I’ve honestly never seen anything wrong with the translation, seemed to be pretty much on par with most other stuff of that era?
Macros really only have a couple of specific use cases IMO, using the default ‘all attack’ for quickly dealing with easy encounters (although just using skills like Hewn that you’re not intending to use on bosses tends to be quicker sometimes), and the Zio battle where you need to use the Psycho Wand before you can deal any damage.
There is lots of humor and personality in the original text that gets flattened into a bland, simplified patter.
Official translation:
: I’m the principal of this academy. Let’s see, you must be Alys, the hunter, and you are her assistant, Chaz.
: Forgive me, but Chaz is a full-fledged partner of mine.
2021 fan translation:
Hmm, I think maybe I prefer the blandness over a punched-up Joss Whedony type of thing.
Reminds me of playing Crusader of Centy after having played the PAL Soleil version countless times as a kid, the attempts at whacky humour in the US script rubbed me the wrong way compared to the generic vanilla translation I was used to.
Yeah skimming a let’s play of the new translation, it is indeed very opinionated like that the whole way through. Probably overall a higher density of jokes than the original text had. I can see how that might be divisive.
What I would ideally like to play is a relatively vanilla fantasy writing style, with a flowing natural tone and occasional comic relief, matching the vibe of the comic-book panels. Still, at least you now get to choose whether you prefer something totally flavorless or overspiced.
don’t settle for one or the other, just painstakingly reconcile them to your own headcanon
very generalizable and popular option I hear
the us translation changes a bunch of the religious references later in the game, too
Yeah that bugged me about it too, like what is very obviously a church being referred to as “the wise man’s house” and God being ‘the Shaman’, it was very clumsy.
Besides that, the US translation may be the more accurate one though for all I know. There was a lot of things in that game that I just saw as weird mysterious quirks, and not until I played it again as an adult that I was able to recognise them as just visual gags and such.
I’ve never investigated it but I’ve long wondered if the item/spell names being different across the 4 games + PSO was actually true in Japanese as well. It didn’t really seem like a series that had it together.
Gah I am going yo have to play one of these in Japanese to prove a point.
Dark Phallus
ok serious question to ppl who have played garegga:
in your estimation, if you were to select an a+b+c ship (not using a keybind on an emulator or in the rev 2017 version but with 3 seperate buttons)
0 voters
continued playing earthbound, up thru beating the 5th sanctuary location (have not gone on the boat in Summers yet)
the game drags very intensely from threed (a bunch of running around in circles quests that don’t follow any logical flow, necessitating intense use of the hint guy) to belch’s factory (the first dungeon in the game that feels interminable) to the desert (unclear why we ought to come here, really unclear why we have to come back here). bright spots are saturn valley and the gold mine ‘3rd strongest mole’ gag. but yeah it’s really dumb that you go to a desert with a whole bunch of nothing, go to fourside, see nothing to do, have to go back to the desert to progress the story, see no way of proceeding, then go back to fourside again before the plot inches forward. and then in fourside you run into several roadblocks, the only girl in the party is kidnapped again without warning, a stupid department store dungeon, (a nice wacky detour to moonside) before going back to the desert fucking again for a stupid maze fetch quest. the trout yogurt gag after all that… doesn’t land at all
the game seems to speed up again once you get to summers, maybe it’s just the fact that you’re doing something new for once and the quests seem to make logical sense. like it feels like this entire portion of the game was just a bunch of sidequests that accidentally got made into the main quest, they don’t seem to connect to each other at all
yup
ugh fuck clara schumann was just dropped in this ofk game and like yes, ok, i know that it’s the one woman classical composer everyone knows can we please stop the entire classical apparatus is busted please fuck
Been resolving to play at least one game for an hour a day, because I just don’t play anymore and need to get back into the habit. Yesterday I fucked around with BeamNG, a car simulator I’ve had for a while, and wrecked some cars in a large test map.
Today I busted out Quake Injector and played the Coppertone map pack. The quake community regularly does map compilations, of which I’ve played a few, and with the Quake Injector getting requisite mods/maps/etc is really easy. (Coppertone, in this case being a reference to Copper, the Quake mod that changes a few small but significant things for better qualitiy of life/bugfixes/etc)
https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/coppertone-summer-jam-2.103/
The hub worlds in these are pretty good, this one the portals to new maps are all beach chairs.
Anyway, there’s one map where quake guy is pacman, and you’re chased by shamblers. I got cornered and ran out of ammo while I had the invincibility, so I was just kind of hitting them with my axe until I died
This map is by iYago (no twitter) and it’s called For Here Shall They Reign Again. It had a pretty good set of fights and battle areas.
The pack also has maps by TheTrashbang (who’s doing mapping work for Blendo’s next game) and Radiator Yang (who does a lot of blogging) so it’s really neat to see names I somewhat recognize next to quake mappers.
I bought MONUMENT on switch for like a buck, it’s another throwback FPS but it’s a throwback to like early 00s budget shooters like serious sam or more accurately, games made with the cube engine or something like that which ended up being put on coverdisks so they could advertise a “free game”
not the worst fps i played but also absolutely nothing i can recommend
Lagrange Point - beat the first boss, finally. definitely felt like a “by the skin of my teeth” situation, but with the amount of damage that boss did, i somehow feel like there isn’t any other way it could go. i might be slightly underleveled according to the uh…one walkthrough someone posted to GameFAQs 13 years ago, but that’s fine. i now have access to other places via space transport - it isn’t really clear to me if these are little natural planets or satellites, or both (one location is just called “Satellite” which doesn’t help me intuit the distinction between these places), but my impression is we’re in a civilization based on satellites within Lagrange Points. probably the manual to the game makes this more clear, or maybe there’s an intro i skipped by not letting the title screen fade out, who knows. so far, no one in the game has said the words “lagrange point.”
right now i’m trying to figure out what to do with the new characters who have come my way. up until this point, i’ve met a robot and a space native american who asked me if i’m going to Satellite. when i said yes they joined me, but weren’t selectable until i got to the Lounge on Satellite. this is basically your Dragon Quest-style pub type location where you can switch party members. i think my least favorite thing in jrpgs is party management when the characters don’t level up outside of being in your group.
