This post is partially inspired by the eternal complaining about "censorship" and localization, and partially by this article about Vagrant Story's localizationOne of my favorite games of all time is Chrono Trigger, and my favorite part of Chrono Trigger is the Kingdom of Zeal, where dreams come true. It's the lynchpin of the game, the only part ( Read more... )

Has it already been six years ( Read more... )

I would have had this up earlier today, but first there was a power outage that took up forty minutes of our time and then I went out to a three-hour-long dinner. Add in some other things I was doing, and there was a short delay. But it's still the first, so it's still a retrospective on the New Year ( Read more... )

So yesterday I was looking up the lyrics of the Hymn of the Fayth from Final Fantasy X, and after a bit of searching, I found a page that listed them as:Ieyui (pray)
Nobomeno (savior)
Renmiri (dream)
Yojuyogo (child of prayer)
Hasatekanae (forever and ever)
Kutamae. (Grant us peace)
And I thought that can't be right, unless it's an invented ( Read more... )

Studying isn't useless! Who would have thought!
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The Game Boy was kind of a weird time. There were a ton of puzzle games, exhaustively (and exhaustingly) covered in Jeremy Parish's Game Boy World series. There were the games that were brought over and then jammed into an existing series, like how 魔界塔士 SaGa (Makai Tōsho SaGa, “Spirit World Tower Warrior SaGa”) became Final Fantasy Legend. There ( Read more... )

My last Japanese tutoring session was all about the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. In English, these tend to be the same verb--"The box moved," "I moved the box"--and when they're not people get confused, like with lay (transitive) and lie (intransitive ( Read more... )

I say finally because we missed them by twenty minutes at the last Flower Festival we attended in Hiroshima.

I have a bad habit of springing for concert tickets when I haven't actually listened to any of that band's recent albums. My record is probably the last time I went to see VNV Nation, 15 years after they released the most recent album I ( Read more... )

Late night, late morning, and the rain that had been predicted nearly every day in the weather report finally arrived. softlykarou went out with a friend to fetch breakfast, and then came back, ate, and we left just under the buzzer to allow the hotel staff to clean our room ( Read more... )

One benefit of staying in a ryokan is that you get both dinner and breakfast, so after sleeping in almost until the last minute, I was awakened by softlykarou with exactly enough time to make it to breakfast after a quick shower. And such a breakfast:


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