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eyedelater · 1 year

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yakuza like a dragon post

i went to a store and bought neo TWEWY, and then instead of playing that, i bought Yakuza: Like a Dragon (yakuza 7) on steam because it was on sale and started playing that. now it seems like i'll be playing this game for the rest of my natural life because the amount of stuff to do is simply limitless. so that's bad news for my copy of neo TWEWY, but good news for me?

naturally, this post is going on my anime blog because the game is originally in japanese. i have the audio set to japanese, and it's very educational. the japanese voice actors are all quite good. kasuga's voice actor is fantastic. and at first i didn't have that many thoughts worth recording about the game, but now, several have built up, and i need somewhere to put them. i should note that i've never played any other yakuza games, but i understand that they are generally well-loved by everyone… maybe? i've only ever seen tiny snippets of gameplay footage from the other yakuza games, so i have no idea what their gameplay is like. if you have to aim a gun with your joystick, i'll never play them.

good first impressions. i LOVE a minimap. i LOVE a minimap that is set to north-up and is always on. if i ever got some stupid shit like google glass to put a GUI on my everyday life, i would put a north-up minimap corresponding with my GPS location. (ok maybe i wouldn't want it tracked constantly. but still.) on my in-game minimap, kasuga is a big arrow, and his party members are little arrows, just like a duck and ducklings. i'm running around leading my little ducklings all around yokohama. because i'm trying to make kasuga the best man he can be, i usually make an effort to have him navigate the sidewalks in a polite way. i want him not to crash into other pedestrians even though he is tall and imposing and his hitbox is very wide. so i skillfully dodge between all the pedestrians to avoid making them shout. but despite my best efforts, i hear all my little ducklings behind me crashing into every pedestrian i managed to avoid. my little ducklings are so clumsy.

i did the side quest where you lead the bubble man to a clothing store. i didn't like that duckling.

the hitboxes on items and vending machines are Absolutely merciless, and because the interact button is also the run button, i keep breaking into a run and crashing around instead of picking up the item. there's just no way for kasuga to look cool when trying to interact with something.

you might not know this about me, but in my view, the best video games allow you to run fast and jump high regardless of the circumstances. so i can't deny that my heart sank when i found out that this game has no jump button whatsoever. i will do my best to see past this obvious deficit.

this game has such a good sense of humor. it's ridiculous and not overly negative despite some terrible things happening. i laughed out loud at the cheerful little tune when someone joins your party. i love the wholesomeness of kasuga just trying to be the best man he can be and become a real-life hero. the way side quests always devolve into violence and then the problem is always solved by a beatdown is too funny. the absurdity and good humor puts it on a level that is not too far from golden kamuy, in my opinion. i'm not especially far along as i write this (saeko just joined my party), but i really think this game might be a treasure. and i have to say that if i hadn't been really into golden kamuy immediately before playing this, i might not have been in the right mindset to appreciate cute ossans like this. i like the audacious decision to make your party primarily out of down-on-their-luck 40- and 50-somethings, and i love the audacious decision to have them do cute things like become best friends and earn vocational school certificates and plant little gardens. (if i apply the COCK test to this game, it passes 3 points with flying colors: completely unhinged, offends the church, kicks ass. it might be deficient on the Creatures point unless you count the catchable bugs, which barely count due to their pure normalness, or sujimon, which barely count due to their humanity.)

i've learned that these vocational school certificates don't fuck around. however, i'm determined not to cheat or look up answers. (eventually i decided to savescum, but only a little.)

i was thinking it's really hard to do anything to improve kasuga's personality, but then i finally unlocked the part-time hero quests and like 50 achievements hit at once and he became 5 times the better man instantaneously.

i love nanba. he's the best. i love his frown and his slouch. his deadpan voice is the best. i love his finishing attack that knocks him flat on his ass. i'm trying to get lots of side quests done in between main story points because i don't know when i might lose access to this map like i lost access to the kamurocho map, but i can't get emotionally closer to nanba without advancing the main story more. i need that, and that's why i'm advancing the main story. (the fact that getting closer to him is tied to story progress might indicate that he's going to be an especially long-lasting member of your party…)

nanba has the highest of whatever stat makes you go first in battle, but he seems to be the slowest of my ducklings when it comes to keeping up with running kasuga, so it happens over and over and over that kasuga aggros the enemies and then nanba is like "all right, it's my turn!!" but he's like 30 feet behind or around the corner and has to run a little while everyone waits for him.

i work with homeless people in my day job, and i think this game portrays them somewhat cruelly… i have really mixed feelings about it… like the narrative puts in effort to be like, "everyone has their own reasons for being on the street and it's not as simple as going and getting a job," which is true! and it includes the obvious fact that not having a home is a gigantic obstacle to getting a job. (hot tip: you will have trouble getting a normal job if you don't have somewhere to take showers and do laundry, because otherwise, you will stink too much for anyone to hire you. and if you have a very small income, are you going to spend it on doing laundry often enough at the laundromat, or are you going to spend it mostly on food? and are you going to spend it on thrifty foods like dry beans and pasta to boil up at your nonexistent stove, or are you going to buy more expensive fast food and gas station food that is immediately available? it all comes together into a big vicious circle that is incredibly difficult to escape without outside help, no matter how badly you want to work. yet many people fail to consider any of this and act like homeless people are some kind of mess to clean up.) but despite that, the game also implicitly and explicitly makes fun of homeless people a lot ("battle bum" and "hungry hungry homeless," "homeless guy" as a job class, nanba's bad breath attack and pigeon attack [even though i love his pigeon attack], weird implication that there's a Leader at the homeless settlement that everyone respects). and it does seem to completely ignore the fact that drugs and mental illness generally factor into homelessness in a major way. (maybe it's different in japan? i don't know a single thing about the drugs situation there. but i can't imagine the mental illness situation is too different.) i don't know. you can't expect every depiction to be perfectly respectful, especially in a very silly game like this. but i think it's not good to ignore the disrespect. this is something i'm still chewing over. all the outfits are exactly right though.

is there a mod where you can give kasuga a giant white cravat so we can acknowledge how much the color of his outfit reminds me of miles edgeworth

i noticed that sometimes kasuga has nothing in his unbuttoned shirt except his cleavage and other times there's a red scarf thing there. what's up with that? oh, is it when he transforms into a Hero and that means his outfit changes slightly, just like how nanba puts his hood up? [note added in later: yes.]

i have unlocked many things such as gardening and part-time hero quests, but i still don't have anything to do with the extremely burgeoning pile of crafting materials i have been amassing this entire time. i could build a hosue with all this shit.

classifying other humans as sujimon is interesting. it's true that if you're out in the real world you may come across someone and it's like, "have i seen this person before? no… i've just seen another of the exact same Type of Guy." i myself am of a certain Type that old people mistake for their niece. of course, it's kind of bizarre and messed up to classify sujimon as if they're something other than human. but it is funny. (and in this case, the "mon" isn't short for monster but rather for mono 者, which can be a word describing humans.)

some of these cutscenes are incredibly long. i like to listen carefully to the japanese lines as if it were a listening exercise. based on my listenings, i would say they did a good job with the translation, though it's clear they decided to lean very much in the direction of "getting the connotations across and making it sound good in english" and away from "translating literally exactly what they are saying." because of my personal taste, i tend to be a stickler for leaning toward the latter (with allowances for making it sound good in english), but that's just a matter of poetic license. there are some lines i would have translated quite differently, but that's only a result of my own oversized ego. overall, they did a better job than i could have. obviously. i also noticed in the cutscenes that there are often unnaturally long pauses between the lines but that you can make them shorter if you press the A button? maybe to give you, the viewer, time to process? seems weird though. [note added in later: i think that was my computer struggling to load the cutscene. so instead of having huge loading times in between cutscenes, they have little tiny loading times in between all the dialogue? seems like something like that. this is the most demanding game i've ever tried to run on this computer.]

adachi is constantly saying, "koshi ga haru ze." i think it's "haru," but i'm not sure. "koshi" means "hips," and he's an old guy, so it's probably something about his hips aching. but i can't quite figure out the verb. is it haru as in "to stretch or strain?" i guess that would make sense. or is it a different verb and i'm mishearing? my auditory processing is somewhat notoriously poor. anyway, whatever he's actually saying, i kinda want adachi to shut the fuck up about his hips.

i basically never play games where the characters are meant to be photorealistically rendered. there is not one such game that i have played through to the end. i just prefer cartoonier stuff for various reasons, not the least of which is the uncanny valley of almost-realistically rendered human faces. this game definitely, absolutely has that uncanny valley factor, but i can overlook it. it's refreshing to see character designs that are just people.

i can't believe there's DLC for this game. how could i possibly ever run out of stuff to do. how could i possibly ever run out of stuff to do (a second time for emphasis)

crashing into people on a real-life sidewalk "sorry ma'am, my hitbox is just-- oOF, excuse me, i'm so sorry, it's my hitbox--"

i'm not pumped for this business management minigame. i saved right after we set things up with nick ogata and then stopped playing for the day. i'm too exhausted today to try it… i hope there's an easy way to do the necessary part and then i can forget about it because it doesn't seem fun… can't i just pawn this off on nick ogata right away? by the way, i had to check if nick ogata's name used the same kanji as That ogata, and it does. so i guess it's a name that exists and has the "tail" kanji in it for real, rather than noda-sensei unusually spelling an existing name with a "tail" kanji for hyakunosuke because he's a cat.

they had a moment of minor fanservice after everyone took a bath and saeko was sitting with her cleavage out. but then in the same scene was kasuga's entire boobs. that's balance.* no one can make complaints on any side there. maybe the complaint is that we didn't see nanba's. though i'm quite sure his torso would be unexceptional. but that's why i want to see. look, this is not for my sexual gratification. i just think it's funny how showing a man's entire boobs is totally allowed, and i want to see. (golden kamuy got me used to being allowed to see.)

(*is it?)

i don't want to see adachi's boobs.

i was like "it's so hard to find bugs :( they only spawn on a tree once every 5 hours of play" but then i went to hamakita park and ran around in a field catching bug after bug!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

do these various chinatown bun vendors know that their prized proprietary recipes are so similar to each other's offerings that their buns stack together in my inventory

playing in fullscreen, having various thoughts, but this .txt is behind the fullscreen so i can't click away to it. finish playing for the night. forget everything i was going to write.

i historically spend most of my computer time in the web browser without minimizing and may go weeks without looking at my desktop. but when i do rarely play a PC game, i open it by going to my desktop where i have plonked the game's icon. so lately, i'm seeing my desktop much more often. my desktop background is that color page of tsukishima and koito from volume 24, and lately i see it every day. my boys are here to ground me with their serious looks.

right before we got access to the romance workshop, it was like, "this is a great way to repurpose our old items instead of shelling out huge amounts of cash on new ones!" but i have to shell out monster amounts of cash to upgrade the workshop.

one of these days i have to give nanba a new job. i think kasuga will remain a hero, and i don't know about the others, but nanba needs a job other than homeless guy because he needs a new outfit. maybe he'll have more good attacks too. his flame breath is a little frustrating because it's really hard to get him and the enemies in the right position so that it hits more than one enemy. when i feel like i have them in a good position for his flame breath, he decides on his own to run 20 feet closer so that he can only hit one enemy after all.

i want to appreciate the game for all it has to offer, but i'm not very interested in learning how to play all these real-life card games and mahjong. i mean, i know how to play blackjack. knew. it's somewhere in there. i've tried the darts, baseball, and golf minigames. they're fun enough. haven't downloaded the slots minigames. but i don't really want to play cards.

ichiban calls saeko "sacchan (さっちゃん)," but they romanized it as sa-chan. that's fair, given that "sac" is an english word that we don't especially like. and romanizing "sacchan" as the also-phonetically-accurate "satchan" would mean the T appears out of nowhere, so it's not a good option in this case.