Homebrew stuff
Astro Ninja Man DX and Kira Kira Star Night DX - these two homebrew games are made by the same crew and share some qualities so i’ll discuss them together. both games feel like they exist to show off some of the cooler technological and sound tricks that the Famicom can pull off (colors, strobing, scrolling, etc.) while giving a platform to Japanese chiptune artists. Kira Kira… is probably the less-compelling game, to me. it’s sort of a rhythm game, but abstractly in that you need to memorize the patterns of falling stars to collect enough by the end of the round. within each stage, there are maybe a dozen falling star patterns - if you can manage to collect all the stars within a pattern, you get bonus points. keep that up and the bonus points increase exponentially.
the midwestern-child-beauty-pageant moe girl aesthetic is…not really my thing, but it does manage to be cute and not creepy, sometimes. it’s a fun game and the music and colors are enough to make me want to play through it more than once, at least.
Astro Ninja… is more my thing. again, it feels like it could be a rhythm game, but this time it’s more of a shooter. you power up Astro Ninja Man by collecting mini-ninja-men who then create body doubles. there can be up to 5 of you on screen at once, and basically the goal is to make it to the end of the level without dying. as far as i can tell, there are no particular tricks with the scoring system, but maybe they’re not too overt or i’m missing something. again, the color and music implementation in this game is what really sells it.
i’d consider buying one or both of these games on carts, but apparently there is debate as to whether the “cheap” boards used by Columbus Circle, which are 3.3v, will fry your console, which runs 5v. i don’t know enough about this stuff, but based on working with synths and power sources, my guess is that this is one of those “it will probably be fine but you’re taking a risk” kind of things. that said, not really a risk i feel like taking with my current set up.
both games are “simplistic” in that they sacrifice complex gameplay and game length for pushing the Famicom to its limits as an audio-visual medium. personally, i think the most-successful aftermarket NES games are the one that try to recapture the simplicity of the early 80s, but paired up with the graphical and audio complexity of the early 90s. oh, which brings me to:
Gold Guardian Gun Girl - damn, i wish i’d picked this one up as a cart. hard to tell, but maybe the creator still prints them, occasionally. it’s a fairly-straightforward dungeon crawl game, but you need to regulate gas (for your mech) and HP (which drains when you run out of gas). there are six different controls schemes in the game, though i only like 2.5 of them. i should just do a run with each scheme, though, as i can’t shake the feeling that the most-unusable control scheme is probably the best one. has that addicting crawl quality to it, so i’ll be spending more time with this one.
Castlevania: The Holy Relics. hmm. it’s ok. the graphics looks nice considering the game builds off CV2, but the music is Just OK (so far?). it’s definitely very competent for a hack, but the way its first boss sucks (it stays out of reach of attacks for 90% of its time, meaning you really need the axe to beat it) is sending me bad vibes.
GRAVEYARD DUDE - this one is kind of puzzling (no pun intended). it’s a sokoban-style game, but everything about it is…idk if i’m using this word correctly because i’m an American…maybe a touch too cheeky, for me.
it does capture a certain kind of verbiage that reminds me of 80s Rare or maybe 80s PC games, and i suppose within that framing, i’m fine with it. the game itself seems fun for this kind of thing, but truthfully, i should play more than a few levels, first, before saying much about it. i like what i’ve played but i need to be in the right frame of mind to do puzzle games.
NEO Heiankyo Alien - another thing i’d like as a cart, but see above re: Columbus Circle carts. anyway, i LOVE HEIANKYO ALIEN. i didn’t know a remake for the Famicom had been a thing (though i did play the PC/Steam remix from a few years back), but as soon as i saw the ROM, i had to try it. i think the Game Boy HA will always be my favorite, for both nostalgia and presentation, but this is probably a close second. the soundtrack and colors are great, but the one thing i can say it doesn’t do well is character scrolling. everything moves in kind of a jerky way - it’s just a little too slow.
Macros are suboptimal but they do make battles go by much quicker! Which is important to reduce Old RPG Dungeon Disorientation in a game like this, in which the player’s drawing of their own mental maps of the dungeons is constantly interrupted by random battles that take place on a different screen
In fact (horrible videogame opinion alert. Do not read) I consider this a feature of older RPGs and feel that frameskipping, by making battles go too fast, unfortunately reduces disorientation too much and ruins this delicate balance between valuing speed vs valuing efficiency in old RPGs
ok i’m so silly… you can just wait for the ship select screen to time out to select abc type ships in garegga lmao
I played through this game the other day, and I also enjoyed it. I assume we’re going to see a flood of Vampire Survivors clones for a little while, and I’m sure there’s an audience for them.
I was a little ambivalent on the mangled Old English, in part because I wasn’t sure how intentional it was at first and because of how wrong people often get it when they try to do it right.
I haven’t tried anything else by this developer, but I think I will.
Glad you enjoyed it! Based on what I’ve seen from Spirits Abyss, which is also written in this exact style, I think it’s totally intentional. The vibe of the setting is “blood and muck gothic fantasy but dark-cute and funny,” and I believe the intention of this writing is to make as much content in the game feel as unserious as possible.
