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Weiterfechten

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Everything posted by Weiterfechten

  1. I would like to second what Dergonu posted. I don't personally have a thorough knowledge about translating but learning Japanese I could atleast perhaps give you a tip or two of my own experience so far (when did I get a whole two years into this thing?). I generally think it is a good way to start fairly early with the kanji and getting over the daunting task of even learning what the individual kanji mean (Remembering The Kanji, by Heisig, is an option I would recommend which goes through the aforementioned common use kanji that Dergonu mentioned). This may be somewhat controversial but I found that learning the individual kanji really helped getting a grasp of the general meaning of the words outside of it just looking like scribbles (some seem to point out that most compound words (words with more than one kanji) in JP don't make any sense when considering the individual kanji but I would not really agree with this since I, after having gone through RTK twice, generally can understand the meaning of compound two kanji words even without getting what the full translation is into English). It may also only be for smaller things when you are translating a full VN, but sometimes the individual kanji too carry a lot of meaning in an end of itself, for example in place or personal names or combined kanji words (with 4 or more kanji). In my experience with grammar I would recommend, of course, getting a bit of a ground too in this by reading grammar guides (there exist loads on the Internet, and many that are free), like Tae Kim's grammar guide and Jay Rubin's "Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You" (this one is not free). Aside from this I would also recommend reading, reading and reading, perhaps it is just me but generally grammar and learning words don't help me much if I don't actively see and use them. I would also recommend coming back to these grammar guides if something worries you or makes you question yourself in writing or reading even if it is a considerable time after having read about it (like が and は). A third thing I would perhaps like to add is the use of some kind of memory tool, there exist loads, but generally people tend to use in my experience Memrise or Anki (Anki being the one I use). These can both work as a learning tool and a remembering tool (for the aforementioned RTK for example), there existing, so called, decks with words that you can learn and options to make you able to create your own deck with words that you seem to forget or want to learn (perhaps taken from literature or online in works that you have read). This way you never truly get out of sync with the material that you see, and when you see it outside of the memory tools it reminds you of the word that you have learned or are learning, thereby reminding you of its meaning. Lastly good luck, it may seem daunting but always remember that what you are doing is for something fun down the line!
  2. So I finished reading Doki Doki Literature Club!. I felt I needed to read it after all the attention it has been getting and to get a break from reading the massive novel Sakura no Uta and yeah it was kind of what I expected after having been spoiled about all the major plot points. I still enjoyed it though. Still definitely an impressive feat for an OELVN and something of an eye-opener for my view of the "genre" (my first VN was Katawa Shoujo but since then I have not read a single one). I guess the game is too short for me to really make a thorough review of my opinions so I will just stick to leaving this small notice.
  3. Grats, I guess all you can do at this point is to hope for another Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood miracle.
  4. I usually read the one route I am looking forward to the most first, sometimes I get it wrong and find some other route better down the line, but most of the time I would say I land right. If the route was amazingly good I will likely be more sparing in reading other routes despite them being perhaps not as good, and if I read the first route and I am disappointed I may or may not continue to read another route (depending on how bad/good it was).
  5. If you are looking for something shorter, and if you haven't read it, perhaps Doki Doki Literature Club? One of the characters takes a pretty dominant role and if nothing else it is certainly an experience.
  6. Happy birthday Ranzo and Zvana! I didn't find any birthday picture sadly :/.
  7. I am pretty sure I have already said this somewhere else but to me finishing a game is to be done playing the game, whether that is you having completed it 100%, all the options available explored, or just having done the routes you feel like playing (I do however not consider a game complete if I have not come to a single end credit sequence for a game). If I do not feel like continuing a game I will not do so purely for completion's sake.
