I laughed harder at this than I should have. 
And man, looking at your pictures makes me want to go around and see what dead Gameboy batteries I have. I replaced my Pokemon yellow/crystal/sapphire batteries some years ago, and it was a lot of fun to learn how to do so.
took a little break from okami to let srs do its magic, but back to it. Really appreciate the ferocity with which dogs wag their tails everywhere in this game, your character included
I did get a bit lost today and looked up a guide (in japanese! trying to be better about this when looking up info on games n stuff when I get stuck) for one section, and once I saw the solution I remembered that I’d also gotten stuck here in english, so I don’t think it was a language issue 
There’s usually pretty good indicators for what you’re supposed to do for these puzzles and they’re pretty straightforward or give you forced camera angles or big flashing indicators for what you should be doing, but for some reason this one just gave you like no real in-game hints.
There’s a sparrow gang who wont let you into their area because the boss’s daughter is missing, and they don’t know where she is, but you know that you need to enter to rescue one of the guardian dogs of a nearby town, so clearly this is a now problem and not a come back later problem.
Relatively close to that area, there is a broken down house with a knife wielding old 舌切りババ , and if you go up around the back side you can use a bomb to enter through a boarded up hole in the roof. After you fall in, issun tells you that the hole will let moonlight in, and maybe you can do something with that. So I came back at night, looked around, but nothing obvious stood out in the room. Assumed that I needed another item or ability and left.
Turns out you have to drag 舌切りババ into the moonlight to reveal her true form, then slay the demons and rescue the sparrow to gain access to the area they are in. But the knife doesn’t like obviously glitter in the room or anything, and being able to drag people around has only been for lil gags up to this point not a main mechanic in anything.
Now, after the fact and trying to figure out if this was some story I was missing out on, a lot of this information comes together nicely in Shita-kiri Suzume - Wikipedia. If you know the story, it’d be obvious that if you walk past the evil knife woman house and then walk up to the sparrow gang headquarters and they say their daughter is missing to go “oh, duh, it’s playing on 舌切り雀” and then know where she was.
But even then I made it as far as that knowledge would have taken me, and still didn’t solve the rest of it on my own so 
Treating it as a learning experience, more struggling = more learning, or something 
Ah, now you’re making me want to play the game again; it’s such a pretty game to look at…
You’re really making me feel like I need to finally play this game, with all these screenshots lol
It’s great! But also really frustrating when you just need/want quick information. Sorta like reading JP series blurbs first, instead of English on here (which I’ve been doing more lately, but still not 100%)
yeessss… yeeeesss… the plan is working
It’s genuinely just a treat to play: the visuals are great, the music is fantastic, the gameplay is slick, and it’s filled with so much comedy that it’s hard for me to ever get frustrated by it. For every hard line that scrambles my brain there might be a super funny gag in the very next one to immediately relieve that stress. if I were enjoying it less there’s no way I’d be able to put up with this for so long
Hmmm, I wonder if I’ll be alright without a checkable translation here… In any case, who knows when I’ll even get to playing it. Probably not soon, but it’s gone up in my preference list, at this point
I’ve noticed that even though (or maybe because) it’s using a lot of hard language, it likes to do the nintendo thing where they will color code important information for progression in the text, and then will generally repeat that once or twice in some way. The game is also generally pretty linear so it’s a bit hard to get lost (except here, with a backtracking section, apparently )
Language-wise I haven’t really bothered but there’s plenty of english longplays of the full game to search through if there’s any lines that are like really giving you trouble, but I haven’t actually done any compare/contrast english vs japanese to see how closely things stick
mhmhm exactly! It takes a lot of restraint to not go the easy way and just let my eyes scan an entire english page in 2 seconds for the solution, but gotta start building that scanning ability in japanese somehow, even if it puts a bigger time restraint on getting the knowledge that I actually want to get
Also now realizing one of my parallel readers with folklore actually contains this story, and if i’d read it like a good boy then I would know this already, but that is neither here nor there
Ahh, I mostly meant the sentences, not gameplay. But good to know
I hate that kind of searching. I’ll just make an オオカミ post on the forums here, if it comes to that. But noted.
I know that story! I read it in the…
… Oh, you got there.
Trying to kinda space out my okami and 86 stuff to not overwhelm myself with flashcards.
Played quite a bit more since last update, and finished the first major story arc! I’d guess I’m about 40% of the way through the game at around 17 hours. Reading has largely sped up, but there are two sections left that I’m quite worried about the difficulty of the language for: the western capital, which I assume will have a lot of court-speak, and the snowy northern village of カムイ, which just from looking at the guide headers I know is mostly going to be in katakana and might actually include some アイヌ語 vocab
My initial estimate of ~50 hours is probably going to be about right. I’m not sure if I wanna go for 100% achievements on this run or not, but I do at least want to get all 100 はぐれ球 using the guides on that site. Getting all 100 gets you a special weapon on ng+ that makes some of the annoying achievements a lot easier to get when I eventually come back to the game, and I didn’t do it on my english play-through for the steam version.
Played to about my new word count in okami today, but still felt like reading more, so picked up a series on my ptr shelf and figured I would try it out. Did not anticipate reading the whole volume at once though! This is not at all what I was expecting, and I’m really enjoying it! (aside from one thing that is extremely gratuitous if it doesn’t end up being plot related, but it seems like it might) 25 seems about right, got some real vernacular-y speech from the main guy written as it’s spoken that I’d feel bad rating much lower, but it felt super smooth to read, even with some of the kinda non-sequitur events.