i'm SO glad this game doesn't run on real time or abbreviated time or any semblance of realistic passage of time (unlike persona 4). i don't have to ration my side quests or relationship growth based on how much time is left in the day (unlike in persona 4). i won't miss out on important things because i ran out of time or accidentally missed a deadline for that particular date (unlike in persona 4).

my dear nanba killed me once. he can save me, and he can kill me, but only the saving matters to the narrative; no matter how many times he kills me, it is erased. that is his conundrum as a character in a video game with a predetermined plot. anyway, i bought him an expensive weapon, and he killed me with it. it was already somewhat late at night in real life when it happened, so after that, i spent the rest of my time before bed upgrading my weapons and grinding a little in preparation to kill my dear nanba. the game didn't want me running all around ijincho in between fighting the wrecking ball and fighting nanba, so it disabled the taxi service, but i can't be stopped. i ran all the way across town and back to get vegetables so the master could make me some bentos. and i came across hiro's missing cat at hamakita park, so i got a million yen to upgrade my weapons and armor. and now, the next day, after thinking about it all day, it is just about time to kill nanba. but he'll be okay, and then he'll rejoin my party where he belongs.

i killed nanba very easily. i didn't need to use any of the master's bentos. nanba was okay, but he still didn't come back to my party yet. but that's okay. he'll keep gaining XP in the background, and in the mean time, we have a new little duckling. i really wish joon-gi had some attacks that affected the whole crowd of enemies, since he has the highest agility or dexterity or whatever makes him attack first, and when you attack first, the enemies haven't had a chance to spread out yet, so that's when you want to do a broad attack… maybe if he levels up a bit…

i've been watching someone play paper mario lately, and i keep thinking, i wish i could put my party members in my pocket so i don't have to worry about my 2 or 3 incredibly clumsy ducklings constantly crashing into everyone and everything and me as i navigate the crowded city.

nanba came back sooner than i thought. he didn't even have time to get a new outfit like i thought he might. but i guess when you're a level x homeless guy as your job, you can't just get a new outfit even if you meet your brother off-camera and solve your emotional difficulties. also, when nanba came back, sacchan got put in my pocket! so they can be put in my pocket while i run around! but then they won't help me fight.

when i first started playing, i thought the danger level indicators were like the wantedness indicators in GTA, like that's how hard the police are going after you and it's based on how many crimes you commit. but it turns out that there are no consequences and in fact many rewards for beating up endless chinpiras in broad daylight.

joon-gi's voice actor is quite good. i enjoy his polite speech. and despite his calm demeanor, when he attacks, he often lets out a very powerful TSERYAAAA!!!! that feels kind of uncharacteristic but very amusing

i got sick of trying to be nice walking on the sidewalks. now everywhere i go is a chorus of UWOs and KYAs and WOTTOs. it's not my fault my hitbox is wide and my ducklings are so bad at pathfinding. when i break into a run, they also break into a run and loop around to run directly in front of me from a 90 degree angle. i keep getting t-boned by my own ducklings. and then they make a complaining noise.

i'm gonna go to isezaki ijincho just to visit the several large SEGA-branded arcades that definitely exist there in the real world. oh wait, this area itself doesn't quite exist in the real world. i guess that makes sense.

i maxed out my relationship with nanba. i was very annoyed that there was the whole thing of "oops now we have to actually give nanba a surprise party because he's expecting it and he's excited about it!" and then we maxed out his hearts without actually having a surprise party. give me a break. when is he gonna get his goddamn surprise party. he told you that he always wanted one since he was a kid. that girl coming in and lying to him was not a surprise party; it was a misguided gesture that half landed, half flopped. WHERE is nanba yu's surprise party!!!!!!!

han joon-gi finally got an attack that hits many enemies and it's sooo useful. it's also an insane move that would definitely wreak havoc and cause chaos in real life. probably not even an american would risk double-handgun sweeping crossfire on a busy street like that. he does it indoors, too.

(sweating) kasuga ichiban is going to be a MUCH better person than i am by the end of this…

it's fun to have zhao in the party. he sure has a lot of martial arts moves. his painted nails are cute. i like him, but his little mustache is the kind i hate. also is it just me or was there just a little more sexual tension between him and kasuga than expected? when they're having heart-to-hearts at the bar, i mean. well, if i got behind any ship in this game, it would be kasuga/nanba, i suppose.

i don't like the shareholder meeting minigame or the business management minigame as a whole. feels like a swing and a miss to me. i mean, i can tell love went into it. it just doesn't feel intuitive, for one thing… it doesn't seem fun. it is kinda funny how the pacified shareholders settle into a state of dreamy nodding and clapping.

none of the ladies ichiban can woo seem especially interesting as characters. i guess sumire is the best one. maybe you have to be into women for that aspect to land with you. maybe i'll try wooing one or two of them a little more to see if we get any interesting cutscenes or anything. also iroha doesn't care to hear any followup about how i found the secret weapons dealer we were talking about. what's up with that? or am i somehow failing to tell her properly?

with the part-time hero quests, i have to fight x number of a certain kind of enemy, but they have to be new kills since that particular quest appeared. it's frustrating to have to go find 10 more of whatever kind of guy i've already killed 80 of. anyway, they're fellow humans so these aren't kills; they're One-Piece-style defeats, where you get the shit knocked out of you so bad that you change your outlook on life and stop being a sujimon.

i got to the sotenbori arena, and some of the rules are like, "no switching party members during battle!" buddy i didn't even know i could do that.

i wonder if new game+ will be significantly harder or something. as it stands, the game isn't hard enough for me to need to use advanced tactics like swapping out party members during a fight. either way, i've never been much of a new game+ person, preferring to have as much fun as possible the first time playing. i mean, i'm not especially good at video games in the first place, and i haven't played that many games all the way to the end. i think the only games i've new game plussed were okami and hollow knight. except i don't remember if hollow knight actually has a new game+ or if i just played it a second time.

i know just from my tumblr dashboard that majima and saejima are important characters from other yakuza games. i could also kinda tell from the loving way they were depicted and how they had their own special fight music. i loved how they had an unavoidable tag-team attack. i beat every floor in the battle arena, most of them twice, before the fight with majima and saejima, and they still almost murdered us. if i hadn't called in the masochist poundmate to make us nigh-invulnerable, i probably would have lost to them. and it cracked me up that they were added to poundmates just like that.

more weapons should be upgradeable. it doesn't make sense that there are just a few. and you can't even tell from the start which ones you will be able to upgrade. and you can't tell in advance how far you will be able to upgrade them or when you'll hit a dead end. [note added in later: i finally looked it up and found out that there's basically 1 upgradeable weapon per class that will be upgraded into that class's most powerful weapon. but i was unable to glean that just by playing the game.]

is the joke with the empty cough drop tins supposed to be about how, in real life, you know rationally that empty tins like that are essentially worthless, but you can't shake the feeling that they could be useful, so you hold on to them? because if that's the joke it's really funny. i have one such tin right in front of me on my desk. they just seem so potentially useful. of course they're useful if you want to store little stuff. but there's a limit to how much little stuff anyone really needs to store in old tins. and i think almost everyone has reached that limit and doesn't need any tins.

i kind of wish there were more interesting jobs for sacchan... instead of only Very Distinctly Feminine jobs. i dunno. strong binary gender roles in this game.

i'm kind of feeling like i need to finish up this game before may 12th-ish because at that time i will inevitably shift my focus to the new zelda game. but i doubt i'll make a post about that game. i've never had enough thoughts about the story in a zelda game to take notes about it, not in my life. yet i've played almost every one of them.

if it's one of the special fights where kasuga takes his shirt off first, then he's also shirtless in the specials and tag team animations. that's love.

we had a fun fight with kiryu, who i know is the protagonist of at least one other yakuza game. (are all the other guys protagonists too? majima doesn't seem like a protagonist, though.) kiryu's tattoo strikes me as significantly cooler than ichiban's. and when they're standing right next to each other, their outfits clearly mirror one another.

i've played for 100 hours and i'm almost out of things to say about this game, as i've gotten used to all the fun and exciting things and now they just seem normal. if i ever play a game less exciting than this, i'll fall asleep. i'm on chapter 14. i wonder if i'll get any side quests ever again. no new ones have shown up in a while. and none of the side quests have been as funny as the one about the public urinator where you come across the 4 guys standing at the edge of the river. that might have been the peak.

for the past several weeks, i've been busy and very tired and distracted reading the works of junji ito, so i haven't played as much of this game as i had intended to, and now my plan to finish playing this before the new zelda game comes out has been thrown out the window because the new zelda game came out today and i preordered it so i have it and it's right here!!!!!!!!! so do i want to not play the game on its opening day and risk spoilers, which i have heretofore avoided? or do i want to set yakuza aside to play the new zelda game? and poor neo TWEWY gets pushed even further aside. considering how long breath of the wild kept me busy, i can't see far enough into the future to know when i'll get around to neo TWEWY.

but after writing that paragraph, without consciously making a choice, i started reading more junji ito stories, even though i'm not in love with his stuff… i just have a compulsion to read all of it… so i can finish the other text post i'm working on…

...

…i finished the other text post i was working on. time to play on.

ICHIBAN SURVIVED AN EXPLOSION AND SHOWED UP WITH ONE (1) BANDAID AND A SMILE ON HIS FACE!!! THAT WAS THE BEST. i'm reinvigorated.

i was like, "ok we're in the final chapter. let's finish this up (with love and care) and be done with it." but we're back in kamurocho, which i have not thoroughly explored. what can i do but comb every street and alley for mcguffins?! it's only fair! to the developers who put so much loving detail in the game! and while i'm at it, i should upgrade all my weapons so much more! it's telling me to prepare for the final battle! i have to prepare by upgrading everyone's weapons a lot! and in order to do that, i need lots of money! so i'll play the last 10 levels of the sotenbori battle arena 5 times! and then i'll taxi back and forth between the materials cart in the park and romance workshop and make everyone's weapons OP! and then i'll forget what i was doing! and then i'll learn that ichiban has to be a foreman in order to unlock various things! and then i'll get ichiban to foreman level 21 so he won't be so weak! and then i'll learn that ichiban doesn't actually need to remain a foreman to have the demolish ability so i'll switch him back to hero! and then i'll learn about the three secret shops and go unlock them with my demolish ability! and then i'll buy a bunch of gold safe keys from the secret shops! and then i'll look up a list of gold safes! and the list unexpectedly tells me what's in the safes, and i don't really need any of it! so then i'll decide i don't need to open gold safes and forget what i was doing! IT'S HARD TO FINISH THE GAME!!!

the tendo fight, which took forever, didn't give me even half as much XP as the invested vagrant.

i didn't expect nick ogata to stick his neck out like an MVP and grill masato at the press conference like that. mostly unrelated note: i really like masato's aoki ryou politician voice. it's very cute. it's a 100% perfect match for his aoki ryou face.

i'm fighting masato. i love how he's got his swaggery chinpira body language animations but he intersperses it with glasses adjustments. genius touch. i was loving this battle with him. i didn't want it to end, but i didn't want to artifically prolong it by using health items. so i just punched him a lot and then it was over.

...

arakawa masato has passed away. now we're in the epilogue. time is running out for them to give nanba a birthday party before the game ends all the way.

