Trivia / The Five Star Stories

• Bad Export for You: Played with. For some reason, they decided to split each volume in the English edition up into two or three separate books. On the other hand, not only did they keep the non-standard large format that allows you to see Nagano's art in all its obsessively detailed glory, they also stuck translated sections of the voluminous collection of sourcebooks, complete with full-colour illustrations, in the back of each issue. Also, while the translation is beautifully written, the editing could use some serious work, as FSS has one of the highest numbers of spelling and punctuation errors you're likely to find in an English manga outside of a scanslation.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: While not as severe as other examples, the manga has gone on several years-long hiatuses that led to official translations being discontinued.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: To make all the export issues listed here worse, the translated volumes have all gone out of print over a decade ago and the remaining copies go for hundreds of dollars, before finally starting to be republished in 2022...in French only, for the time being.
• No Export for You: Sadly, the translators seem to have given up around the end of volume 10, probably due to the financial difficulty of putting out a niche manga with high production values. There are scanslations of the first third of Japanese Vol.11 (in the style of the official translation, full-colour sourcebook pages and all) and a short gaiden story from Japanese Vol.12, but it seems no scanslation groups are planning to do any more at the moment.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For over a decade people have always assumed that the reason Five Star Stories has never appeared in Super Robot Wars is that the LED Mirage was used by mistake in Super Robot Wars 4 without Nagano's permission, with the devs thinking it's from L-Gaim. In reality, the mech actually used was the Blood Temple which looks extremely similar to the Mirage as Nagano used the Blood Temple as a design basis for it. Blood Temple is in fact from L-Gaim and has never been used again because that isn't the mech that the final boss actually uses in the show, so it hasn't been used since in order to fix a continuity error. This SD design for the Blood Temple has appeared in other works since, officially drawn by Nagano, and has officially licensed garage kits. As for people saying that he doesn't want his robots to be damaged because they're the strongest, that's purely extrapolated from a Zeta Gundam interview with Tomino where he said that people these days care more about how powerful the Psycho Gundam is than about the interpersonal relationships between the characters, and his statement that the Mirage's flamethrower could kill even gods was him joking taking the piss out of such a mindset.
• What Could Have Been: The series was originally conceived as being more of a Real Robot story, in the vein of Armored Trooper VOTOMS. Nagano's earliest production sketches for the LED Mirage are even more stripped-down and utilitarian-looking than his designs for Zeta Gundam.

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