Week 2 of マルコと銀河竜 ✨🐉

Japanese Reading Book Clubs
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marco
marco1200×675 91.7 KB

Week 2 September 30 2023
Character count ~18856 characters
Stopping point CG image percentage 34%
Stopping point description Sakurako character screen
Previous week Week 1
Next week Week 3
Home Thread Home thread for マルコと銀河竜 :sparkles::dragon:

We’re playing this VN as part of the Visual Novel Reading Club.

This week's end screen

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IMG_06071280×720 207 KB

How to see your current CG image percentage
  1. Go back to the title menu (via settings window “TITLE MENU” or via File->Back To Title on Steam in windowed mode). No need to save, you can easily continue.
  2. Click on “Extras”.
  3. Click on “CG Mode”.
  4. At the bottom you can find the “Acquisition rate”. This is the total amount of CG images you’ve seen, completely unrelated to the current save file.

Discussion Guidelines

  • Please blur / hide any major events in the current week’s portion (however early they occur), like so: text here (that’s: [spoiler]text here[/spoiler]).
  • Don’t hestitate to ask questions! I know that some of you might be feeling shy, or don’t want to bother others with their questions, but you don’t have to worry: People love answering questions. You’re making the thread more lively, and you’re also helping anyone who has the same questions. So please, ask a lot of them!
  • Join the conversation — it’s fun!

Participation Poll

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m planning to catch up later
  • I’m skipping this VN
  • The club has already finished, and I’m reading this VN now
0 voters
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This week’s reading is slightly over 17k characters. (not including the “movies” because I don’t get subtitles for them.)
image

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Whew, that was pretty long. Including the movie sequences I got 18856 characters! Which means we’re at 31% (if they included the movie sequences in the total count… and if not, somewhere at 29% I guess), so we’re closer to being back on track :slight_smile:

Story comments

Man, this story… There’s suddenly a huge space creature out to eat the earth! And since this place has such nice croquettes, I can’t let it be ruined… still not signing up for kill it though! Apparently it might have treasure though, and the meat is super delicious? Let’s talk a bit about how we’d prepare it!

I actually laughed out loud a few times during this week’s part (mostly at Tera-involved shenanigans; her whole introduction sequence was especially good), but my favourite moment was probably:

The musical choice there was just perfect.

Translation side note:
Marco: クソどうでもいいレベルで、お気の毒っすな
Translated as: I’m sorry to hear that.
…I think this translation is missing a few, uh, nuances.

Also… I wonder if some of those CGs are going to be used again, or if “futuristic arcade” was produced to host like 5 lines, and “detailed ocean beach landscape” was just shown once for the “this town has nothing but ocean” joke and never again :laughing:

The movie this time was great again!

Story question

I’m not quite sure I quite followed what the plan was inside the Nudo. I guess at first they wanted to blow it up from the inside (wow), then the detonator got knocked off into the acid… and then Arco decided that the cancer will take care of killing the Nudo? But since the cancer was carried off, they followed it (assumedly to make it sure it stayed alive so it can kill the Nudo? Although Marco seemed to take pity on it, so maybe it was that?), and in the process they discovered and killed the parasites instead. Problem solved.

Is that about it? I’m just a bit confused because trying to use the cancer to kill the Nudo seems like a pretty… slow method to solve a very immediate problem.

Japanese questions

What’s the 代わりに adding to this sentence? Is it just as jokingly “to balance things out”? (Joking because the commerical is just showing more of Tera’s bad sides, so more of the same as earlier.)

What’s the verbだけverb?

The Handbook of Japanese Grammar has verbだけverb[te-form], which means “someone is doing one thing, but not another thing that s/he should be doing”, which possibly kind of fits (not sure about the “not another thing they should be doing” though) - but the second verb is not in te-form here, making me wonder if it’s some other specific grammar point that I haven’t found yet.

Also I discovered that in the Steam version you can point to the lower right corner during movies and you get playback controls!

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I don’t remember the context but without it I would think that she “recieved” something and now is offering to show another CM as “payment”. (i.e. “In return for you doing this, I will do this.”) Does that make sense in context?

I have only ever encountered this construct with the potential form where it then means “as much as possible”. e.g. 飲めるだけ飲む… but here we don’t have the potential form. I did a quick search and apparently this use of だけ means “doing the verb to some (limited) extent” - so like “a little” or “a bit”. :thinking:

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@Legato @Biblio
Attributive form + だけ vs potential form + だけ: grammar - だけ between two verbs / second verb performing an action on だけ construction - Japanese Language Stack Exchange

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I’m tapping out… This is good for language learning, but story and character-wise it’s way too all over the place for me/ just not vibing. Hope everyone else enjoys tho, and looking forward to whatever comes next!

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Hmm, I don’t think it does, since nobody did anything for her (or even interacted with her) before she says that. I’ll have to check when I get back to my PC on Monday!

Re: だけ:

So it would be something like “Naming themselves a tourist attraction failed. The current state is that whatever lifeform (visits), they just destroy a little”? That seems weirdly considerate of them.

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And we’re off to week 3!

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I checked the context and what’s happening is that テラ doesn’t want to do a self-intro because she like the sun needs no introduction :upside_down_face:, so 瑠璃 is showing a CM on her behalf instead.

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Ah, that makes sense! Thanks!

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