…

okay the game ended and i can't complain about it. even if they failed to give nanba a birthday party. it was good.

ah, the story was good… the confrontation between ichiban and masato at the lockers was a strong ending scene… they wrapped it up neatly. ichiban finally got through to him. even though i know that when masato said he never liked ichiban, he wasn't lying, either. but it's like ichiban said: they have a connection, like brothers. i'm just glad masato didn't kill himself. i'm surprised kume souta didn't show up in the epilogue. i guess we can safely assume he's in prison.

i started this post by extolling the fact that this game has endless things to do. but although i did really enjoy doing most of those things, in the end, i feel like it had a significant detrimental effect on the momentum of the story. by stretching out the gameplay between story segments, the earlier story developments came to feel very distant, and by the end, i didn't feel as close to nanba and saeko and the others as i did earlier in the game… i got too used to everything, got too absorbed in grinding, became obsessed with tying up loose ends, started taking things for granted. the magic faded. how much of that is my fault for getting distracted from the story, and how much is the game's fault for distracting me from its own story? i can't tell.

probably the best way to play this game would be to rampage through the main story as enthusiastically as you can, then go back to unearth and subsequently tie up every loose end on a new game+.

despite all that, i will say conclusively that the game is good and i recommend it wholeheartedly. the combat system is very satisfying. i love the omnipresent, excessive, dramatic particle effects. the animations are great. the voices are great. it's so fun to run around the extremely detailed city and go eat realistic foods at restaurants and have fights for no reason. the story is a strong backbone for the game. and i'm glad you aren't penalized for leaving certain loose ends untied… like the business management minigame, which i neglected until the very end. i know i could have unlocked a new party member through that minigame. it just didn't seem worth it. maybe i'll watch a bunch of youtube videos of all the things i missed. and maybe i'll revisit the game for my new game+ someday.

#yakuza: like a dragon #yakuza 7 #yakuza 7 spoilers #yes this post spoils the whole game.#i had a busy weekend compulsively finishing my 2 long posts about what i've been doing for the past 3 months #i remember a long time ago readmores didn't work on mobile. god i hope they fixed that. for y'all's sake.#thinking about the nature of writing lately. AI can write things but it can't write based on an uncontrollable urge to write. so i win?

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eyedelater · 1 year

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junji ito post

this is a diary post of my thoughts while reading various works by junji ito.

i found the beautiful hardcover edition of GYO at my local library, so i borrowed that on a whim. i read that. then i thought i would watch the movie version because i wanted to see how they would tackle, you know… all aspects of the work. the movie was so lousy i quit watching less than halfway through. maybe i'll pick it up again sometime. but i'm a stickler for honoring the source material, and they inserted so much weird and dumb fanservice, it was intolerable. then i wondered what other anime adaptations existed of junji ito works. so i watched the 2022 netflix series JUNJI ITO MANIAC. i thought it was, on the whole, somewhat weak, but i did watch every episode. then i got more junji ito books from my local library, including TOMIE, UZUMAKI, DESERTER, LOVESICKNESS, REMINA, and VENUS IN THE BLIND SPOT. i also watched the series JUNJI ITO COLLECTION and read more stories online. i wanted this post to encompass all of ito-sensei's works, but after reading most of them, i decided to read the rest some other time. you can scroll to near the end of this post for an incomplete list of ito-sensei's works that i find to be worth reading. this post contains some spoilers, but i think spoilers don't matter too much for horror manga, as it's the visuals that really count.

i should preface everything by saying that i have known of junji ito for many years. when i was in high school… well, a short summary would be that in 9th grade, i saw a traumatizing gory video that messed me up and made me afraid of the dark despite being 14 years old, and i was especially afraid of dark spaces like the cracks between things. i slept on a mattress pressed into the corner of a room, and i was still afraid of the gap between the mattress and the wall. i wouldn't face my back to it all night. the cabinet door under the bathroom sink didn't shut all the way, and i would watch that dark gap through the clear shower curtain for 100% of my time in the shower to make sure nothing came out. (i made my dad get a clear shower curtain for that reason.) i was mentally ill, you see. did you know that sometimes, knowing a fear is irrational does nothing to make you not afraid? (i'm better now.) so there's the baseline, and then, due to the whims of my internet friend group, i felt compelled to read junji ito's THE ENIGMA OF AMIGARA FAULT. it struck the worst possible chord with me: now i knew that what could be lurking in the dark cracks between things is a stretched and disfigured human body being blissfully, eternally compelled through its own personal tunnel. THAT is what's in between my mattress and the wall. THAT is what could slip through the crack in the bathroom cabinet door. can i put into words how awful it was to think about? but of course, being rational at the same time, i acknowledged even then that the manga itself was kinda good. to come up with such an unpleasant idea is worthy of praise in itself. so i came to respect junji ito. but i haven't read that story again, and i won't. (they had the nerve to stick it in as a bonus story at the end of the GYO hardcover. i didn't even flip through. i will not read that story again.) several years later, i read UZUMAKI and thought it was good. and i think i read one or two TOMIE stories and then lost interest. (oh and i read the cat diary with yon and mu with no hesitation because i knew it wouldn't actually be scary. it was fun.)

so i had the impression that junji ito was very powerful and worthy of my respect. that's why i picked up GYO at my local library. i was pretty sure it was going to be good, and there was also a distant element of facing my fears.

GYO was pretty good. the way humans became disfigured after infection reminded me of Mermaid Swamp, an RPGmaker game i played a while ago and lost sleep over. i can't say i recommend it, but i do like RPGmaker horror games… anyway, GYO was well-composed and certainly Extensive in Scope. you know, it just keeps piling on and on. but it all came together… kind of. but when we got the circus part, i had to be like, "seriously?"

then i watched JUNJI ITO MANIAC. i find that netflix-produced animes have a certain flavor, a tinge that says, "netflix execs really really really really want to make money from this!!!" so to the extent that there is production value, it feels like it has been expended for the sake of making it Look like the anime is good, and not for actually making the anime good, if that makes sense. i feel that there is some heart missing… some loving devotion to the source material. at least some of the time. after watching the whole series, i came across many of the source stories in the short story collections i read. the anime adaptations were generally faithful to the short stories, and i appreciate that. but there is a difference between "turning a manga into an anime" and "turning a manga into a good anime." it is the difference between "this manga scene is now happening in motion" and "the tension and emotion of the original scene has been successfully translated into motion." and actually, it kind of felt like… for some of these… we didn't need to animate them? the thing about horror manga is that your own feelings of horror set the pace. maybe you are pulled quickly forward by suspense, but your eye lingers on the most hideous pages against your will. if the scariest part flashes up too briefly when translated into anime, it won't have as much of an effect. so it felt as though the timing for the scariest parts was weirdly rushed in some of the anime episodes. even watching without knowing the source material, i got the distinct impression that the manga had to be much better than this. [note added in later: sometimes, they actually weren't much better.] they got some of the faces wrong, too. you know how junji ito has his distinctive style where sunken eyes are expertly depicted with many small lines? it's a striking look. it looks great. classic. the way they showed those sunken eyes in the anime was unbelievably lame. it was an airbrushed look. i know they couldn't have animated it with many small lines, but shading it with a harder edge would have looked a thousand times better. or cel shading. come up with a creative solution to capture the effect. also, some of the voices were really annoying. i mean, i guess souichi's voice being annoying is appropriate. (what is souichi's deal? isn't he just really annoying? i haven't read any of his short stories yet.) anyway probably the best story in this series was the hanging balloons. i haven't read that story yet either. i have a feeling the manga is much scarier. but the anime has the advantage of showing the movement of the balloons. the way it will loop around your neck and fling you away in a second was well done.

(revelation) i see… so basically… the JUNJI ITO MANIAC series was the second junji ito series netflix made. so these are all the second-tier stories that they didn't care to animate in the first series? is that right? that makes sense. i'll have to watch the other series soon. [note added in later: wrong. JUNJI ITO COLLECTION was about the same.]

some of ito-sensei's stories are bizarrely anticlimactic. because it is horror manga, i set aside my usual expectation of a happy ending; i am expecting an ending that is either disastrous or faintly hopeful despite everything. but i was expecting an ending, and some of these short stories don't have much of one. like "the bully" (ijimekko). i thought it wasn't very good. i thought it was a miss. i think maybe that one didn't need to be animated, for that reason. but after reading several, i have come to accept that an anticlimactic ending is standard for his short stories. i got used to it. i guess his intention is to end a scary story without much denouement, before the terror fades away, so as to leave a stronger impact. [note added in later: it turns out that in an interview, he said pretty much exactly that.] but i think it wasn't executed successfully every time.

i read the LOVESICKNESS collection of short stories. the story of the beautiful boy at the crossroads was pretty good. i find it kind of strange how romantic love is a strong and frequently recurring theme in ito-sensei's work, and not just in this particular collection. well, the whole way he depicts women has a certain flavor, doesn't it.

i read REMINA. i don't have very strong feelings about this one except that remina the girl sure doesn't have very much agency as a character. all she does is get pursued and picked up and pulled around by everyone on earth. i thought that as a climax, there might actually be some fun and exciting link between her and remina the planet, since at first that it seemed to attack the most when she was being crucified or whatever, but there was no such thing. remina the planet just made a beeline for earth and then started taking its time on the devouring part for no reason.

i spent my whole saturday reading TOMIE from cover to cover. it was pretty good. i think it's really funny how tomie herself evolves (in terms of character development) to be such a needy brat. and i think it's funny how all the tomies want to kill each other. i like how a tomie regenerating under certain circumstances takes on some characteristics of her surroundings, like the ashes tomies and the sake tomies and the carpet tomie. i also think it's really funny how tomie really doesn't want to split into more than one but she's sooo prone to it and she haaates it. overall, i was more amused than really scared by TOMIE. important note: there's probably quite a lot to be said if you read these stories through an explicitly feminist lens, but i don't care to do that right now.

i'm looking at wikipedia now and realizing there is a nearly endless supply of junji ito short stories. my local library does not have all of these. they have six or seven volumes, which is a ton given the extent of their manga collection, and i kinda thought that was all, but it's not. i'll have to read some of these online. however, there is a dilemma. given my history of getting afraid of the dark and its debilitating effects on my life, i want to avoid giving myself that feeling again (and i know it is possible), so i never read or watch anything scary at night. but i don't read manga online unless it is on my laptop or ipad. and i don't have my laptop or ipad with me in the daytime, only in the evenings… maybe i'll bring my ipad to work…? [note added in later: i made it work by reading in the early evening. this is the kind of thing i really worry about.]

i guess i've had a complicated relationship with horror media in that i like it, and most of the time it doesn't Hit in a bad way, but i need to make sure to take precautions when i consume it or else i could seriously lose a lot of sleep. even just typing out that paragraph about my ordeal in high school left me with a terribly nervous feeling because i wrote it at night and relived unpleasant memories. but i can still turn a lightswitch off and then walk out of a dark room without pressing my back against a wall. so i'm miles ahead of where i was back then. that's a relief.

i will note that this whole time, i kiiinda thought junji ito's "ito" miiight just be ito 糸 (thread). i mean, i knew his name (romanized) long before i ever learned that "ito" means "thread." it's only natural that in my ignorance, i might form some association between them. but it's totally not thread. who would be named that? (there's probably somebody.) it's actually itou 伊藤. junji itou. itou junji. but no one romanizes it like that. it's the same itou as the itou in delicious ITO EN jasmine tea, which goes really well with unfrosted blueberry pop tarts. if you're planning to try it with frosted pop tarts, don't even bother. oi ocha is good too.

while watching MANIAC, i was like, what is souichi's deal…? now i'm watching the first episode of JUNJI ITO COLLECTION and i've realized that souichi could be an enjoyably ridiculous character but they gave him a completely insufferable voice actor and thus made him insufferable. i wonder if they had the perfectly reasonable thought, "we can't make his voice nice or else he could become sexy to teen girls, and that idea is apprehensible," and then they overcorrected. perhaps they could've made it less awful and safely unsexy by giving him a realistic teenage boy voice. they could even make it appropriately obnoxious without going too far. i have to read the souichi series and then i'll be able to love him. i can't love him with this shitty voice <3 [note added in later: it turns out souichi is in 6th grade and 11 years old. he's not even a teen. that means my sexy voice hypothesis, by all rights, ought to be moot. i still think they made the wrong voice actor choice. i mean, not that the actor didn't give it his all. but he sounds like an annoying man or teen, not an annoying kid. souichi needed a kid voice.]

