June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Language

[prfsnl_gmr]

Who else is playing translated games?!

Tonight, I knocked out Spartan X-2 (Famicom). It is a Japan-exclusive sequel to the Famicom port of Kung Fu Master (which was titled Spartan X in Japan to capitalize on the popularity of a pretty rad Jackie Chan movie...despite no actual similarity to the movie). It controls a lot like Kung Fu, you press A to punch, B to kick, and up to jump. The controls are generally fine, and Irem even added an uppercut special move, but the hits lack the crisp “pop” found in its predecessor. The levels and enemies are much more varied than in Kung Fu, however, and the sprite work and Ninja Gaiden-style cut scenes all look great (for the Famicom). The translation is also solid, and unlike Spartan X, the story in Spartan X-2 plays out much more like a Jackie Chan “super cop” film. Recommended.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Skipped Vigilante, eh?

I haven't squeezed much game time in lately. I flew through Xak III earlier, but now I'm just bumbling through Ys IV.

Really fantastic game. Actually the worst of the PCE titles though, but that's just a testament to how good the others are.

Having a fan dub is interesting. It's well-done, but inherently cheesy due to all the corny dialogue and characters with "spooky" evil voices. Thankfully, Adol never speaks.

[prfsnl_gmr]

How does Ys IV compare to the other Ys IV in your opinion? I mean to play both at some point.

Also...I wouldn’t say that I’ve skipped Vigilante. It’s still on my list, as I’ve (unfortunately) spent a bit of time with it. I just haven’t girded my loins for a playthrough yet...

I think I’m going to start up the Satteleview Legend of Zelda games tonight. They’re real historical oddities, and it was a gargantuan effort to find them, make them playable, and translate them. You can read about it here:

https://kotaku.com/fans-translate-rare- ... 1787933007

I really respect that effort, and I think Nintendo, who completely ignored these games, should recognize it by releasing these games officially to the public for free.

[BoneSnapDeez]

The two Super Famicom Ys games (Mask of the Sun and Ys V) are decent enough action-RPGs but poor compared to other Ys titles.

Dawn of Ys on PCE is excellent. It's very similar to Book I & II, so perfect for folks who didn't like the third game.

I have a BS Zelda repro cart. Gave it a shot a few years ago. Pretty fun, but as I recall there was a time limit aspect I found annoying.

[MrPopo]

I'm rolling up to the end of Scenario 3, though I still have a fair amount of gameplay ahead of me. I'm three battles out from reuniting all three forces for the climactic final battle, but at that point I'll need to do some grinding to get the other two forces at the level they need to be. The other two scenarios end with the force in the low to mid teens post-promote. Scenario 3 has you get a second promotion at level 20 promoted and you'll be in single digit levels once you get the other two forces. So that's a fair number of levels I need to get. Fortunately, this and the other games (which had you use a secondary force that included people you hadn't leveled) have the Hero's Challenge dungeon specifically designed for this sort of grinding. The bonus for the Scenario 3 is beating it gives you the best weapons for each of your three protagonists, so you're going for more of a reward than just "I need levels".

[pierrot]

Panzer Dragoon Mini has a story? That could be fan translated, and actually was? This is the craziest thing I've heard all day. I must have blocked out story from the PTSD.



I played a bit more Policenauts, but I'm not really enjoying it. It's painfully boring. That may partly be my own fault for actually choosing to talk with everyone multiple times on all of the different options, and searching rooms for things that prompt dialogue, instead of just immediately doing whatever would give me the flag to proceed to the next flag. There's still a real issue with the timeline here. I happened to let the game sit at the title screen long enough for the "trailer" for the game to start playing, and in that video, it says that Jonathan was frozen for 25 years, and hadn't seen Lorain in 28 years. With nine months for a typical gestation period, that girl is Jonathan's daughter, dammit.

There's also this weird stuff with the APs, where they were made using the sperm of astronauts; so some of them could theoretically be Jothan's "children," too. I'm really not seeing the appeal of this game, so far. It's also pretty obnoxious how much of the script is what I'll call "dual words." In Japanese, kanji can at times be given sort of arbitrary secondary pronunciations. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the title for the game series, Harukanaru Toki no Naka de. 'Toki' would normally be written as 時, but in the game's title, it's actually, 時空, which would normally be read as 'jikuu,' which is obviously space-time. So in Policenauts, Kojima is doing this by attaching all kinds of English words as the readings for the characters, and in the spoken dialogue, they bounce between pronouncing the word as it would be in Japanese and using the English 'pronunciation.' For instance, the Earth ('chikyuu' in Japanese) is typically called "home." It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but I just find it to be unreasonably common for something that serves no real purpose other than to unnecessarily complicate the dialogue.

[MrPopo]

Kojima unnecessarily complicating something in one of his games? Say it isn't so.

[pierrot]

I know, right? There was no way anyone could possibly see that coming.

[prfsnl_gmr]

@pierrot

Nope. No story. Not much of a translation, unless you count the end8ng “congraturations!” screen. Still, though, it wasn’t released outside of America, and I thought it’d be fun to play this month. (Boy, was I wrong! )

EDIT: I made it through the first episode of The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets tonight. It is a timed, remixed version of A Link to the Past with a smaller map (i.e., NE Hyrule) and real-time events. (Princess Zelda got attacked by monsters when I was about 1/2 way through the second dungeon. I had to book it out of there, rescue her, get back to the dungeon, and get the second stone tablet before I ran out of time.) The game is, so far, very interesting. The real-time events make it feel a bit like Majora’s Mask, but the timed, “get as much loot as possible as quickly as possible” makes the game feel a lot more like Four Swords. Looking forward to the second episode, which places me in NW Hyrule.

[Nemoide]

Unlike pierrot, I'm TOTALLY digging Policenauts.

The fact that it's a pastiche of things I like (80s cop movies, 90s anime, "real robot" anime) is a large portion of what's making it click. Some folks might look at a character like Tony Redwood and roll your eyes saying "well, he's super-obviously a bad guy" but I'm totally on board with it. It feels so COOL. I'm taking my time, reading lots of the glossary entries, trying to click on as many things as I can etc. So the central conflict hasn't yet revealed itself, although I think I have a pretty clear idea about who's good, who's bad, and how certain things are going to go down.
Even with the problematic stuff, like from a critical standpoint, it probably wasn't a great choice to let you touch ladies' boobs to show a bounce animation... I'm rolling with it.

I don't really feel qualified to comment on the translation as my Japanese skills are pretty poor. Every once in a while I'll think "hey, that's not what they said" but then I'll think about it and understand why they picked that.

I wish I had more time to play. Hopefully I'll be able to sink some time in during the next couple of days.