  8. Perhaps it is just me but I find them all pretty hard to watch whereby I don't watch any.
  9. I will have to go with the normal and perhaps boring answer of depends. I have found VNs which have really not very enjoyable side-routes (G-senjou no Maou, ouch, why do you do this, you should have left it at one route) and stories that have, in my opinion, really well functioning side-routes (like Grisaia). I think you generally summed up my thoughts pretty well with your second and third paragraph about choices. If I were to add something however I would say that I personally really enjoy choice as a cause and effect kind of game mechanic, I love to see how my actions influence the world and its inhabitans. Especially if major changes can happen to the world outside of just which person you get together with. I do not really like how most VNs today (or atleast those I have read) have taken away this mechanic about major cause and effect and made it more about - here you go here are four choices for four heroines and the choices really do not make sense as to why you get your outcome (oh you went to the grocery store? Then that means you get to get together with Girl or Boy A). In these situations I do not feel like I am having any cause and effect depending on myself with meaning picking a certain choice and more like I am playing some kind of dice game to figure out who I land on and if I will have to revert back to the choice to go again. I am also not a fan of how when you go through some linear games sometimes you are forced to replay the entire game to get a new part of the story and you have no clue where the new content starts. Sometimes in these games you can skip dialogue to get to the new content but in some games that does not happen and you are left wondering what you have or have not read. If you in these situations miss really important information it can easily ruin your fun and you will be none the wiser as to why you are not getting what the characters are talking about. If I were to say what my dream VN choice management would be it would probably be a game all too branched out and too expensive to make with a bunch of different choices that effect large portions of the story, world and characters. It would also be a game where the choices do not seem minor, but actually seem to have meaning and make you actively think about what you would do in the situation. As I am currently reading Sakura no Uta, a linear VN with no choices (that make any difference to the story) and a, in my opinion, really good story that over time explain your character's life from childhood till now (whereby plot gets revealed), I thought I might leave you with that suggestion (it is not translated yet though :/)
  10. Ok thanks! Hmm... I will think about that before doing that again, it certainly was not my intention to come off as rude, but then again you never learn if you don't dare to make mistakes. If you were to formulate the same sentence with the meaning of something like; "Welcome. There aren't a lot of Japenese people on here, right? If you want recommendations for VNs then go ahead and use the recommendations subforum", then how would you write it if you do not mind me asking? Btw. sorry if I come off as pushy asking for help all the time, I am just trying to learn.
  11. I am curious, can you tell me what I got wrong? It is always good to be corrected after doing something grammatically wrong, since that way you can correct what is wrong in the future.
  12. Fair. Hmm... 二回目 私の日本語は本当に悪いです。申し訳ありません。日本人このフォールムには珍しいですね、ってこと告げたい。あなたVNオススメ欲しいのならばRecommendationサブフォーラムを使いなさい。 Mandatory translation of my bad JP: "My Japanese is really bad. I am sorry. It is rare for Japanese people to use this forum, right? If you want any recommendations for VNs, please use the Recommendations sub forum."
  13. ようこそ!日本人このフォーラム使う人が少ないですね、VNオススメ欲しいならば、どうぞRecommendationsを使いなさい。宜しくお願いします。
  14. I guess I will stick to the newly updated Yomichan version on Firefox then. I did not even know it existed before this was brought up and just assumed that everything other than Rikaisama was going to be a pain to set up (partly to blame due to my time spent troubleshooting Chiitrans). Thanks for the info!
  15. Downloaded it after searching for other extensions and indeed it does work with the method described. Here is the link for the program: https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/
  16. You will have to excuse me for I might just be me reading this wrong, but I don't really get what you are trying to say. Which developer is doing what and what does "your unsafe browser is online" mean?
  17. I use ITH and Firefox with Rikaisama (an extension to translate words and phrases) and a clipboard inserter (another extension) for reading. If you want a thorough explanation I would recommend the place where I got the idea from; https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/wiki/vnhooking. Beware however that you have to use an outdated version of the Firefox web browser since Rikaisama is outdated (I do not use Firefox for anything else, so no real worries about it being outdated). In terms of ease of use it is pretty good and I have not really encountered any noticable bugs so far that completely breaks the program (unlike Chiitrans, which I tried before). You will however need to use some creativity and grammar knowledge to understand the sentences (which might be slightly hard if you know no Japenese) to completely understand the message since it only translates the meaning of the words and not really the grammar.