JUNJI ITO COLLECTION failed to successfully adapt the story of the beautiful boy at the crossroads. as a multi-chapter story with a relatively strong narrative, it should have been given at least a whole episode or an OVA-length animation to tell the whole story at once, but instead, they abbreviated it and never followed up with the rest. that being said, the main problem was that they didn't make the narrative as clear as in the manga. well, whatever. i'm going to watch through COLLECTION even though it's lousy.

i read the compilation book entitled VENUS IN THE BLIND SPOT. apart from noticing that they had the audacity to include the enigma of amigara fault again, none of the stories especially stuck with me except the cute love letter manga to kazuo umezz. i'll have to read some of his stuff next. speaking of other horror manga, i bought and read the english translation of "inuki kanako no daikyoufu" (Be Very Afraid of Kanako Inuki!) by inuki kanako because i wanted to support my local comic book shop. i kinda picked it at random based on the cover and paid full cover price. i kinda didn't like it. i don't have much to say about it except that her perfectly neckless art style is fun. maybe i'll read her tatari series sometime.

i'm remembering that when i read UZUMAKI for the first time, despite having watched many horror movies, i failed to consider the narrative expectations for works in the horror genre; that is, i had not resigned myself to a bad ending, which i now understand is very much to be expected. so i was really rooting for kirie and shuichi the whole time, and at the end, when they fail to escape the spiral, i was like "ok fuck me then i guess." i was pissed. but what i'm saying is that i was wrong to be pissed because my expectations were unreasonable. in retrospect, it was an appropriate ending.

there's that one tumblr post making fun of kirie and her fucked up boyfriend. it has a couple of panels where shuichi's looking deadened and she puts her head on his shoulder. i think that post is mean. i'm on shuichi's side! be nice to him! you saw what happened to his dad! have a heart!

JUNJI ITO COLLECTION episode 7 was probably the best so far, just because they did a pretty good job with the used record one. if the singer hadn't done a good job, it would have flopped. the song adds so much that is impossible to portray in the form of manga. it spooked me enough that i'm not going to watch any more episodes tonight, which did not happen with any other episodes of COLLECTION or MANIAC.

i was right. manga souichi is much more lovable than anime souichi, because though their faces are equally obnoxious, manga souichi has no obnoxious voice. the souichi stories are kind of refreshing because we get to see junji ito's strange sense of humor without anything too scary happening. my first souichi exposure was the 4 walled room episode in MANIAC, meaning i missed his introduction that appears in COLLECTION, so i was like "who the fuck is this? our protagonist, kouichi, is going to die in the gap between these walls. what? nothing in particular happened at the end. (souichi appears in another episode) this guy's in more than one??" but in the end, i kind of like how he's in 6th grade and his main powers are supercharged annoying personality and also being able to administer real curses. and despite the horrible voice, most of the souichi segments seem to have been adapted with incredible accuracy. souichi's recurring associated sound effect in the manga is "gachu gachu," the slightly clankety sound of him sucking on nails. one scanlator translated it as "munch munch;' another as "nom nom." i've never seen "gachu gachu" before.

ito-sensei's art peculiarities: he is the master of the "lovely face looking concerned." great skill with sunken eyes looking upset and exhausted. in the profile view, everyone has that distinctive frown. poses are sometimes a little awkward as if drawn from a clumsily posed posable model. chins sometimes don't make sense if the perspective isn't straight on or in profile. occasionally, his unique sense of humor shines through in the facial expressions. he's very good at drawing cutely styled hair and plain, elegant clothes. he also draws scary things.

the short story "fashion model" features fuchi, the fashion model. she debuted in the souichi story "rumors." i love fuchi. i'm on her side. when she's riding in the car with everyone much shorter than her and politely excited to go to the deep woods, that's cute. i like when she hitches up her long dress to run quickly in the woods. in "fashion model: cursed frame," fuchi appears in a magazine shot with two other models smiling happily, and that's cute. i want more fuchi content. (also, fuchi is pronounced the same as huci, the ainu word for grandmother. irrelevant.)

junji ito short stories are really hit-or-miss, i've decided. UZUMAKI, GYO, and TOMIE are essentially hit, and that's why he's popular, but a lot of these one-shots, they do not hit.

many of the strange evils in ito-sensei's works seem to be town-restricted. it seems that in most cases, if you get out of town, everything's fine. town where bodies turn into tombstones. town where everyone needs maps to navigate. town where it's foggy and everyone does fortune-telling. town contaminated by spirals. let's all exit towns.

i think ito-sensei can tell when an idea is good and when an idea is bad. generally, the better ideas are longer stories, and the worse ideas are shorter stories. i guess an exception would be hell doll funeral. that one was short but good. another exception is the bully. that one was bad but long.

i think ito-sensei's stories would be better if he applied his skill at drawing unique face shapes to drawing main characters instead of using unique face shapes only for the sake of showing "ugliness" in comparison to the uniformly beautiful main characters. as if ugliness is horror.

most of the characters in his stories are very shallow, but that's okay; they are only here in service of the narrative, to react to whatever hideous sights are laid before them... or to take part in them.

he is really a master of rictus...

it's funny, i just read a ton of ito-sensei's works from the 90s and very early 2000s, and then i accidentally jumped to one from the past few years because the entries on his wikipedia page aren't in chronological order (someone fix that), and now youtubers are appearing and twitter is a plot point. also, the quality of the work is quite visually different, as he switched to digital. it feels very, very polished now. i wonder why they don't have these at my local library.

here are the junji ito works that are worth reading, in my view (not in any order) :

the hanging balloons - this vision is truly inspired. you can also read "return of the hanging balloons," but it's hardly anything.

souichi's series, including: fun summer vacation, fun winter vacation, souichi's diary of delights, souichi's home tutor, mannequin teacher [probably the best], souichi's birthday, souichi's selfish curse, the room with four walls, coffin, rumors, souichi's beloved pet, secret of the haunted house, and the souichi front [also known as secret of the haunted house: souichi's version]. - not every single one of these is fantastic, but some of them are quite good. if you only want a little taste, read "souichi's home tutor" and then "mannequin teacher," as they distinctly go together. you can also read "souichi possessed," but it's hardly anything.

splatter film [also called smashed] - another truly inspired vision. if you don't get it, the joke is mosquitoes.

used record [also called secondhand record] - read it and then watch episode 7 of junji ito collection.

fashion model - get to know my girl fuchi. you can also read "fashion model: cursed frame," but it's not much.

village of the siren - this one has a unique feeling, i think.

gyo, tomie, and uzumaki are all about as worthwhile as each other.

lovesickness is slightly less good than the three listed in the previous bullet point, but still pretty good

the chill [also known as coldness] - if you want to experience trypophobia hell. don't take that warning lightly.

groaning drain pipes - just because the perfectly anticlimactic ending cracks me up

blood bubble bushes - uhh something also similar to trypophobia in this one, but it's striking

oshikiri's series, including hallucinations, bog of the living dead, pen pal, intruder, further tales of oshikiri, and further tales of oshikiri: walls - some of these are pretty good.

house of puppets - it's a house of puppets.

the town without streets - goes in an unexpectedly atmospheric direction. interestingly a mishmash of many different ideas, unlike his usual one-note short stories.

gravetown - another inspired idea.

the story of the mysterious tunnel - can't decide how much to like this one.

frankenstein (adaptation) - very well done. there's a scene where victor and the monster make eye contact and then the monster immediately turns around and scales a sheer cliff face. you made his body really strong, victor. he can scale a sheer cliff face. i should note i only read around the first half of frankenstein the novel. i know, it's a failing on my part. so i can't judge the accuracy. i don't know if the monster scales a sheer cliff face in the novel. anyway someone should cosplay as reanimated justine. you just need to really build up your limbs onto some stilts and stuff.

hell doll funeral - it's a hell doll funeral

fixed face - ending cracked me up

weeping woman way - i like this one. it's so wet.

madonna [also called the witch] - i enjoy a story that offends the church.

spirit flow of aokigahara - this one is really good. i love their bodily transformation.

sensor - the first chapter makes you envision getting hairs in your mouth so you go "pfuh! pfuh!" and the rest is like, oh, so god really does exist. i really appreciate how much he wrung out of the creepy natural phenomenon of volcanic hair, which i didn't know about before this.

i wanted this to be a comprehensive list, but i'm sick of reading these for now. maybe i'll read the rest of his works some other time.

in conclusion, despite the inexplicably strong urge i felt to read as much of junji ito's body of work as possible, i'm not in love with his stuff. i certainly don't care enough to compare any translations. however, i do really respect his art skills and horrific ideas, and i enjoy his inscrutable sense of humor.

(i am really looking forward to the black and white uzumaki anime if it ever comes out.)

#junji ito #ito junji #this post is about horror manga and contains some potentially upsetting things.#i'm not giving you a trigger warning for each and every junji ito work discussed in this post.#please look up trigger warnings for each individual work before you read them if you're worried.

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eyedelater · 1 year

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this is my favorite pop team epic

#the comic itself is funny enough with zero context but the context is Absolutely indispensible #i hope the earnest pixiv artist is living his best life

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eyedelater · 1 year

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shipping is cringe except when i do it then it’s beautiful and profound and a necessary aspect of the work’s interpretation.

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eyedelater · 1 year

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Hello, hope you are doing well! If you have time, I have a quick translation request for MP100. Could you please tell me if Ritsu is the top scorer in just his school, or across his year in Japan? I don't have the manga raws, but it was mentioned in page 22 / 72 of Chapter 20, and page 9 / 109 of chapter 31. Thank you!

i was like "do i even have the mp100 raws anymore?" but i do.

chapter 20:

kamuro says "zenkoku moshi demo joui ni hairu kimi no iken ga kikitai"

zenkoku = nationwide, moshi = mock exams / practice exams, joui = high-ranking / upper ranking, hairu = to be in (in this context)

i'm too tired to phrase this very smoothly but he basically says, "You're in the upper ranks of the national mock exam. I want to hear your opinion."

so it doesn't say that ritsu is THE top scorer; it says that he is in the upper ranks, among the top scorers. i would think if he was the top scorer, kamuro would have said something like "ranks first" or "number one." but kamuro is talking on a national scale.

chapter 31:

for the dialogue, the translation by ultimateking is accurate. what koyama is saying is referring to these various characters and what each one trying to control. so when he says "be it the town, the country..." he's referring to people like dimple, who are trying to control people on a larger scale. i think he's not referring to ritsu.

and the paper in the background, which may have been the only part you were asking about in the first place, says "Midterm Test Results, First Years" and ritsu ranks first. given the spread of points, i doubt that's a list of national results (you would imagine that in a whole country of first years, there would be many 498 scorers, many 497 scorers, many 496 scorers, etc). it's probably the list for all the first years in salt middle school.

so these panels do not suggest that ritsu is the top scorer in the country, but rather among the top scorers for the mock exams nationwide and the top scorer for just his middle school first years' midterms.

