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Fred the Barber

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Blog Comments posted by Fred the Barber

    Darbury

    Posted

    4 hours ago, Rooke said:

    (A lot of people have a 'length' requirement on the text in relation to gameplay, so if reading the text doesn't take a certain number of hours or if it doesn't contain a certain amount of words uninterrupted by gameplay, then they won't consider it. But I find that definition useful only if there's a separate category for shorter works, like in the book world we have novel, novelette, short story and so on. Because VNs don't have these other categories, I find this qualifier a tad useless. Stories aren't devalued because of their size - I'm sure we all remember the rumour of Hemingway's 6 word story. So I don't believe story events in games should be devalued solely because of their size related to gameplay. So some people might say you're not reading in Gone Home for a significant enough length of time vs exploration, but that's VERY subjective and I don't think it should be disqualified on that basis alone.)

    Ok, slight fork on the topic of length - I kind of wonder whether this should be a bigger consideration for VNs, as it already is with traditional fiction literature. VNDB tries to provide a rough estimate for it, which is not perfect but is better than nothing (except for Clephas who reads everything literally 10x faster than I do, of course), but I'm actually suggesting that maybe, in critical discussion, we should start categorizing VNs more specifically based on their length before trying to assess them, and in recommendations take length into further consideration. Currently length is hardly considered in discussion at all, that I can see, whereas we do have lengthy fixated discussion on other VN categories, which are mostly classified based on mood (and sometimes topic) of a VN: nakige, utsuge, moege, chuunige, etc.,. For instance, Clannad takes a mental eternity to play, especially when considering all the skipping through (or, God forbid, actually reading through) replays of the common route. Eden* is rather short and requires no replay. Yet people will probably quite happily simultaneously recommend both of these to someone purely on the basis of the content of other games they've enjoyed, since both are highly-regarded nakige. But the actual experience of reading each is vastly different. Reading a short story and reading an epic novel are radically different experiences; the same is probably true of VNs, too.

    Also, I kind of wrote this post just because I wanted to bring up The Dinosaur, because it's a rather good 7-word short story.

    Mr Poltroon

    Posted

    Regarding arranged marriages, which you tangentially brought up but which I was thinking about through the entire post, here is an excellent article by esteemed comedian Aziz Ansari on the topic of love today and how arranged marriages are probably actually not all they're vilified to be: http://time.com/aziz-ansari-modern-romance/. The last section, especially, is very relevant to most of your post. I think he has a whole book on the topic of "modern romance", but who has the time for that?

    At any rate, I, at least, certainly wouldn't mind if someone set me up with a nice young lady...

    Mr Poltroon

    Posted

    Thanks for the reminder that I really need to get to reading/watching Cross Game.

    About halfway through reading this post I was thinking "I need to ask him what he thinks about Kimi ni Todoke", but then that got addressed quite clearly, so I really have no comment here, aside from that I don't read manga so I only know all these things from their associated anime, which is frequently not especially representative of the manga. As a specific, relevant example: based on the anime, I'd be unlikely to recommend Fruits Basket to anyone, but the manga probably covers a lot more ground. Oh well. I have too many hobbies already, so I'm continuing to leave manga on the shelf, so to speak.

    Zakamutt

    Posted

    If you wear glasses, seriously consider contacts. It's a pretty amazing experience to go back to having everything in your field of vision being visible, instead of everything inside that obtrusive frame. It probably took me a month to really get comfortable with them, but I hate what wearing glasses does to my field of vision now that I know what I'm missing out on. I switched about 10 years ago and have never wanted to go back. The surgery thing is tempting, but scary...

    Clephas

    Posted

    9 hours ago, username_ds said:

    Since I am a foodie Tokyo is pretty awesome for that ...

    I'm also a bit of a foodie, and have to agree on this point. I visited some five years ago, and I remember enjoying pretty literally every meal I ate in Japan. I visited there before I turned into an otaku, so I wasn't blinded by rose-colored glasses, either; it really was great. The only other place I've been to which had comparably good food (probably better, but it's a close one) was Italy.

    Anyway, I have to agree with the general "like anywhere, it's got pros and cons" sentiment. Living in the US, I like a lot of things here, and I also dislike a lot of things (and if Trump gets elected, there'll be one more thing that I really don't like...). I expect I'd feel the same wherever I went, Japan included, except that I'd undoubtedly find it easier to be somewhere that I'm not an outsider, which for me pretty much means the US or Canada, since the US's Pacific Northwest and large parts of Canada are practically indistinguishable.

