game publisher, was probably the most colorful gaming mag on the stands at the time, and took the high road by abstaining from reviews for the most part.  It also seems to be the most beloved nostalgic mag for Japanese gamers of a certain age despite its lack of any strong critical/editorial stance.  Add a Japanese Howard Phillips to the mix and they'd be twins.
 
***Oh yeah, forgot to mention - as usual, Family Computer Magazine is printed Japanese-style and is read from right-to-left.  Your CBR reader must be set to Japanese/manga mode throughout the entire issue if you want facing pages to be oriented correctly.
Also, the color manga sections were actually a pullout with narrow landscape-aspect pages.  I recommend setting your reader to "fit height" during that portion of the mag, which will basically fill your screen with the entire page and make it easy to read.

The cover is by Robert DeJesus, who some of you non-comics fans may know as the designer/artist of Banzi Chibi-chan, the sort-of-mascot character in early issues of PSM.

ADULTS ONLY
So basically, this is Tips & Tricks for adult games.  Kouryaku Dennou idol was a spin-off mag to BugBug magazine and focuses on strategies/solutions to adult games.  While currently there may only be 3 monthly mags devoted to adult games being published in Japan, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there were more like 8 or 9, and they were so successful that a strategy-focused spinoff was economically viable.  Kind of like EGM2.  Except everyone is naked.

The entirety of Family Computer Magazine is read R-L, so you will need to set your CBR reader to Japanese/Manga mode if viewing two pages at a time in order for facing pages to be oriented correctly (and you DO want to view it that way to see the lovely two-page ads, right?)
Featuring games you've definitely heard of, such as
Actraiser F-Zero TMNT II: The Arcade Game And a bunch of games you might have heard of, some released in the USA, some not.
Did I mention that unlike almost all other Japanese mags, Family Computer Magazine doesn't have any b&w sections?  100% color from cover to cover.

There's another 24 pages of FFVIII coverage here, but perhaps because FFVIII already graced the cover of the past two issues, they've given the cover to Chocobo Racing, despite it only getting 2 pages of coverage.  Also getting 2 pages (but no cover - sorry, you-know-who) is Tomb Raider III, pretty much the only non-Japanese game in the entire issue (Spyro the Dragon gets half a page.)

This is one of those weird issues that was given two issue numbers (it's technically issues 1344 and 1345), and counting all pages individually, this issue weighs in at 316 pages (though the posters and comic spreads are left joined in the archive as they should be).  That's the equivalent of 4 issues of Game Players, only with just one issue of Game Players' worth of ads.  And since these double number issues are also allotted two weeks on newsstands as opposed to one, there were only 3 issues of Famitsu published in September 2014 for a total of 851 pages, though if we count the last issue from August as well (which was printed within 30 days of this issue) it's a total of 1,189 pages in a 30 day period.  Which is just a few more pages than the 76 that Game Players churned out every month.
Why am I picking on Game Players?  I'm not.  I wish ALL mags I scanned were like Game Players.  Scanning 1,189 pages per month versus 76 pages per month...that's one month of Famitsu vs. 15.6 months of Game Players.  Imagine how many more issues I could scan if only they weren't SO. DAMN. LONG...😩

This issue reminds me that I really need to get around to reading Kimagure Orange Road.  Back around the time this issue was published, the TV series hadn't yet been translated into English, but AnimEigo had released several volumes of the OAV series.  My local video store had a couple of them, and I liked them quite a bit.  I'd always wanted to read the manga, but this was before the Internet, so fan translations weren't a thing you could come by.  It's never been officially translated to my knowledge, but you can find it in English easily enough nowadays.  I've actually got the first volume in Japanese sitting in my closet, which was supposed to inspire me to use it to study Japanese, but it turns out I'm far too lazy to put that much effort into reading a comic LOL.

Celebrate 100 issues of Dengeki PlayStation with 50 pages of Final Fantasy VIII coverage.  And not one, but two memory card sticker sheets.  Every time I run across one of these, there's always a sticker or two missing and I wonder what games they were for.  And did the person who took them actually put them on a memory card or just stick them somewhere else, like the back of a volkswagon?

I see you down there.

Is this tiny cameo Ms. Croft's first-ever appearance on a Japanese gaming mag cover?  Quite possibly.  Japan was about the only country in the world that never caught Croft Cover Chlamydia.  aHEM. Fever.  I meant, Croft Cover Fever.
Not that they're really talking about Tomb Raider at all in this issue - it shows up in an article rating how accurate the depiction of guns in various games are.  Poor Lara comes dead last in realism with 2 out of 5 stars.  I'm not sure whose idea it was to include Tomb Raider in any comparative evaluation of REALISM, though.  Have they even played the series?🤔

Scanning English-language gaming mags is getting dangerous around here.  No matter how good your scan is, it might get refused if someone else already made plans to release it later.  Luckily, I don't think anyone else has plans to release Japanese mags, so I can stick to those I guess. 
And non-gaming mags like ToyFare here.  Video games are the base entry level on the pyramid of nerd-dom.  Common as.  One level up and in much fewer numbers are the comic book fans, represented by Wizard Magazine, which will be coming, eventually.  At the top of the pyramid and in the smallest numbers are the action figure collectors - the nerds who play games, read comics, AND aren't ashamed to play with toys.  What level of nerd are you?

The manga section is read R-L.  If using two-page view mode, you will need to turn on Japanese/manga mode as well during the manga section.  If viewing pages one at a time, no adjustments are necessary.
 