#mob psycho 100 #mp100 translation notes #MOB BLOG MOB LOG #thanks for making this easy and giving me the page numbers #don't ask me for translations for volumes after volume 12 i don't have those raws right now

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eyedelater · 1 year

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the past

(part 3 of a series of posts about tsukishima hajime. this is the last and longest one. see also parts 1 and 2.)

tsukishima's biggest hurdle in life is figuring out how to square away his troubled past while continuing to live. he feels like the only path he can follow is the one forged by tsurumi, a great man with big ideas who saved his life. he doesn't have any dreams or ambitions other than that because he doesn't value his own life at all. but it was tsurumi who made him that way in the first place.

when tsurumi asks tsukishima if he should have let igogusa know he was alive, tsukishima tells him that it's fine, but he only says that because he is on death row and has no reason to expect he will ever escape from it. he thinks that igogusa knowing he was a death row inmate would only shock and dismay her, so he would rather just die without her knowing the truth. (the line he says is, "iie… ima sara kanojo ni nanimo shiteageraremasen kara" "no… because there's nothing i can do for her at this point.") but that's based only on what he understands as his current situation at that time! if the order of things had been different, if tsukishima had first understood that he would be escaping with his life and living as a free man (albeit with a great debt to tsurumi), maybe his answer would have been very different! tsurumi intentionally timed his question so that tsukishima would give the wrong answer and then feel compelled to stand by it! tsurumi wants tsukishima to feel resigned to never seeing igogusa again, because then, he can focus solely on serving tsurumi's goals. now, because tsurumi made him say it was fine, changing his mind would be going back on his word and challenging the person who saved him from execution. he could not do it. his will was already mostly broken on that day.

isn't it a little cruel that we the readers have the dramatic irony of knowing that igogusa is alive and well when tsukishima never knows for sure in canon? apart from trusting that tsurumi told him the truth, that is. but tsurumi told him a mixed and tainted truth in the first place, and tsukishima realized that, so of course his trust is also tainted by painful doubt. he threw the hair away, but he hasn't forgotten her; he hits a low point and ends up asking inkarmat about her, and when he asks, he thinks of her face! for the first time in the story! it's such a meaningful reveal. and even if he later decides that doesn't want inkarmat's answer… does he really never want the answer? can he ever get closure? it's so sad… the line between "wanting to know" and "thinking you don't want to know" is painful to tread. i mean, on my part, i want him to let go of her so he can be with koito forever, joyful and unburdened... but maybe it would be finding out that she's fine without him that would really help him get closure and move on with his life… to then be with koito otonoshin forever… i mean, he and koito are canonically together forever either way, but i mean together in TRUE AND UNFETTERED ROMANTIC LOVE...! ahem.

in chapter 210, when tsukishima puts on his scariest face, he says, "あなたたちは救われたじゃないですか" "weren't you (plural) saved?" (polite form) (he keeps polite speech during his whole subsequent monologue, even though he gets a little emotional.) it took me a long time to understand this line, but maybe it's just dullness on my part. at first, i thought he was talking about koito and his father being "saved," but that's not right; the other party in the "you (plural)" must be ogata. then i was thinking that it was about ogata and koito not appreciating being "saved" by tsurumi, and tsukishima is upset that they're not just quietly cooperating like he does. like, "why can't you fools just go along with it? were you saved by him or not? if you were, just shut up and don't question it. like i do." but after thinking about it more, i've decided that he actually says it with a wry and pained irony: he was also "saved" by tsurumi and has mixed feelings about it, and that makes three. like, "you two were saved, weren't you? what, it doesn't feel that way? of course not... it's the same for me..." and that explains why he goes on to tell koito about how he himself was tricked. and the scary face is not that he's upset with koito or trying to scare him but rather a reflection of his own internal turmoil finally showing on his face for once.

the thing is, among ogata, tsukishima, usami, and koito, koito was the least "saved" out of all of them, because there was nothing for him to be "saved" from in the first place, and tsukishima knows that. koito was just kidnapped. by them. you could argue that he became closer with his father because of the incident, and that he was able to solve his problem of being shoehorned toward the navy despite being prone to seasickness, but that hardly amounts to "saving" from anything. koito was slated to live a bonbon life either way. so that's why tsukishima can't help but give his little sweet lies monologue to koito. because he knows that koito was wronged and not actually saved at all.

withering up

when tsukishima looks perfectly desolate after tsurumi revealed the depth of his farce with igogusa's fake bones (the moment tsukishima refers to as having "withered up completely" when explaining it to koito), i had a hard time discerning what he was feeling in that moment. he had just had his old wounds opened up, he got upset and punched and yelled at tsurumi, he tried to protect tsurumi from a shell, they both got grievously injured, and then tsurumi explained just how far he went for tsukishima's sake. so what exactly was it about that chain of events that made tsukishima wither up completely? i think i've realized that it was shame. what tsukishima felt in the withered-up panel was shame for having doubted tsurumi. it was deep self-disgust because he had lost control of himself enough to resort to violence, just like when he killed his father. not only that, but it was violence against the only person who valued him enough to save him! he hates himself in that moment. and that's exactly what tsurumi wanted, because the foil to miserable, self-hating tsukishima in that moment is tsurumi, his shining savior. everything about the interaction went exactly as tsurumi planned (apart from losing part of his skull).

as tsukishima explained to koito, it was only later that he slowly started to doubt tsurumi (after thinking about the logistics of meeting that sado resident in the field hospital); in that moment, he didn't doubt tsurumi whatsoever. he trusted him and respected him so deeply that that interaction is what led him to finally throw away igogusa's lock of hair after 9 years. tsurumi had finally broken him completely. the depth of his trust and respect for tsurumi was the depth of the shame and self-hatred that he felt, and that's how tsurumi was then able to pour in his affection and cement tsukishima as his most loyal pawn. he broke tsukishima's will and then touched him gently on the head. urgh! (gritting teeth! fists clenched!) a nicer person should touch tsukishima gently on the head…!

and then, when tsukishima slowly started to doubt what tsurumi told him, he didn't act on that doubt or tell anyone or do anything differently because he still didn't trust himself enough to feel like his feelings of doubt could actually be warranted. he just slowly let those feelings ferment, and it wasn't until koito confronted him about the kidnapping incident that he was able to actually bring those feelings to the surface and consult with someone about them. but even then, he did it in the habit of tsurumi's dirty work dog and finished his monologue by threatening to kill koito…

this whole character arc of being unable to decide whether to doubt himself or doubt tsurumi is extra painful because of the dramatic irony. he never gets closure about igogusa! he never knows for sure that she's alive, even though we, the readers, do! the question of whether tsurumi told the truth about her is integral to tsukishima's doubt or trust of tsurumi, and he never closes that door in canon.

the fact that igogusa is alive seems to indicate that what tsurumi did for tsukishima was real and that igogusa's parents really did orchestrate an island-wide lie about tsukishima's death so that they could marry her off to a rich family. when you first read the scene where tsurumi explains that to tsukishima, you must suspect that it is tsurumi's completely manufactured story to manipulate tsukishima, toeing the line of believability. but if tsurumi didn't lie and that's what really happened, then it's worth focusing on how that's a uniquely fucked up thing to happen to tsukishima. it's so sad and bizarre. and the pain tsukishima must have felt knowing that he killed his father not as revenge for igogusa's suicide but without any good reason at all, only as a consequence of losing his self-control because he failed to understand the ruse behind it all… he felt that hideous guilt at having lost his self-control, and then, 9 years later, tsurumi's charade provoked him and he lost his self-control AGAIN! and this time, it was tsurumi he punched! so when it became clear once again that tsurumi actually did help tsukishima and that igogusa was in fact alive, it was a new dose of the same hideous guilt, compounding it! and that's why tsukishima is so defeated. he loses ALL trust in his own judgment (at least for a period of time… of years) and bolsters only his self-control. he decides to not try to figure out things for himself anymore and instead surrender his free will to tsurumi, who is so kind to him and so clear and admirable, and as long as he holds onto his self-control while burying his own will, everything will work out… it's a win-win in his view! he knows he's being manipulated, but because he can't trust his own free will to guide him, he feels like being useful to tsurumi makes his life worthwhile! and of course tsurumi benefits from having created the perfect pawn! tsukishima turns off his free will and his heart, turns his self control to max, and follows instructions to a tee! that's why he's so good at dancing in the girl's group at the circus.

it took me a really long time to realize that the reason tsukishima had such an emotional reaction to the lighthouse parents not knowing the whereabouts of svetlana is that he can relate to it directly because he himself still doesn't know where igogusa is or whether she's alive (because he can't fully trust what tsurumi told him, even though we the readers know it's true). the pain of not even knowing whether someone important to you is alive or dead…

when tsukishima was chasing after tanigaki and inkarmat and koito came over and stopped him by saying it was an order from his superior officer… that was really brave and smart on koito's part. he understood that tsukishima is motivated by duty and commitment to tsurumi, but he couldn't have been 100% certain that tsukishima would obey his order and not kill him too. despite that, he was 100% confident in his authority to give that order, and tsukishima didn't expect that. tsukishima had been looking down on him to a degree (understandably), and that's why he was surprised that koito was willing to step up and use his authority like that despite being wounded and at a disadvantage. he called tsukishima's bluff (as a soldier, do you respect authority or not?), and tsukishima faltered. it was perfect because really nothing but an order from a superior officer (and fellow tsurumi loyalist) could have stopped him at that moment. (another note about that scene: i never noticed before but tsukishima is pointing a rifle at tanigaki and inkarmat, koito shows up, and tsukishima keeps his rifle pointing at those two while picking up a handgun with his other hand and pointing it at koito behind him. that's such a goofy maneuver!)

it seems very unlikely that tsukishima has talked in detail about his past ordeals to anyone but tsurumi (although i suspect others in the unit understand the general gist of things), and the two of them probably haven't talked about it since the battle of mukden. the reason is that tsurumi isn't actually interested in helping tsukishima heal, as that might diminish his capacity as a pawn. but koito would never think that way, and he would want to actually help tsukishima and make him happy. so i want to see koito and tsukishima talk to each other about his past and his pain so that tsukishima won't feel so alone in his internal struggles. i think i've become fixated on the idea of tsukishima achieving happiness… i just want it for him so bad… i need to go on ao3 or something. (i've only read 1 golden kamuy fanfic so far.)

#tsukishima hajime #koito otonoshin #tsurumi tokushirou #golden kamuy #golden kamuy meta #tsukikoi flavored posts #this could be more cohesive and better organized but i'm done messing with it #golden kamuy spoilers

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eyedelater · 1 year

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golden kamuy lines that i wondered about so i went back and checked what they were in japanese

i checked these lines not because i thought the translations were wrong, but because i know that when translating japanese to english, a certain amount of rephrasing and smoothing over is necessary, so i was just curious about what they originally said. as such, my own translations included herein are not meant to be corrections.

✔️ chapter 1 - sugimoto's line about almost killing a superior officer (which is never touched on in the story again) - 気に入らない上官を半殺しにしなきゃ "If I hadn't half-killed a superior officer I didn't like" (rest of line omitted). ki ni iranai = dislike. hangoroshi is literally half-killing. so it really was just an officer he didn't like...

✔️ chapter 5, page 3 - the line EH scans translated as "It's for the woman I love" is actually 惚れた女のためだ "It's for the woman I fell for." it's a very subtle difference, but it makes sense looking back; using the verb "horeta" leaves room for doubt as to whether he's still in love with her right now.

✔️ chapter 15 - "Sutu are not to be used lightly." - ストゥの乱用は消して許されていない "Misuse of the sutu is absolutely not allowed."

✔️ chapter 22 - "Who cares?! / You walking Ainu dictionary!" - 知らねーよ / アイヌのうんちくぅ!" the translation is accurate. sugimoto adds an extra u for emphasis to "unchiku," meaning "great erudition, extensive knowledge, vast stock of knowledge"

✔️ chapter 27, page 4 - EH scans has tanigaki asking nihei tetzusou, "How's your daughter doing now?" but VIZ says it's "Wait, a daughter?" so which is correct? - what tanigaki says is 娘が? "Your daughter?" he's echoing back a clause that nihei used to start a sentence, as if he's only just now noticing that nihei mentioned having a daughter. that's why he paused in the panel before, because it took that long to process. so VIZ had the correct translation in this case. 😱 EH scans's translation would be correct if he was saying "musume ha?" instead of "ga" because that would be more like asking, "How's your daughter?" but that wouldn't quite make sense in this context anyway.

✔️ chapter 43, page 11 - when ogata tells nikaidou about how he loves his grandmother so he doesn't want to shoot huci — バアチャン子の俺にそんなことをさせるな - he says baachanko... he basically calls himself a grandma's boy. "Don't make a grandma's boy like me do something like that."

✔️ chapter 49, page 21 - about how the knife is smaller than shiraishi's dick - 白石のちんぽより小さい刃物じゃ「日露戦争帰り」は殺せねえぜ "[Veterans of the Russo-Japanese war] can't be killed by a knife that's smaller than Shiraishi's dick."

