every sound i hear is the sound of your voice
hello to crocell! i'm glad you wanted to add me, i've always been kinda curious about you since omnistrike keeps telling me nice things. you must tell me where your username comes from, it makes me think of croissants for some reason.
anyway, i've been playing that game i downloaded yesterday, erratic cadence. it's a chinese shounen-ai fan game set during crisis core around christmas-time. i keep needing to take breaks while playing because trying to translate all the chinese gives me a headache. it's not too hard, but sometimes there are chunks of really formal military language where i basically need to spam text into dictionaries.
in the game, you play as cloud, and afaik there's three different pairing!endings that you can get: zack/cloud, sephiroth/cloud and sephiroth/zack. initially i started playing thinking, "tch, who cares about sephiroth," but GEEZ he's become one of my favorite characters in this game. SO UKE. the characterization is surprisingly good (... i say this after calling sephiroth 'uke' and making people scream and flee in fear); it's not spot on, and sephiroth is such a... mommyroth, but then again, i'm translating it as opposed to just reading it straight off, and my grasp on the chinese language is pretty dodgy. i love seeing crisis core through cloud's eyes. it's christmas-time but shinra's still going down the crapper because of genesis' attacks, and a lot of the characters are mourning because angeal just died. sephiroth lingers around the hallways waiting for the two to come back, even though he knows that they won't, and says to cloud that they used to spend all day together; now he doesn't have anyone to spend time with. (at that point you get a choice of saying, "what about zack?" and, "what about... me...?" i'm doing the SxC route first, so now sephiroth has ordered cloud to come in the next day and play cards with him. HEEHEEHEE SO CUTE.) zack especially is such a trooper; he appears and looks really troubled, and then cloud shows up and asks what's wrong, and zack's all, "AHAHAHA HEYYY, NOTHING, NOTHING, LET'S GO GET SOME FOOD," and is all smileyface and drags cloud off, even though neither of them are hungry. it's so adorable aaa. and sad.
anyway, i capped the scenes with fluffyroth because i love the dialogue he has with cloud. the first few times cloud sees him, his options are "approach with caution" and "RUN AWAY QUICKLY". if you choose to approach sephiroth, cloud takes like a step closer, and then goes, "I'M STILL NOT UP TO HIM YET, I CAN STILL RUN, SHOULD I RUN Y/N??" finally after i managed to get cloud to approach sephiroth without fleeing, cloud asks how sephiroth is, and then is like, "i-i'm bothering you aren't i, i'll just leave now." sephiroth says something along the lines of, "i'm not bothered. are you leaving because you don't want to bother me..."
"... or is it because you're really afraid of me?" [lit. "or is it because i'm very frightening?" the last two words could also mean terrible/formidable, but the sentence just sounds too weird for me to think that that's what he's really saying.]
cloud: i-it's nothing like that!
sephiroth: *looks pissy* you... come over here a moment.
cloud: (h-h-h-h-he's taken out masamune! it can't be that he wants to-- wh-what do i do!?)
cloud: (he won't really stab me!?) *walks reluctantly up to sephiroth*
... text flew by way too quickly for me to cap it, but it basically went:
sephiroth: ... you're so short.
cloud: wh-what?
sephiroth: obviously you're not eating enough. you need to eat more, not eating enough is stunting your growth.
cloud: o-okay...
sephiroth: here, have a food card. use it as much as you like.
and then sephiroth walks off and cloud just... dies inside.
then there's a scene where cloud spies on zack and sephiroth talking on the roof. sephiroth comments on zack's training; he says that zack's been pushing himself really hard, to the point where sephiroth can hear him smashing up the training room from the opposite side of shinra. he says that zack should chill out because rumors are starting to spread amongst the younger troopers, and that zack should stop using such weird training methods.
zack: ... so are you saying i'm really weird?
[note: it sounds ominous in english but in chinese it's quite lighthearted and like, amused-sounding.]
they have a lot of small talk, very lighthearted and upbeat banter with zack skirting around the issues, and then sephiroth gets tired of it and goes straight for the kill: asking about angeal. he asks zack if the reason why he's been pushing himself so hard is because of his scar, and zack kinda makes an "....... nn" sound. and then sephiroth goes, "that's the one angeal gave you, isn't it," and zack just looks really sad. sephiroth goes, "here, i'll heal it for you," and then zack stops him and explains that he wants it, to remember angeal. and then he just. breaks down a little. excuse the GAYYYY, it's totally just fanservice. seph's standing there with his hand glowing 'cause he was about to heal zack.
zack: angeal chose his path according to his dreams and honor, but i was just there to help his achieve his goals, right?
zack: what now...? angeal isn't here anymore, so now what should i do...?
[note: he uses fairly military language here; the 'now what should i do' actually is more like, 'what should my next move be', like when you plot strategies for war.]
zack quickly goes back to his usual self after that brief bit of angst, though. after saying that, he says something like, "... oh well, what's done is done, time to move on, right? sorry for unloading on you like that," and is all smiles again. and talks a little bit about how he once dreamed of being a hero.
sephiroth: do you still want to become a hero now?
zack: ... what, and become like you?
sephiroth: if you still want to become a hero, you need to try and beat me.
zack: ... don't joke around, mr. legendary hero.
kyahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
tl;dr: i'm really having fun with this game. it's interesting? most of the fun is in practicing my chinese, though. i'm learning a lot of vocab, quickly, and totally feel proud of myself when i flick through screens without needing to refer to a dictionary. i'm really, really bad with languages (i've been 'learning' chinese ever since i was a child olololol but i still can't speak any dialect of it fluently), but at least i'm making some progress, i guess.