I’ve said this before in discord but Tim’s translation of moon would be better if he did a barebones gloss and then passed npcs through the chrono cross automatic accent generator.
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I’m totally into this in theory. my issue with the dragon quest localization style, particularly DQXI, is that it’s laid on so obnoxiously thick. it’s just so cloying. every line is written as if to say “look how british we are! aren’t we doing good? we made this oh so very british for you! please love how british this is!”
like yes the default for most localization is american but it’s not as if all the dialog is full of phrases like “yeehaw!” “howdy doody” “wow that’s groovy, man”, “gosh, that’s swell!” etc. even earthbound is like, purposefully affected to “sound american” but does so non-annoyingly. this isn’t any accident or some naive decision, like they are deliberately localizing it to sound as screechingly british as possible and like, it’s kind of funny I guess but I really don’t know if I’m up for another 80 hours of this or whatever
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imagining a version of dragon quest xi that really is as ‘screechingly british as possible’ with hendrik having a meltdown about migrants not singing vera lynn loud enough
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It’s a good point about how Americanisms are rare by comparison but unfortunately I think generic American accents are coded as ‘normal’ accents for a global Anglophone audience.
I honestly appreciate the British accents in these localisations but I am conflicted about it. Cor blimey! It’s arf-past tea-time and I’ve yet to butter me crumpets. Cheerio!
Brexit: Echoes of an Elusive Age
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i finished tokyo xanadu!
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i love the dqxi localization, i don’t even mind the haiku town really. i can recognize is it as kind of, i don’t know, over the top, but i also appreciate that it picked a direction and leaned all the way into it. and i’m not someone who thinks alliteration or puns are inherently funny at all
though to be fair if there was a game that was written to be “american” and it was mindfully packed with yeehaws and groovy howdy doodys i would probably think that ruled too
(i also think the ui is beautiful and good, but the location of the skill tree menu specifically is a bizarre oversight for sure)
(in the zone is better than pep up, but pep up is good, and it allows for the item “pep pop,” which obviously would have a worse name otherwise, and whatever the system is called it is mechanically good as hell imo)
(i can’t afford to start thinking about dq right now whoops)
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I got called out in your first full paragraph. And now I am spurred to action as intended. You are the fal’Cie to my l’Cie.
Which is good a segue as I can manage to make my first post to say I beat Final Fantasy XIII on Saturday afternoon. 80 Hours of my life but then what expectations from such a journey? Freedom of adventure, catharsis of dismantling existing power structures and villainous purposes?
For some slice of context I’m treading lightly in early Fatherhood to still achieve my lifelong goal of beating my backlog (another word for game’s that sit on the shelf un-experienced to ‘The End’). XIII was my first FF since I beat IV back in 2013 and I can finally put another notch on another belt of whatever FF character wears eight belts (side-story and offshoot belts not included in this post). IV. V. VI. VII. IX. X. XII. and now XIII.
I can’t act as though I am not disappointed. Somewhere in the Marianas Trench part of my brain lies the desire to play contrarian to large swaths of opinion and say ‘No you’re wrong and here’s why’ on any given game but especially with a series that has given me as much as FF. XIII is a mash of deep exorbitance and the mundane in a strange serving that I’ve never known the series to offer. I’m attempting to be context-less here and treat the game independently (if it didn’t have the FF moniker would I have liked it…some skoshes of degrees more?..I’ll never know but: no).
80 hours I found myself traipsing through breathtaking art design and art direction in fantastic and engaging enemy designs and scene-scapes that not uncommonly illicited a cry of joy or agape mouth. In the end I think it’s the games greatest strength but to whom would I recommend 80 hours of time spent in even the most engaging of modern art museums? I don’t want to pick apart every piece of the game but only to offer general perspectives. To try to project into the future how I will remember the game based on how I think of it freshly now, it’s high and low lights that help place it in my overall gaming context.
The music is truly… nice. Hamauzu’s style is unique to Uematsu’s in a way of being more ethereal, a little less ear-wormy and more just painting moods with intensity or a feeling of being spaced out. In the end I think he’s a worthy series composer even if I don’t anticipate wearing out the OST as much as I have IV-IX, or even X (to which I love Hamauzu’s contributions).
The real gripes have been captured endlessly in countless other video and written reviews and I don’t want to belabor too many of those points. What will likely stand out for me though is that ‘mastery’ of the Paradigm system just to beat the game is not as deep as those who truly ‘master’ it to complete all missions and obtain consistent 5-star battle ratings would have you believe. There are not that many relevant Paradigms needed to blast your way through battles. Four or five tops come to mind in reflection. The Crystarium and Weapon upgrades too just become glass-eyed tedious late game and in the former feel largely irrelevant. Apart from story (interesting but largely unimpactful) and characters (just a bunch of cool ass fuckers) I don’t have that much I want to prattle on about.
In the end it’s a pot of good looking soup that ain’t been seasoned right and makes you wish you hadn’t tried to make soup that night. It was OK.