✔️ chapter 59 - when ogata offers to work for hijikata - 腕の立つ用心棒はいらねえかい EH scans's translation, "How would you like to hire a skilled bodyguard?" is just right.

✔️ chapter 68, page 16 - when sugimoto has the aconite paste on his tongue to test its potency and he starts making noises, EH scans and VIZ both translated it as just moaning and groaning. but what he really says is ほっ…ほっへ ("ho… hohhe") and then ほっへふへッ ("hohhehuhe") and then はやふほっへッ ("hayafuhohhe"). these are not mere groans; these are words that are garbled by not being able to put his lips together. based on the vowels alone, i think what he's saying in each line respectively has to be とっ…取って ("T-take it off") and then 取ってくれ ("Please take it off") and then 早く取って ("Take it off already!"). neither EH scans nor VIZ bothered to try to decipher these... but then i guess they'd have to misspell it in english too, which is kinda unpleasant. to be fair, the people around him didn't understand what he was saying either.

✔️ chapter 95, page 5 - ogata's line to suzukawa about getting more than 2k meters away from him - 二千メートル以上俺から逃げきれるか試してみるか？EH scans got it exactly and it sounds so cool: "Do you want to try and see if you can get more than 2,000 meters away from me?" VIZ pared it down for no reason: "Wanna see if you can get out of range?" hate it.

✔️ chapter 114 - when ogata says the model 38 rifle is too good for sugimoto, he literally uses the expression "pearls before swine," as in 豚に真珠 buta ni shinju. i didn't know they had that one in japanese too. (EDIT: i had forgotten that "pearls before swine" is a biblical phrase so of course it would have spread as far as the bible has spread.)

✔️ chapter 117 - kantarou tells hijikata and the others that kamezou is dead, and EH scans has ienaga saying "Kame…" and i interpreted that as like, repeating part of an unfamiliar name because she doesn't recognize it because he was such a minor character. but in the raws in fact she says, "Kame-kun…" as in, that must have been what she called him. of course ienaga would pay attention to an edible young chinpira like kamezou i guess

✔️ chapter 119, page 20 - the line about how they're used to being fed - すっかり餌付けされてる "They're totally used to being fed." i have to give you the verbatim jisho.org definition of 餌付け because it's too funny in this context: "artificial feeding (of wild animals); accustoming (a wild animal) to accepting food from humans."

✔️ chapter 126, page 19 - koito's thoughts about usami getting his stick figures turned into tattoos - めちゃくちゃ気合入ってる...!! - "He's incredibly fired up...!!" or maybe "He's so into it...!!" or maybe "He's seriously motivated...!!"

✔️ chapter 138, page 20 - missing parts friends - tsurumi says, 脳みそが欠けた気分はどうだね? / 我々は「脳みそ欠け友達」だな…… "How does it feel to be missing brain tissue? / Looks like we're [missing brain tissue friends] now......" and then the narrative box says ふたりはカケトモ "The two of them are kaketomo." so basically "kaketomo" is short for "(noumiso) kake tomodachi" (missing brain tissue friends) and that's what EH scans translated as "missing parts friends." no great way to translate it, really.

✔️ chapter 139 - when ienaga yells about bringing back asirpa-san, the implication is that she ate some of sugimoto's brain while she was operating on him (and thus gained some of his qualities, namely concern for asirpa). what sugimoto says is ...おまえつまみ食いしただろ which EH scans translated it as, "…You took a few nibbles, didn't you?" which is accurate. viz translated it as "Did you eat part of my brain?" which has added meaning but only insofar as it explains what sugimoto actually means. つまみ食い tsumamigui refers to sneakily eating bits of food.

✔️ chapter 139 - koito's dad talking to sugimoto about a letter he got from hanazawa when he died - 花沢��将どんは切腹すっときオイへ手紙をくれもした / 息子の勇作どんが最前線で戦死して / 「愚かな父の面目を保ってくれた」と... "When Lieutenant General Hanazawa-don committed seppuku, he left me a letter. / It said that by dying on the front lines, his son Yuusaku-don / [preserved the honor of his foolish father]..." (the phrase "menboku wo tamotsu" means "saving face" or "preserving honor.") this letter must have been written by ogata hyakunosuke.

✔️ chapter 145, page 11 - tsukishima's line about sugimoto taking too many hits to the head in the stenka - 鯉登少尉殿これは「妙案」じゃありません // 「殴られ過ぎ」ですッ literally "Second Lieutenant Koito! This isn't [a brilliant plan]! // This is [got punched too much]!"

✔️ chapter 149 - tsukishima's moment of clarity - ふと我に返って思ったのは "I suddenly came to my senses and thought" (sentence is continued in next speech bubble, but this is the part i cared about.)

✔️ chapter 165 - ogata's conversation with yuusaku about killing and guilt - these are all my translations. yuusaku says なぜなら誰もが人を殺すことで罪悪感が生じるからだと...!! ("That's because the act of killing people produces feelings of guilt in everyone…!!"). then ogata says 罪悪感? / 殺した相手に対する罪悪感ですか? // そんなもの… みんなありませんよ // そう振る舞っているだけでは? // みんな俺と同じはずだ ("Feelings of guilt? / You mean feelings of guilt toward the ones they killed? // No one has... anything like that. // Aren't they all just acting that way? // I'm sure they're all like me." NEXT PAGE: yuusaku hugs him and says兄様はけしてそんな人じゃない / きっと分かる日が来ます // 人を殺して罪悪感を微塵も感じない人間がこの世にいて良いはずがないのです ("You're not that kind of person at all, brother. // I know you'll understand someday. // After all, it cannot be that there are humans in this world who don't feel even the slightest bit of guilt about killing people.") that last line is really hard to translate right, but this is the best i've got... anyway the important word in this conversation is zaiakukan 罪悪感 "feelings of guilt." (you can't translate it as just "guilt" because in english, "guilt" can also mean "the state of having actually done something wrong." and zaiakukan doesn't actually mean that you've done anything wrong. it's just a guilty feeling.)

✔️ chapter 169, page 5 - when koito says he hates ogata, he uses the word "daikirai" 大嫌い. kirai and daikirai both mean "hate" but if you know that "dai" means "big," then you know which word is stronger.

✔️ chapter 185, page 10 - when tsukishima yells at svetlana - 生きてることくらい伝えたらどうだ!! // どんな気持ちであんたを待ってるか… // どうしてそんな残酷なことが出来るんだ!! "Why don't you at least let them know you're alive?!! // Think of how they must feel waiting for you... // How can you do something so cruel?!!" this scene is important because it shows us that tsukishima still has a human heart, despite everything

✔️ chapter 204, page 3 - tanigaki's line about being famous for his big balls - 毎回あのネタ使うから / 樺太中のアイヌに俺の金玉がデカいと知れてしまったけどな "But because you use that line every time, / now Ainu all over Karafuto know that my balls are huge."

✔️ chapter 227, page 3 - tsurumi's line to usami (who just kicked that kid's neck in) that was weirdly translated by VIZ as "You always intended to do this to your friend." - that translation is just wrong. the line is (in dialect) 親友にこんげ真似をすっと分かっていたんだば... meaning, "Had I known you would do this to your best friend…" maybe because VIZ was going by the volume version, they got confused by the dialect? they must have misread the "sutto" (meaning approximately "that you would do") as "zutto" (meaning "always").

✔️ chapter 231, page 8 - koito says 私は鶴見中尉殿と月島軍曹を最後まで見届ける覚悟でいる "I am resolved to see Second Lieutenant Tsurumi and Sergeant Tsukishima through to the end."

✔️ chapter 263, page 8 - shiraishi's line about boutarou taking his bullets - お前ならあのまま俺を弾除けにするはずだ // らしくねえな "You of all people would have stayed where you were and used me as a shield. // That wasn't like you at all." approximately.

✔️ chapter 268 - tsurumi's outburst about the miserable end that awaited wilk and the others - そのカムイを守る戦いのためにウイルクたちはどんな悲惨な最後を遂げたのかこれから教えてあげよう "Now I will tell you about how Wilk and the others met their wretched end in their battle to protect those kamuy!" approximately. or maybe, "Now I will tell you about how Wilk and the others fighting to protect those kamuy met their wretched end!" the former is a little more literally accurate, but the latter sounds better...

✔️also chapter 268 - after past tsurumi hears that it's wilk, the line translated by EH scans as, "So he's become involved with my life again, after all." - やっぱりまた私の人生に関わってきたか EH scans got it exactly right. VIZ got it wrong and translated it as, "Yet again my life changes." not remotely close. you got the ONLY VERB IN THE SENTENCE wrong.

✔️ chapter 300 - when ogata sees vasily's binocular reflection and he's very pleased, he says 運命は俺に味方した / 世界が俺は正しいと言っている "Fate has taken my side. / The world is telling me I'm right."

✔️ ch306 - koito tells tsurumi to release tsukishima - もうこの男を解放してあげてください "Please set this man free already."

#golden kamuy #golden kamuy spoilers #golden kamuy translation notes #this post gets check emojis instead of bullet points bc that's how i was checking them off in my .txt that i copied and pasted from.#we're going to read the entry from ch68 and we're not going to talk about where else we may have read dialogue like this.

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eyedelater · 1 year

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ace attorney spirit of justice post

i was going to play the whole game without bothering to post about it, but now i've had enough thoughts that i have to put them somewhere. they are disorganized and out of order and include full spoilers.

the game would have been $30 on switch but it was like $16 on iOS. what did i miss out on for saving my $14? i don't care. there's only so much you can miss out on when it's a visual novel. also, i remembered the reason i didn't play this game when it came out on iOS several years ago. it's because the app is very careful to list which iOS versions and devices the game will work on, and it will warn you not to purchase content if you're on any other version or device. and that was before i had gotten my first job, so i didn't have ~$16 to spare on a game that might not work. so i forgot about it. anyway i took the plunge this time and it worked fine on my ipad whose iOS version is not on the supported list.

i didn't start writing this post until the middle of the 5th and final case. i think we're about to defend dhurke in court and i have to note that i love that idea. and there's the fact that the justice minister was such an evil son of a bitch and now he's dead and that's kind of objectively good. also, the character designs in this game are quite good, especially the outfits.

red flag: when mere bailiffs in your "peaceful" country are carrying assault rifles at all times. they don't even do that in america. as of 2023.

i liked apollo's near-drowning cave adventure. and dhurke saved him with his left arm, which seems to be fine and only lives in a makeshift sling for stylistic reasons. on a gut level i'm displeased that the solution to the puzzle box requires one of the panels to be half-turned, even though i know puzzle boxes don't have strict rules any more than any other kind of brain teaser.

datz is so cute for a 46-year-old insurgent. he has the biggest mouth ever. that one face he makes strongly evokes enel one piece's big moment, but that's fair. now listen closely to me. up until recently, an important personal policy of mine has been as follows: "NO HOT DADS!" it's a hard-and-fast rule related to my personal taste/distaste and nothing else. but i think a really fun and good ship would be the dilf x dilf ship of datz x dhurke. so i can make a small exception. they can have a revolutionary ossan love that is perfectly righteous, true, and appropriate. maybe. (i do know that datz is no one's dad.)

i love apollo justice. he's the best and the cutest. i love his forehead and his vest and his antennae. but in real life, people with naturally very loud voices are unpleasant to be around <3 tone it down <3

when we see that photo of dhurke looking like apollo's spitting image with little apollo and little nahyuta and datz is like "yeah there he is with his Biological son nahyuta (Zero resemblance Whatsoever) and his Foster son apollo (clone)" it's like (everyone in the audience side-eyes each other) uh-huh… that being said, i don't remember anything that was said about apollo's family history in previous games apart from lamiroir being his and trucy's mother. also dhurke's eyebrows are trifurcated while apollo's are only bifurcated. that's plausible deniability. maybe jove justice is dhurke's brother or something? [he's not.] and if queen amara was dhurke's wife, was she nahyuta's mother, and then, were her genes 100% dominant so that nahyuta looks like a clone of her and not like dhurke at all? [note added in later: it seems that was the case.]

