In the process of dumping, releasing and scanning the Namco Elemecha Encyclopedia, there was something of an elephant in the room regarding punch-list items left before this thing was “preserved”, and that’s this giant 80-page booklet.

I initially invested in a fairly powerful X-ACTO knife, at the cost of eight US dollars. I was fully prepared to slice out the pages one at a time, maybe a few at a time if I really pressed down, but was fully aware that pressing down too aggressively could have the likelihood of pushing down the edge where the cut was made, then it doesn’t sit flat on the scanner, there’s blurring, all hell breaks loose, it’ll be anarchy.

I then had a halcyon moment of remembering that my parents used to buy me those countertop calendars, the ones with 365 days on them, and you read the little nugget of Pollyanna information on it and chuck it.

However, once you get to about mid-March, right about as this post goes up, there tends to be a rather large cliff of glue hanging off the top of the calendar as you rip away the paper it’s holding together. I usually get rid of this as soon as I can, but some people who I don’t understand let the glue overhang topple there indefinitely, pushing it away daily as they tear away a new day’s blessing.

So I figured I’d just do what I do with those, pull pages slowly, and when there’s an overhang, just rip it away slowly with your thumbs, pages fall out, and then do it all over again. And that worked.

I retained the edges, no cutting. Cutting would have been fine, but since I was scanning these by the exact page dimensions, I’d have to delete them in Photoshop anyway.

Once this process was complete, I had a nice snowy pile of spine glue and paper on my desk, as if a mouse had shredded a napkin I used to plug the hole the mouse was using to get into the kitchen from the basement. Upon this process completing, it was time to scan, rotate, level, de-screen, combine, OCR, reduce, upload, and then write.

At this point, my time with this disc has come to a close. I’ve followed it for years, first seeing it appear in my Namco searches on Yahoo! Japan Auctions, wondering what the heck it was, and then being fairly astonished that there were STILL some 90’s Namco soundtrack releases on Victor that were unknown to me. They were pretty prolific during this time, a time where this could only happen then.

CD production was cheap, cassettes were mostly dead, music was rich and lush enough to require 72 minutes of lossless greenfield, and someone who loves these games very much, made a heck of a love letter to them.

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I can only hope in my efforts to permanently preserve this release, I can honor the legacy of all the people that created it. I’m not sure distributing it for free is necessarily doing the job there, but on a long enough timeline, like all non-modern CD releases not re-released on modern platforms, this work would have disappeared into the wind, at least the ability to make a lossless copy of it.

Enjoy it now. PDF, CBZ, PDF compressed with OCR, and RAW scans: archive.org