  18. Oh, did not know that existed. Guess my numbers were inflated due to how long I felt the battles lasted. Might also be that I am just really bad because most of my battles I am pretty sure did not end in 20 seconds
  19. Hello! So I recently finished playing "Tales of Berseria" (JRPG game by Bandai Namco) and I thought I would round up my thoughts about the game here (the review should be mostly spoiler free, otherwise notify me and I'll change it). The story tells the tale of young Velvet Crowe and her adventurous crew (surmounting to 6 by the end of the game) who set out to put an end to a trauma of Velvet's past by all manner of means, ranging from fishing and cooking to straight up fighting. Well mostly the latter. You see while you might be fooled by an early cutesy introduction the meat of the game is truly in its dark undertones which, for a game with a age rating of 16, is a fair amount of the content. I found also that the content was fairly philosophical at times (perhaps not in the amount of some VNs though). In the game you namely find yourself fighting between different values, ideas and perspectives, something the game manages in my opinion to do with fluidity and better than most games and VNs. This philosophy comes from the intimite and delicate relation the game places between cutscenes, extra dialogue (dialogue you can choose to straight up never open) and world building in which you get to take a part of not a straight up philosophy lesson but instead a smaller amount of nit picks of philosophy. In this regard I found the game interesting above the brute force gameplay and story (we will get to that later) and found myself able to enjoy not skipping every single dialogue line, something I admittedly find myself doing all too often in games. The story is very good and interesting throughout the whole game, if somewhat trope-ish (what can one expect from a JRPG game?) and while the story never managed to grab me to the point of tears it certainly has its moments for both the ones liking darker and (somewhat) lighter storylines. Is this good? Well, perhaps. I personally did not really enjoy the sudden shift the game took towards the end to become so light namely and I sort of wished the story had stuck purely to the largely dark undertones it held in the beginning, since this shift sort of opened up the door for it being trope-ish for the (in my opinion good) ending. Did this largely influence my enjoyment? Certainly not, but just something to note for those not able to stand JRPGs love for tropes. In terms of voice acting I can not speak for the English side but with Japanese voices the dialogue is very nicely voiced. The fighting (which is 50%> of the game in my opinion) is focused on different, so called, artes (attacks basically) which have different effects, elements, level upgrading (..., I was literally still getting new tutorial messages for fights 1 hour before the, ~40-ish hour, game ended). If you are like me however you will notice the little blue bar (so called "souls") next to people's faces and that is, truth be told, the MVP meter, 80% of your time will be spent waiting for this to go up to three bars and then pressing R to do some, so called, break soul ability, which is basically code name for stun lock, invincibility frames and damage central (if you want some NG+ level fighting, I am not your guy, I am the R spammer). If you do not have this bar filled you will be in the living hell mode, where you can get stun locked into the next century and can get absolutely destroyed by different AI unless you run around in circles (blocking does exist but did not work very well in my experience compared to dashing away) and wait for your blue bar (basically working as a stamina bar) to refill by attacking with basic artes and running. Is the fighting enjoyable? Yes. Is it repetitive? Yes, especially if you need to farm for levels where your life basically becomes turning down the volume to next to nought to not have to use hearing aid in the near future due to the EXTREMELY loud battle sounds (one reason I cannot really speak for the music) and getting perhaps slightly bored of seeing the same cat on a wand for the 30th time. Personally I would have perhaps liked some other battle system (with an lessened focus on stuns and the "souls" (stamina bar) and an increased focus on leveling) but I can also see the enjoyment it brings when you absolutely destroy your enemies with OP and nice animated powers. Beware however, the AOE stun of doom is real in this game so if you screw up your blue bar of destiny you are a bit in the toilet when an enemy does an AOE of half the battleground and you can neither run away, get up your souls (since it takes forever to do so) or attack (due to the extreme damage some bosses do). In terms of bosses the game too offers a wide arrange, though arguably they are later on narrowed down in terms of difficulty to their AOE attack size and ability to stun lock you and your AI friends (which are actually pretty good in my experience of not needlessly dying), since in my experience that is where the real trouble late game comes up and minor changes in attack patterns become minor. The characters are also really enjoyable and funny, making me chuckle more than once and not making one character that one guy which is boring compared to the others. The relations between the different antagonists and characters later on get really interesting too, tying in nicely with good story overall. In terms of graphics the game is generally really good, if perhaps somewhat randomly pixely at some points (I laughed when an antagonist got an 144p background randomly smashed up behind himself while he kept the same quality as the rest of the game). Out doors the quality stays pretty good too and most of the views of the game are pretty nice if looked from afar, if somewhat dulled out if you get close up. Ending thoughts Though focusing (perhaps too much) on the the battle system, Tales of Berseria is something to truly enjoy for its story and characters, which is something that brought me back to game and made the experience all the more worth it.
  20. So I finished Toritani's route in Sakura no Uta. The end was a bit sudden and there was certainly a bit of a lack of extra characters during the route making it just a tad bit bland for a first route. In terms of the story it was in my opinion fairly meh, with no real striking moments (though if you love pottery and French artists, sculptors (...) you have something to look forward to). I would definitely not go as far as to say it was bad, but perhaps just not my cup of tea, moving on to Rin's route now, to be honest I am not overly enthusiastic (I do not really like the character) but at this point I am kind of more interested in the backstory of the main character and his relation to Rin than their relationship now so perhaps it might just strike somewhat of a chord with me.
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