ace attorney games sure do include characters' ancestry as twists a lot of the time. maybe it's unavoidable in a human drama?

i think 35-year-old miles edgeworth has glasses because they couldn't think of any fun talky animations to give him so they had to give him some glasses-adjusting poses

how much taxpayer money is nahyuta spending on international flights for ema skye every 2 days

the idea of channeling an ancient figure like the founder or kee'ra is so fun and cool. i can't help but feel like it probably won't come to that, though. also, the fact that they preserved her true face not on any flat painting but on a mini sculpture in the round inside a tricky snowglobe thing was really cool. now they just need her name and maya could totally channel her. or i guess the queen could. [note added in later: of course they didn't channel her. ace attorney always has to step right up to the plate and not even swing.]

the high priestess carries on the rich tradition of being a smug know-nothing, a tried-and-true charming character archetype. i can get behind it. she's doing her best. her english voice actor was no good, though. are there no little girl voices available?

it's very interesting to have a revolution subplot (or rather, underlying main plot) where we the audience can and should eventually be like, "oh. the revolutionaries are very clearly and obviously the ones who are correct." though in the end, even after the revolution succeeded, it's still a monarchy.

i wonder how people with dissociative identity disorder feel about uendo in the fourth case. the story didn't go into the fact that in order to end up with DID, someone generally has to go through a staggeringly traumatic childhood. though you could kind of get that impression from owen… i don't know. i heard about a case where a victim with DID testified as many of her different alters in a court of law, in real life. is it disrespectful to portray DID in fiction at all? it's fair to say that in most cases, they do a shit job. i didn't feel like it was really played as a joke in this case... except for the way he used it conveniently for his rakugo characters... i guess that does count as playing it as a joke.

the 4th case must have been fun to localize, huh? you can't pretend rakugo is anything but rakugo.

you know, i thought that maybe i had been imagining it and that i was longing for something i shouldn't have expected, but after comparing nahyuta's reactions in court, i really do think van zieks's reactions in DGS were not as satisfying as they could have been. it's like, he's the most stoic prosecutor we've ever gone up against and there was absolutely nothing silly about his reactions (except throwing glasses of wine all over the place, which, like i said, gets old. and it's not that funny in the first place. it's more... aggressive.) like at least nahyuta's most drastic reactions are a little bit humbling, a little bit humiliating, you know? he loses his composure. van zieks doesn't lose his composure in that way.

they certainly did a good job of making nahyuta a lovably aggravating opponent.

is any ace attorney case NOT a locked-room mystery? good grief

nahyuta says, "Her Eminence thinks highly of my prosecutorial skills." but didn't you lose 3 or 4 cases in this game already? and one guilty verdict you got was nullified the next day?

when we were opposing phoenix in court and he got really upset and put his head in his hands… that was so alarming! it's like, we're not him! ah! we can't go over there and be him to fix it! for once, we don't know what he's thinking when he's breaking down like that! though it was easy enough to figure out.

the fact that khura'in is totally a theocracy is glossed right over. like check it out! we're a deeply religious ethnostate where there is no line between church and state! but don't worry— everyone in the whole country agrees that it's ideal… right? like even if they bring back defense lawyers, there still might be some problems worth addressing.

edgeworth let out a Nghoooooooooh! and it was cravat-related! it was all worth it just for this.

i have to kick phoenix wright's ass and also apollo justice's ass because they climbed into a manhole and cave respectively without thinking to bring a light source with them. you can't tell me you didn't expect it to be dark. you can see that it is dark from the outside.

"Founder's Orb left with Datz." とても嫌な予感がする…

the way armie became agoraphobic as a result of a different phobia (in her case, fire)… that really hit hard for personal reasons… huegh

oh so datz brought us back the Orb after all. i am honestly shocked.

dhurke's tit shadow

ok so they had to kill off dhurke so he can't live happily with datz. and they had to go on and on about his everlasting het love with amara. maybe that dilf x dilf ship was a pipe dream in the first place. but what else am i supposed to do when i come across not one but two characters who make me want to bend my no hot dads rule?? give me a break.

i cried when apollo left the nest to start his own musty law office. make all your dads proud, apollo...!

in the great ace attorney, there was the sad ex-jailer who was wearing an implausibly perfect facial disguise in which even the shape of his nose was greatly altered, and that pissed me off due to its implausibility. in this game, there was another implausibly perfect disguise, which was queen amara posing as nayna, wherein her facial structure, eye color, nose, body type, posture, and weight were all perfectly disguised. there's a limit to how good disguises can be before it becomes BS. narratively.

now i'm in the bonus story and we're up against edgeworth and he took his glasses off for the trial. (slams table) what? why did they do that? what is the logic behind this? glasses aren't only a leisure time thing. glasses are an all the time thing if you need them. and whether you're near-sighted or far-sighted, you need them in the courtroom, as important objects and people appear at both near and middle distance. does this imply that edgeworth's glasses are cosmetic only? even then, there's no reason to take them off before a trial! if you're going to change his character design, commit to it! ahh but the edgeworth shrug, smile, and shake head movement is wonderful as always. ok, could it be that the glasses did not render nicely in a 3/4 view so they gave up and excluded them completely? i think that has to be it. they couldn't get glasses to work in a 3/4 view so they gave up. weak...

(you have unlocked: minor pet peeve: when characters with glasses take their glasses off without good reason. no one who wears glasses in real life would do that.)

edgeworth told the judge that he doesn't plan on getting married. of course this is because it's still illegal to get gay married in japanifornia :( so he can't officially get gay married to his common law husband of many years, phoenix wright.

i don't have any large overarching opinions to sum up about the game except that it's an ace attorney game as good as any other, and as such, it was worth playing. it felt a lot more similar to the older games than the great ace attorney chronicles did.

#ace attorney spirit of justice spoilers #ace attorney

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eyedelater · 1 year

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a small but annoying official translation mistake in golden kamuy

first, the context of the mistake.

in chapter 82, ogata was getting beat up by one of tsurumi's men. that man says, 死ね!! コウモリ野郎がッ ("Die!! You turncoat bastard!"). he uses the word "koumori," which literally means "bat," as in the animal, but can also mean turncoat, opportunist, two-faced. we know it is meant in the latter sense here because of the context. (i did see it translated as "you bat bastard" in unofficial anime subs... but that's not the focus of this post.)

so then sugimoto storms in and saves ogata by knocking out that soldier, and bloodied ogata looks at him and says, なんだよ /お礼を言って欲しいのか? ("What, / do you want me to thank you?"). and sugimoto replies, お前が好きで助けたわけじゃねえよ / コウモリ野郎 ("I didn't save you because I like you, you know. / Turncoat bastard.") sugimoto echoes the line that the soldier just yelled. and then ogata spits out some blood. great moment. we all love this moment.

and there's a moment several chapters later that echoes this great moment. you could argue that it's a very important and rare moment showing us how ogata and sugimoto feel about each other. in chapter 89, sugimoto is on a rampage killing people and trying to find asirpa in the village full of imposter ainu men. one of the latter is about to shoot him, but ogata shoots that man in the head, and then he says his clever one-liner quietly to himself: 俺も別に好きじゃねえぜ杉元… ("I don't really like you either, Sugimoto...") it's clearly a callback to the earlier scene: they're saving each other, even though they don't really like each other.

EH scans translated everything here perfectly well, as always. they translated ogata's line as, "I didn't save you because I like you either, Sugimoto…"

VIZ made a foolish mistake, though. their translation was, "I guess I don't actually hate Sugimoto after all."

so the line says "don't really like," but they translated it as "don't really hate." you only got it exactly opposite from correct. and the surrounding structure of the sentence is mangled too! i don't really understand how they managed that.

it's a pretty simple sentence in the first place. let's dissect it:

俺も ore mo — I, too

別に betsu ni — not really, not especially (when paired with a negative verb)

好きじゃねえ suki janee — do not like (this is the negative verb)

ぜ ze — tone indicator that cool guys say to sound cool

杉元… sugimoto (and an ellipsis that viz also decides to delete)

so that's "I, too, do not especially like you, Sugimoto..." then you have to apply your cool guy tone indicator and rephrase it to sound cooler: "I don't really like you either, Sugimoto..." can everyone see how i arrived here?

so there is no doubt whatsoever that VIZ made a mistake here. and they're the ones getting paid to do this and publishing it in a physical book! that's very annoying to me. so i just wanted to make a post calling out the official translation for doing an extra-bad job in this particular case. (is it possible that they corrected it before publishing the physical volume? i don't have a copy of it to check, but the mistake is still there on when you read the manga on their website. the website i'm paying them money to access. so it shouldn't be any different than what's in the published volume.)

#if i shipped ogata/sugimoto this mistake would annoy me even more because that line is like 45% of canon support for the ship #ogata hyakunosuke #golden kamuy #golden kamuy translation notes #sugimoto saichi #there are more instances where VIZ did an extra-bad job with GK but i don't want to be a big jerk and call them out a lot.#likewise so as not to be a big jerk i'm not going to figure out the name of the translator and call them out by name. way too rude

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eyedelater · 1 year

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the great ace attorney chronicles post

i went to a really cool video game / CD / DVD / comic / manga store and i HAD to patronize them because i don't want such stores to stop existing even if i'm not going to go there very often because it's quite far from where i live. so i bought the great ace attorney chronicles on switch because it was the only game i felt like i really wanted to buy.

i have played most of the other ace attorney games. i like them, but i'm not an active fan, if that makes sense? i love the weirdness of the characters. i like the game mechanics. the stories are usually fun. i even played the crossover game with professor layton a few years ago. so now the great ace attorney chronicles is both Great Ace Attorney games stuck together for my convenience?! how... convenient!!!

anyway this is the first time i've played an ace attorney game in several years and i started playing it with just a little trepidation. like what if it's not fun? but of course it'll be fun… but what if it's not? i was also interested to see how the english version approaches localization when this one explicitly and undeniably takes place in japan. i already knew that they couldn't localize the name of ryuunosuke naruhodou (apart from omitting a "u" from each name), and i also already knew that phoenix wright's non-localized name is naruhodou, so i was curious to see how they'd tackle it. it seems they've taken the approach of making jokes out of some of the names (iyesa nosa and kyurio korekuta, for example) while keeping the important characters' names intact and punless to the untrained eye (like you only know the pun of "naruhodo" if you know a little japanese). which i think is the best path they could have taken, given the difficult circumstances of pitting "an entire history of punful localized names in the series" against "keeping japanese names for characters who are clearly japanese." (i even just went to court-records.net to check on the japanese name of korekuta and yes of course it was a localization pun and his original japanese name was different. that means they also added or greatly changed brett's line about how the "kyuri" in his name is like the word for "cucumber.") very interesting. i'm eager to look at more fun localized or not localized names as i continue the game. that being said, i do want to know the naming puns for the characters whose names remain in japanese, like hosonaga. (without looking at the kanji… hosoi means thin and nagai means long, so is he mr. long and thin, is that the joke…? [note added in later: yes, that does seem to be the extent of the joke. even the kanji match.] ) and mikotoba (mi can mean beautiful, and kotoba is words, so is he mr. beautiful words, is that the joke…? but that doesn't have anything to do with being a professor of forensic science?? is it a different mi? is it body, is it 3? i don't know. [note added in later: it's a different mi. it's 御 which you usually see pronounced as "go" and the phrase 御言葉 mikotoba means "word of god" in a christian sense. so that's the joke?]) maybe i'll just play the whole game and then look up the jokes of everyone's names later?

