Hi, I need some quick Japanese translation help for two video game artbook products on Amazon.co.jp.  I ran the pages through Yahoo! Babelfish, but the translation does not make much sense.

Valkyrie Profile Material Collection
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%B4%E3%82 … 271&sr=8-2

Etrian Odyssey Sourcebook
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E4%B8%96%E7%95 … 77&sr=11-1

I basically want to know two things from these pages (I don't need a full translation written here):
1) For the Etrian Odyssey Sourcebook, is it actually an artbook as opposed to a game guide?  I do not need game maps or game strategies.  I am actually looking for artwork.

2) For Valkyrie Profile Material Collection (has VP 1 and VP2), which I presume is an artbook, there are some negative reviews.  What is the gist of the negative reviews?  I actually own the original VP Material Collection (VP1 only), so I'm interested to know if these reviewers are making comparisons.  The Babelfish translation seems to imply the VP2 stuff is not good.

Hopefully, this will not take too much of your time.  I have nothing to offer but a big thank you here.  Thank you for your help.

Try Excite's translation service instead of Babelfish. It's not perfect, but I think it gives much better results than anyone else, except maybe Google.

The Etrian Odyssey has artwork from both the first and second games. 111 pages seems a little scant for all that art, and one of the reviews does complain about too many images being packed onto each page. However, B5 is a relatively large paper size, so you should get some decently sized images.

As for Valkyrie Profile, 6000 yen for 200 pages?! Is it hardcover or something? One of the reviews seems to complain that Valkyrie Profile Lenneth gets too much attention, so VP2 content suffers. Another says that there's some overlap of material with the first book.

There's a ToC and some sample pages here:
http://kouryaku.dengeki.com/book/4-04-8 … 040-1.html

Thanks for the link to Excite's translation page.  I tried Excite and Google's translation.  Both came out more or less the same in terms of quality, although I am getting better sense of what the reviews were saying for the VP materials.

Thanks for the quick summary of the description and reviews.  It is just the information I needed to make a purchasing decision.

I find http://tool.nifty.com/globalgate/ to be pretty reliable in terms of JP --> US

Thanks for the link recommendation.  It's about as good as the other two.  I'll probably have to use all three to try to get a better sense of things.