As with most games, letting it sit at the title screen for a while shows a little something. In this case, it's some flavor text, three people standing at the base of a tree as large pink birds fly by, and, of course, epic music (track 1 天使の怖れ / "Angel's Fear").

Oddly, the Japanese version uses English text. While far from flawless, it's at least readable. Might as well clean it up and correct the grammar and word choice...

In addition to the obvious text changes, the backdrop also significantly differs between the two versions. Observe:

That appears to be the same source image, except with one zoomed in, blurrier, and apparently a bit short on sunlight.

Let's throw this in as a bonus. The simple and repetitive title music is not on the OSV.

On starting a new game, the player must name the main character.

Normally, this sort of screen would be nearly identical between versions, just with a different character set, but...

...not so much. Over 170 characters reduced to 26 capital letters, with no sign of lowercase letters or even any punctuation. The added instructions might have something to do with it. While they may help anyone who didn't read or doesn't have the manual and can't figure out how to work the screen on their own, they're still missing an explaination of how to erase a letter once it's entered (use the Y button).

There's also plenty of room on the screen for at least a second row of selectable characters, even with the extra instructions.

Anyway, although the naming screen only allows entry of capital letters, names are just text data as far as the game is concerned, so editing memory to insert lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, or other symbols (using the game's text encoding, of course) works perfectly fine.

As long as you limit yourself to six characters of text, anyway. The game is set up to allow for names as long as 12 bytes, and the English text encoding scheme makes it possible to go up to 24 characters with certain combinations, but the game text isn't formatted with that in mind and will have display issues.

After naming The Boy, the introduction begins.

There are standardized names out there that don't show up anywhere in the game itself, or the manual as far as I can remember. To me, our hero is just The Boy, so his name will appear as [BOY] in the game text on this site. After looking into it further, the names are given in the Japanese manual, where The Boy is officially ランディ (randi, Randy). The remake spells it "Randi", possibly to evade potential unfortunate implications that don't really fit his character.

On to the story! We start with a black background and some suitably ominous music (track 12 闇の奥 / "Deep in Darkness").

Pan across what looks like an advanced militaristic structure.

Pan up through what could be a power room in the structure.

Pan across a dark forest filled with dead trees.

Pan down over a valley with an enormous tree.

Fade to black.

The music fades with a last bit of dissonance as the screen pans across terrain toward a log bridge by a waterfall...