(after playing the 2nd and 3rd chapters)

i did have a strong suspicion that kazuma was going to die. his death flag was "too flawlessly capable; not weird enough." there's no way someone that smart, capable, and helpful could survive an entire ace attorney game. his death was extra sad, though, because accidental deaths are sadder than murders, because there's nothing to get angry about.

i knew that we were expecting a Herlock Sholmes to appear. when i realized that in japanese they just called him sherlock holmes like normal, i was ready to be annoyed at the change that must have been due to some copyright problem (how's the conan doyle estate? don't care). but i was eventually pleased to see that the character of herlock sholmes is annoying as fuck and the annoying stupid name suits him perfectly, so i have no complaint.

i noticed that much of the english translation is in british english (though i feel like there might be some inconsistencies?) and that's a nice touch, i think. make us dumbass yanks read "defence" and "manoeuvring" and the like and we can't object because the game takes place in england. and the japanese characters are speaking english. the difficulty level of english they're speaking is very high. if they are speaking an accordingly high level of japanese in the original text, i bet it would be super difficult for me to read. i haven't read the original japanese whatsoever in any ace attorney games, but i get the strong impression that the localization team for this game has done an excellent job translating. a lot of the text does not feel translated at all, and you read it without it being obvious that it has been paraphrased by necessity. if that makes sense.

we met van zieks and he didn't seem to leave a strong antagonistic impression the way some prosecutors have. like for comparison, in the early games i remember being so pissed at edgeworth that it took me a long time to let him into my heart as a sympathetic character. he was such a strong antagonist in the courtroom that i could not let go of the feeling that he was going to be a thorn in my side. even auchi left a stronger impression of antagonism than van zieks because he just wouldn't shut the fuck up in the first trial. but van zieks didn't put up that much of a fight, did he? so it was a bit of a weak comeback after 5 years, wasn't it? and the defendant got a not guilty verdict by some incomprehensible technicality. it was a little bit pathetic. van zieks's animations and gestures were fantastic, though. i wanted to see the various white parts of his outfit get stained with red wine. i'm very interested to learn more about him. at this point, right after the third chapter, knowing what little we know about van zieks, i suspect that his backstory is sad. but maybe he'll put up more of a fight in the mean time before we get to learning about his character more personally.

i LOVE the way susato raises her eyebrows with pity and looks at you like you're the biggest fucking idiot in the world. she's the best.

all the ace attorney games up to apollo justice, i've played at least twice, maybe three times. it was fun, but looking back, that kind of game also presses some of my buttons that makes me remember it as something of a vexing struggle that we're glad is now over. like all these problems cropped up one after another and we solved them and now it's all set. so going back and replaying those games feels like it would be revisiting problems i've already solved and don't need to solve again (and it would also be extra vexing because i'll know i've solved them before but i won't remember exactly how to do it). so even though i do look back on ace attorney games fondly, i don't know if i want to replay them. (including this game when i'm done with it). even though there were some really really good moments that i might like to experience again. maybe i'll watch playthroughs or something.

i think van zieks isn't as satisfying an opponent as edgeworth partly because of the jury setup; it's like he and i have a common enemy, and that is the idiot jurors, so there isn't such an exciting animus between us, and something is lost. i also think the wine thing really isn't that funny the 10th time. and so far, he hasn't made the kind of really desperate, truly vexed face i want to see… it's like he's not really that invested. i want to see him come closer to fully losing his cool. he's too composed… i don't know. maybe he'll lose it later on. but that's two trials now. [note added in later: he did finally make some truly deranged poses at the very end of the second game. it was pretty satisfying to see his shoulders heaving with desperation.]

TANGENT: out of curiosity i started reading "i am a cat" by our unfortunate character and real life person Natsume Soseki, and i'm very tickled by it so far. i can really feel the love and skill that went into the translation as well; the formal wording they use is so consistently funny. this is truly the self-important and blithely curious viewpoint of a cat. given the complexity of the english vocabulary used, i bet the japanese is crazy difficult. but i certainly like it a lot better than a lot of what i had to read in school. (i heard it is a book often assigned to schoolchildren in japan.) it's also interesting how they sort of half-localized it, translating main character names so we get the puns but leaving place names and some characters' names untranslated? i wonder about that. (the version i'm reading is the 1972 translation by aiko ito and graeme wilson.) i also notice the story takes place during the russo-japanese war, a time period i am slightly familiar with from golden kamuy. the late meiji era. it seems like i'm in a late meiji era spectacular with these three works of fiction lately.

i bet the sequences with herlock's deductions are polarizing among players. if you're impatient, i bet they're excruciating. but i enjoy them well enough. herlock is such a reigen. he's such a dipshit. he's more of a dipshit than reigen.

overall i think the use of motion capture for the character models really adds something special. i appreciate that they went all-out with it and didn't stick only to Plausible posing. that being said, i don't think it hits the mark 100% of the time. (like some of natsume soseki's movements, for example...) plus there's the inherent uncanny contradiction of "moving smoothly between poses (human-like)" and "otherwise maintaining static poses (less human-like)," if that makes sense. like they don't have idle animations. i guess it's not a big deal. i also wonder if the use of 3d models made the animators less inclined to go wild with the faces. i think some of the faces should've gone a little wilder maybe? like if van zieks's eyes got much wider when he was upset or something? hard to pinpoint what i'm longing for.

windibank's little habit with the gun was not fucking cute or funny at all. what were they thinking. honestly.

i laid in my bed for 11 hours and played ace attorney until it wasn't fun anymore. i like that there is the story mode option for when you're stuck and you can't even be bothered to google the solution. i don't give even half a shit about the stupid achievements they have added in to the game. achievements are worthless and meaningless when it's a linear visual novel. especially on the nintendo switch. so even though i feel slightly miffed with myself on some level for using the autoplay option when it means that you get no achievements for that section… on a logical level, i don't care and am in fact more miffed by the fact that there are achievements at all. because that's dumb.

so there's gonna be some dramatic personal history reason why van zieks is racist against japanese people… ok

the more i look at ryunosuke, the more it sinks in… this isn't a word i use lightly, but the only word that can describe him… is "cutie." of course he strongly resembles phoenix wright, but phoenix was never this much of a cutie. ryunosuke is the one who is a cutie. he is just as much of a cutie as apollo justice. or almost.

i just wish van zieks's white gloves would turn red when he crushes the chalice of red wine in his hand. is that too much to ask?

(plays a lot more without writing any notes)

(i hated myself for wasting my saturday playing ace attorney in bed for 11 hours, but i did the same thing the next week.)

kazuma reappears in a cute and sexy new white outfit, obviously a foil to ryunosuke's all black outfit, and with a red splash-of-blood cravat at his neck to show that he died once. but the important part is the very large and unmistakable strap-on harness at his crotch. please tell me there's fanart where he straps the appropriate implement to the front of that thing.

i'm glad gregson turned out to be a bad guy. or, you know, grey area. when he showed up i was like, "are we supposed to like this guy? i can't tell… certainly he's not the gumshoe of this game… they wouldn't give him an annoying habit like constantly eating fish and chips if he was intended to be the gumshoe of this game… right…?" though i'll say that every time he showed up, i was well and truly struck with a VERY powerful craving for potato wedges. oh my god. i can practically taste them. fried fish i don't have such strong feelings about but oh my god. i need to get potato wedges soon. with the skin on. what was i talking about? gregson is not very likeable. i do appreciate the audacious character design of choosing not to endow the man with a chin.

what is the connotation of unicorns in japan? what about in britain? because as far as i know, to americans like me, the connotation is maaaybe "mystical magical legendary forest gracefulness" but primarily "little-girliness and silliness and like rainbows and sunshine cutesiness." so when stronghart appeared behind the bench and his usual walking stick had turned into a unicorn apropos of nothing??? and he bangs it like a gavel even though it doesn't have any surfaces that look good for banging on and he's gonna poke holes into the gaveling block??? and neither he nor anyone else comments on it, ever??? it was more baffling than anything. like, first of all, does this fit his motif, stylistically or symbolically? what message were they trying to send with the unicorn? and why is it suddenly a unicorn now that he's acting as the judge? why couldn't it have been a unicorn the whole time and then the joke is that he bangs his usual walking stick instead of a gavel? why didn't he use his usual walking stick? why is the joke instead that he put away his old walking stick, brought out his fancy unicorn walking stick, and used that as a gavel? just incomprehensible. (also was this guy's japanese name really "Hurt Vortex"? fantastic. that's awe-inspiring. ok to be fair you could have transliterated it as "Hart" instead and then it would actually be a plausible given name. if the localization team was hardcore they could've tried to make "vortex" work by approaching it from a dutch "voort" kind of angle. maybe.)

speaking of gavels, when jigoku was on the witness stand, i was really expecting him to bring out his own gavel. i know he had it in his pocket. he had it in his pocket when we last saw him. it would've been some very welcome comic relief if he had brought out his own gavel and banged it a little.

for years i went to court-records.net to get my explanations of ace attorney character name puns, but it seems they haven't updated it with names from great ace attorney resolve… the people running the site must have lost their thunder… i certainly don't have enough ace attorney thunder to go help them with their website. i guess i'll go to the reprehensible fandom wikia. (grits teeth) it's… very comprehensive and helpful... i looked up a lot of the japanese names of the characters and some of the puns are pretty weak. makes me feel better about some of the weaker localization puns. sometimes there's only so much you can do.

you can tell by the way the characters use both -san/-sama and Mr./Miss that they are frequently flipping back and forth between english and japanese. some hardcore person should put together a hack of these games in which they're speaking japanese for every line that they're speaking in japanese in canon and english for every line that they're speaking english. you'll have to come up with some creative solution for the names.

i have finished playing. i enjoyed the game (i.e., the duology of both games) but it didn't blow me out of the water. i would recommend it to someone who already likes visual novels and ace attorney games, and i will tentatively categorize it as "worth playing" if you already suspect that you might like it. but i won't replay it. i think the motion capture character animation was, on the whole, really funny and totally worth it. even just shamspeare alone was worth it. but like i said, i think some of the faces should've deformed a little more sometimes to show greater emotion. all the outfits were fun. i have to say that in terms of old-timey london aesthetic and interacting with funny londony characters while solving mysteries, that itch has been VERY well scratched by the professor layton series, so this really didn't feel like anything especially new or worthwhile in that respect. i wonder if the game's scenario wouldn't have been more fun if they had stayed in late meiji era japan. and i don't feel one way or another about how *erlock *olmes was involved in the story, but it's worth pointing out that in western culture, he is a pretty played out and tired character, completely lacking any kind of intriguing freshness. even reinventing him as a total reigen can't cleanse him of that tired feeling, in my view. though of course in the end you can't help but love him a little. and his excessively stylized trenchcoat was magnificent.

i guess it was interesting to play a game that starkly highlights the similarities and differences between victorian london and late meiji japan, with characters often butting heads between the two cultures, as someone who is part of neither culture (but who is a native speaker of one of the languages). though during my golden kamuy fixation i did spend a lot of time in the same era of japanese history. and as an english speaker in america, i've absorbed my fair share of cultural and historical information about victorian london. so i was a bit familiar with both cultures. but i guess my point is… they couldn't come up with a more fun or interesting flaw for van zieks than having him be racist against japanese people? i dunno. in conclusion, the culture shock element of the story was necessary but not very striking to me. it didn't leave a strong impression. and it's also worth noting that despite the characters constantly extolling their respective countries, looking back in history, no one nowadays really likes that both great britain and japan were Empires at that time… like, you know… imperialism turned out bad for a lot of people… it's actually quite a bad thing that they had in common.

it seems the last ace attorney game i haven't played yet is Spirit of Justice. i haven't decided whether i want to buy it. it feels like i've been out of touch with phoenix and apollo for a decade and i'd have to catch up again before i could play another game that features them. hmm...

well, what matters now is that i can finally look at some great ace attorney fanart.

#this goes on my anime/manga blog bc the work is originally in japanese.#the great ace attorney spoilers #dgs spoilers

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