    I can certainly see where the welcoming-but-keeping-at-arms-length attitude towards foreigners makes it difficult for anybody wanting to actually move to Japan, but anecdotally many people do manage it. My old company had a large office in Japan (support/consulting positions rather than product, though, so I never looked into it myself) and I knew someone who leveraged that to switch from a typical engineer job at the US office to a role of some sort over in Japan, living and working for about four years in Tokyo. I should really ask him about his experience sometime, but at any rate, depending on your career there are certainly ways you could work out a job, even outside of working from home, if you were really dedicated to living in Japan.

    Mr Poltroon

    Posted

    Good lord. Do you have a diff between the original post I already read and this one, or do I have to get critted by your wall of text and die? Too late, I skimmed it and found (I hope) most of the important parts...

    Anyway, some thoughts:

    Quote

    beach episode ... out of left field ... nevertheless appreciated

    The beach episode was bizarre in both how unexpected it was and how good it was. Gahkthun's is quite possibly the only beach episode I've ever enjoyed.

     

    Regarding Émilie's chapter (by the way - she's Émilie, not Émile - isn't Émile a guy's name?):

    Quote

    This is the point in the VN where I liked Neon the most, a girl who is perceptive with others' emotions, and believes in her friends through it all.

    Yes. Definitely yes. Neon is neither mentally nor physically strong, but she still had a handful of moments where she really came through and was, well, radiant - this was the best of them for me.

     

    Quote

    Meeting all the people you've seen over the course of this VN, if only for the briefest of moments, to the sound of epic music, was epic in and of itself.

    For me, that scene was the moment where all the tumblers clicked into place and the VN truly shone. I can't stop going over that experience in my mind, over and over again, walking through the characters and their support. It was absolutely glorious.

     

    Glad you enjoyed it! Sorry about your head.

    Darbury

    Posted

    I'm quite sympathetic to the "eating cheese in public" point, but to such an extent that I find myself self-conscious about eating any cheese in public, not just the particularly pungent unpasteurized variety. Maybe I'm just self-conscious, but even pasteurized cheese (whether a traditionally pasteurized variety, or a variety that is pasteurized just to get broader appeal in the US) is still something I only really want to enjoy in privacy, for fear of being That Guy. Some other things are fine for consumption while on a bus or a plane or what have you, but I usually steer clear of any kind of imported cheese.

    Darbury

    Posted

    The blog post makes some great points that I hadn't considered before, especially the importance of setting for this decision. And the presence or lack of voice acting is also clearly important - when I can hear the honorifics, it's probably going to bother me a little bit if they're not there (though just a very little bit). If it's not voiced, I really won't care at all.

    However, one thought: you can, in theory, avoid the choice altogether by providing both options and a configuration switch. If I recall correctly, the US MariMite DVD release subtitles actually have exactly this choice (subtitles with honorifics, or without). You're still left choosing a default, but there is an obvious answer there: optimize for the people who don't even understand the concept by stripping honorifics out, and to satisfy the people who will know and be upset if honorifics aren't there, tell them they can enable it.

    That said, I'm well aware that this idea is likely to be laughed out of the room due to the high costs it incurs (I expect, to some extent, you'd end up editing and QAing two scripts, which would obviously suck), but nonetheless, you do have the option to make both sides happy by providing a choice. This is somewhat of a false dilemma.

    Darbury

    Posted

    One thing I didn't see addressed: with what you know now, what would you have done differently? The two choices I see are:

    - accept that this is the character's catchphrase, and stick with always using a consistent translation, but maybe change that one word (and maybe in that universe we'd be looking at a blog post about your "unfair" translation)

    - given that seeing any single word repeated to that extent is going to be too jarring for English readers (apparently more so than for Japanese readers), use contextually-appropriate word choices instead

    From the perspective of an English reader with poor, but non-zero, Japanese comprehension, I'd probably favor the former approach, but I expect the preference is heavily audience-dependent. If you assume a completely non-Japanese-speaking audience, the latter makes much more sense, but the audience for a VN translation probably leans towards people with a modicum of Japanese comprehension, who will be listening to the Japanese voice acting and mentally judging you. Compounding the problem here, I expect, is the Japanese tendency to use adjectives as entire statements; this is going to lead to a strange experience for English readers, regardless of the translation choice for that one word, unless you take substantial liberties with the translation. I haven't read KoiRizo (yet), so maybe that angle is nicely addressed already, but it certainly seems problematic, given the more literal translation which is common with fan translations.

    Anyway, given your newly-endowed benefit of hindsight, how would you approach this tricky dilemma if you were facing it now?

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