A lot for a first post and I have many more thoughts which perhaps could be written or spoken some day. I haven’t written this much about anything really outside of school which was close to a decade ago now. I feel strange.
But one day you get called out and the dam bursts. So thank you @yarusenai
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I’ve been playing old CoD campaigns as my computer is being temperamental and that makes it hard to play FF14. Advanced Warfare was okay, not great in retrospect with a prominent sex predator as the villain.
Finished the Infinite Warfare campaign today and really liked it. It got me to care about the characters for once.
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back on my super mega baseball 3 kick
I don’t know why all of twitter seems to be so excited about blaseball and jessica telephone when you can hit a bullshit pop fly to a centerfielder named y. sax and you have to open up the roster of the team in order to figure out what that person’s first name is because you missed out on his FULLY VOICE-ANNOUNCED WALKUP when he went up to bat
game’s pretty darn good
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i was farming for credits on ceres in warframe and the game refused our feeble attempts to exit the mission, forcing us into a hellish sea of gross meat and fluids
we got the option to extract again like 3 mins later and it didn’t work, so i tried to just quit the mission
oh. cool. thanks
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it got another patch today and a friend says it’s fine now, interesting
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hm lmk if it actually looks good to you, i’m also holding out for word the pc port isn’t dogshit (and a sale wouldn’t hurt)
I’m assuming the screenshots are from this but no amount of googling turns anything up… am I just dumb? help
aaaa thank u this looks so rad
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in a rut and can’t bring myself to play anything other than Gran Turismo 2 endurance races
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Have you ever tried Gran Turismo 4’s Driving Mission 34?
You must defeat
- '54 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Coupe
- '98 Mercedes-Benz SLK 230 Kompressor
- '91 Mercedes-Benz 190 E 2.5 - 16 Evolution II
- '04 Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG (R230)
- '02 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 (R230)
around a single lap of the Nürburgring Nordschleife, driving an '03 SLR.
The catch is that the start of each is staggered, with your SLR starting last, 123 seconds after the first, the 300SL. They make you sit and wait the whole two minutes.
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Hooked up my PS2
That frog is a Rumble Roses save
Check out this mother
These are the games installed on my hard drive. I don’t know why Disgaea 2 is on there. I didn’t care for that one much. Nightmare of Druaga is missing, which is fucked up cuz I love that game. Perhaps it isn’t compatible? This thing was once 30% Pop’n Music games. I really liked those in 2004.
Chikyuu Bouiegun is Earth Defense Force. I imported those when they came out. That’s right: I’m the kinda sickie who collected Simple 2000 games.
I’m not that big on Silent Hill but I guess I had plans on changing that at some point.
Only game I booted was Dragon Quarter and I quit it when I couldn’t find my memory card for it.
The dual shock 2 sure feels way better than subsequent PlayStation controllers. Having official component cables was nice. I will never play this thing again I bet.
That was my PS2 experience.
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Finished Horizon’s Gate, an SRPG modeled after the original NES “Pirates!”
You sail around, going from town to town, running supplies, exploring, logging items, fightin’, sometimes doing some pirating.
This is the 3rd or so game by Rad Codex, and it’s like… almost a complete game? It’s missing some crucial meat on the bones, doesn’t go far enough or do enough, but, what’s there is very charming and quite fun.
Exploring is great, combat is varied and robust, dungeons and caves and whatnot are cool to explore. But then you just see every environment in a few days, and welp, that’s the whole thing. Morale/food system is also a bit too punishing, requiring you to really hit every down you can find, which tends to be a bit samey. You can turn down the difficulty setting to lose morale and food at a slower rate, which I’d recommend.
At the very very end of the game, in the final scenario, you are brought to an entirely new, very small realm, which gave me a taste of a much cooler 2nd phase of the game that might’ve been. Hopefully they do a sequel or something and expand on this.
Overall, glad I played it, wish I’d cranked down the difficulty to blow through the modest amount of content quicker, though. Definitely looking forward to Rad Codex’s next game.
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this really took off among some high profile games people (darius, radiator) and I was kind of bemused by that because I’m totally a mark for these kinds of games and yet between having just played pillars 2 with its identical setting a couple years ago, and not having a great deal of faith in the zippiness of combat in this dev’s prior titles or their approach to procedural generation / game flow, I let this pass me right on by
I generally appreciate the reminder of just how hopelessly idiosyncratic I am even within my particular niche, but I really don’t think this game has enough italians in it
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Yeah I tried Horizon’s Gate and it didn’t click for me. This is just based on the first half hour but the tactical battles are dull (FFTA style – the mechanics don’t reward the time you waste moving units around) and these seafaring games are partly carried by having weird surprises and delights as you explore and in the little bit I played, the setting seems too generic for that.
I enjoyed Pillars 2 a lot on your recommendation though. (Shame that game underperformed. Partly bad marketing i think: the title probably should’ve just been “Deadfire” as I’m instantly bored by the word “Pillars” and it took a lot of nudging to overcome that first impression.)
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