This isn’t even a “I’ll read more of this eventually 
” type thing like I do with a lot of vol 1s, like, I’m going to keep reading this tomorrow
I thought I recognized the art style! That’s from the mangaka of 恋は雨上がりのように 1 | L25, which is one of my faves. 
That one is surely good as well! Keep us posted
Well… I said that, and I do have volume 2 open on my computer, but I got sucked down the pixiv rabbit hole tonight reading just a ton of these cute lil hololive comics from ギユー GiYou@ホロクル_C-20's manga - pixiv. cannot imagine these have any real appeal to non hololive fans, but for me tonight they are sweet sweet candy. Lots of cute lil フブミオ日常生活 shorts. I ended up loosely translating a handful of ones for a discord I’m in as well, since there’s a lot of fubumio fans there who don’t speak japanese, and none of them could taste the sweet nectar I was sharing on their own
Played some more okami and got to the first of the dreaded areas and decided to save that for a fresh day tomorrow, just in case Tonight was a lot of exploring the new larger area, and then picking up a few new skills from the 武術 trainer
Finally happened tonight! My japanese file passed my english file in play time
(1 is english playthrough, 2 is eng ng+, 3 is a test read from a few years ago when I decided this game was way too hard, and 4 is the current file)
Made it through the area I was scared of with pretty minimal new hard stuff, although when I first entered everyone was talking with 某 and 拙者 and I got kinda scared There might still be some fun speech later in the story bits here as it’s wrapping up this area after the dungeon, but I’m pretty sure that puts me over 50% now!
Still pluggin away, but one little milestone and one very funny thing today:
I broke 1000 cards in my mining deck! By stats it looks like about 600 of those are from since I started playing okami, although there’s a few days where some other random words from other things snuck in. That’s still a lot of words!
I can’t remember if I mentioned this on these forums or not, but I am actually not an anki-enjoyer. I strongly dislike the huge focus on SRS that a lot of the learning community and especially the new learner community has. But, here, for me, at the level of japanese I’m at and the kinds of things I’m trying to read, I cannot deny that it’s been helpful. I am pretty selective about cards I add to this deck and I’m very liberal with suspending cards once they hit a particular stage of me going “yeah I’m just not gonna remember this”. I also do not test readings, I put them on the front of my cards. Between seeing the readings on the front of the card and then playing audio for most cards, I get plenty of reading practice, but still only test myself on meaning.
Second was… Heart Sutra jumpscare!
The game was building up to a fight so I was getting ready for that, and then was just completely blindsided by a wall of impenetrable buddhism language I had to take a minute to just refocus my eyes because they kept just sliding off everything happening here
I did go find a modern translation/explanation of this section after the fight, though: 般若心経の意味とは？全文とわかりやすい現代語訳。唱えるとどのような効果があるの？
I had been kinda cruising through the game recently, not running into a whole lot of really hard stuff, but this stopped me dead in my tracks, completely dumbfounded for a minute or two, knowing what it probably was, but being just totally unable to parse anything that was happening in front of me
I’ve been on break from hard stuff that I want to make flashcards from for a few days while waiting for my anki reviews to go down, and was kinda hopping around 朝日新聞 articles looking for something interesting to read:
Ended up reading this one about the increasing popularity of onigiri in japan, and it included this quote:
30～35種類のおにぎりを1個100～300円台で展開するコンビニ大手3社の売りは、「高品質の商品から経済的な商品までそろう『松竹梅』の価格戦略」（セブン＆アイ・ホールディングス広報
I’m not sure how ubiquitous 松竹梅 is supposed to be, but the only place that I know it from is the ranking scheme in okami
You are graded on various parts of your battles, and then get overall grades for several categories at the end of the game that are on a scale of 凡 < 梅 < 竹 < 松 < 神
Then also was watching one of the new holomembers play 漢字でGO！last night (in her debut she said she was really bad with kanji, so why she chose to play a difficult kanji trivia game for her first stream I do not know) and saw 勾玉 come up!
So the kinds of things I’m learning from okami do show up in the wild sometimes, just in maybe some kinda weird ways more connections! learning!
I see it maybe once or twice a year? I saw it in some article a couple years back and it’s been stalking me ever since 
I just learned about that It is called the “three winter friends” or something and was a popular design for porcelaine bowls etc. back in the day (in Japan and China iirc). In that context I learned about the grading system 
EDIT: Here you can see some vases and bowls painted in that style: 松竹梅 kakiemon - Google Search
I’ll also provide a point of data and say that I see it once in a while. Recently, I saw it used in the name of sets at a restaurant. I didn’t remember the order, but the price difference told me all I needed to know. 
I also remember side characters (3 sisters, specifically) being named after that, but I can’t remember exactly what it was. Probably かくりよの宿飯 あやかしお宿に嫁入りします。 | L32
So many good new data points for 松竹梅! I tried looking for more last night and found a blog talking about camera model tiers that used it, but it seemed like kind of a one-off thing and not an industry standard.
I decided to open up the first volume of 狼と香辛料 today and do a test read, and wow I even underestimated the number of shared words these two things would have! I wouldn’t call it an easy read still, I was pretty slow and there were a couple moments of lawrence doing some wry internal calculation that tripped me up, but I managed to read 10 pages of it without too much exertion. The first section here also wasn’t in the anime, so I’m not even getting a comprehension bonus from already knowing what’s happening! I could definitely sit down and read this now, but think I’ll still be saving it for after I finish okami.
Last year around this time, my test reads for books were like 2-3 pages, so also nice to see some improvement on that front I’d been considering picking up とらドラ！volume 2 next month to do a comparison read, and might still do that too. My focus has been mostly on listening this year, but it seems like my overall reading ability was also slowly creeping up in the background
