Somehow, a random story showed up in my phone's newsfeed where people were bitching about the state of gaming mag preservation. The example they used to illustrate their point (that much of the most important gaming history remains unpreserved) was the fact that Famitsu's review of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is not readily available as a scan. This review was famous for being the first game ever to receive a perfect score of 40 (10s from all four reviewers) since Famitsu's launch in 1986.
Well, I happen to have that issue, and while I haven't gotten around to scanning it yet, I decided to do a quickie scan of that page on my flatbed so that anyone wanting to see this "important piece of history" can do so in 600dpi.
Except...is it REALLY all that important? Famitsu uses the "review crew" system that EGM directly copied, with 4 reviewers giving their opinions in a tiny little box that only accommodates 3 or 4 sentences at most. So just like EGM, these are, by design, some of the least in-depth reviews that have ever been written.
To be fair though, even 3 or 4 sentences are like a Russian novel compared to SOME of EGM's reviews. Ahem:
Anyway, I ran the Zelda review through google translate for anyone too lazy to do it themselves, and reformatted it to be easier to see here (sorry, google translate outputs super low-res images):
So there it is. Important? I mean, I guess the first perfect score from Famitsu's notoriously picky reviewers is historically significant, but we didn't need a scan to know that. Is there any important history contained in the actual reviews? Well...I guess it depends on your point of view. On the one hand, maybe all printed matter is historically important, regardless of the quality or significance of what is said. On the other hand, there are far more in-depth and informative reviews written by random people on Gamefaqs or Amazon reviews or personal blogs or wherever, but are people clamoring to preserve those as history? Food for thought.
If anyone wants to download the original (untranslated) scan of this page in 600dpi, here you go: https://i.postimg.cc/D7vDY9xh/Scan-20250218.jpg