Even Japan got fooled into thinking Daikatana was cover-worthy.

What caught my eye:
First of all, no one really needs an hourglass, but this one is pretty cool. Of course, you could easily go broke in Japan collecting all of the billions of Dragon Quest goods.

The other thing I noticed was a Vita game called Dungeon Travelers 2 that surely wasn't released in America.

Except that it was (this is probably common knowledge, but the last game system I owned was a PS2, so forgive my ignorance of anything released in the past 20 years).
Of course, Americans got it in censored form, duh.  The T&A wasn't covered in enough murder and gore to make it past American censors, I guess.
AMERICA:

JAPAN:

What the hell is even happening here though?  It's not actually porn, it just looks like it if you squint.  Oh Japan.  Why you so freaky?😅

Including the bonus "illustration card," this mag is 294 pages.  That's 3 times as long as most USA/UK video game mags.  And so, naturally, you would expect the filesize to be 3 times as big, as well, assuming the files are saved at similar pixel dimensions. 
I sometimes wonder how people react to all of these Japanese mags where 200+ pages is the norm, not the exception.  Do people get excited the mag is 300 pages, or annoyed that the file is on the large side? 
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't mind if ALL mags were 80-pg weaklings, because it would mean a heck of a lot less work LOL.  At least all the ones on my scan pile, at any rate. 😋

Notes on this issue:
There are certain concessions that must be made sometimes when dealing with digital mags when they can't be as easily manipulated by the reader as a physical mag can.  Keeping a scan EXACTLY like the physical mag can sometimes render the digital version nearly unreadable.  For example, a flip book, where half of the mag is printed upside starting from the back cover.  The physical mag simply needs to be flipped over and rotated 180 degrees, and suddenly what used to be the last page is now the first page.  But if you make the CBR match the physical mag exactly (as I once saw someone do), it means that you'll read half of the mag normally, but from the halfway point on, the pages will appear in the reverse order as well as being upside down.  This would be IMPOSSIBLE to read, so when making a digital version of a flipbook, you have no choice but to have all the pages in the same orientation and either put both halves one after the other, or else release a separate CBR for each half.
I deal with this kind of manipulation ALL THE TIME with Japanese mags, whenever there's a manga section printed Japanese-style (with text printed vertically, meaning it's read from R-L.)  In the physical mag, when you get to the first page of the manga section, there will be a note reminding you that it's actually the LAST page of the manga, and it will tell you to "flip to page ___" for the start of the manga.  You then read backwards, R-L, and when you're finished with the manga, you flip forward again to the page following the manga section.  But digital mags can't be manipulated so easily, so I reorder the pages, putting them in order - first page first, last page last (though I still warn people that when reading in 2-page view, they have to change to manga mode for facing pages to match correctly.  This isn't just some random concession I decided upon - this is the exact same thing Japanese publishers have to do when they release official digital versions of their mags.
All of this is leading to THIS mag, which required a bit of a concession in favor of readability, which I will explain:
There is a 4-page-wide foldout that acts as part of the Assassin's Creed article.  On one side of the foldout are 4 article pages, and on the other side is a single 4-page-wide poster.  Since a CBR/PDF can't simulate a foldout, if I were to put the pages in the order they are printed in the mag, all facing pages from that point on would be incorrect.  In order to keep facing pages oriented correctly, I had two choices: I could either insert 2 different blank pages before and after the foldout, which would keep the facing pages correct at the expense of throwing off the page numbers, or I could simply move the last page of the article in front of the foldout, which keeps facing pages and page numbers correct, except for the single page moved.  I opted for the latter.  The article pages are pretty modular, so the pages don't need to be read in a specific order to make sense.  So what you will see if you're looking at the printed page numbers is:
106 (the first page of the article) (also pg106 of the scan) 115 (the last page of the article which has been moved forward) (pg107 of the scan) 4 unnumbered article pages from one side of the foldout (pgs 108-111) 4 unnumbered poster pages from the other side of the foldout (pgs 112-115) 116 (a new article begins) (pg 116 - from here on, the page numbers are once again aligned with pages of the scan.) If this is confusing you, don't worry about it.  Just trust me that this is the best option for a digital release of this format.  Whether reading in single page or double page mode, you'll be good to go.
I have also included a perfect join of the 4-page poster image at the end of the CBR, so as not to disrupt page numbering.
Also at the end of the CBR is a two sided...something...for Onee Chambara Z2.  It's just an A4 sized...mini poster?  Or something?  Printed on thick cardboard?  Dunno.  I can't imagine a use for it.  The table of contents calls it an "illustration card." 

Bilingual English/Japanese
I'm sure some of you will be pleased to know that this is the last issue I have of this publication (future issues would be beyond the cutoff date, regardless). 
So from now on, when you want to know which Japanese craft beers are worth a damn, you're just going to have to ask me.

Bilingual English/Japanese

Bilingual English/Japanese

Bilingual English/Japanese

Bilingual English/Japanese

Bilingual English/Japanese
While you all are buying expensive magazines about video games on eBay, I just got in a box of 20 different craft beers from my favorite microbrewery in Japan, C.O.D.  Twenty beers for around $105.  Beer ain't cheap here.  But Japanese craft beer is like Pokemon to me.  Gotta try 'em all!  Just be grateful I don't subject you to my review album/blog.
This is only one of the reasons I don't have time for games anymore.  😆