Gotcha, I managed to find these pages, listing some of the キャラデザ’s projects: キャラクターデザイン：「RiRi」の女性向け恋愛ゲーム - otomex & イラストレーター別乙女ゲー紹介～RiRiさん編～: ついったーのまとめ
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Ah, looks like I know them from Piofiore. Thanks for the links!
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I found this amazing live stage アフレコ vid for a defunct game 消滅都市 (service ended in Feb, but I don’t think it had the VAs anyway)
Anyone have any idea if a full recording exists somewhere? Would be really great to find
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In あつ森 today I went on one plane tour—to a rainy bamboo island. I managed to catch 5 whole coelacanths! It took me two straight days of rain to catch my first one.
Pics or it didn’t happen
Final count:
・coelacanth - 5
・oarfish - 6
・barred knifejaw - 14
・giant trevally - 2
・red snapper - 9
I still have 3 rare fish available to me that I haven’t caught: golden trout, barreleye, and mahi-mahi. And the thing is, with the dock for the plane, I absolutely could have gotten a mahi-mahi, but nooo, all my luck had to be spent on the coelacanths. Well, I guess I’m only complaining a little bit.
I never asked Justin about his exclusive merch outside of the fishing tourney, and since Rex’ll make you a model of a bug if you give him 3 specimens of it, then Justin should do the same with fish, right? I’ll have to ask him next time he visits, since this means I absolutely have enough now…
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Played a bit of SAO Hollow Fragment, and SAO Alicization Lycoris… Was surprised how much easier the dialogue felt, compared to when I last played.
Hollow Fragment:
- Easy dialogue, hard mechanics and quest vocab
- Benefit is in the vast array of menu items/trees
- Great story, somewhat simplistic (but good) gameplay
- Scenes fully voiced except 主人公
- Can focus on the mechanics more this time
Alicization Lycoris
- Slightly harder sentences, less of in-world vocab
- Fully voiced, including 主人公
- More overall dialogue, less playtime necessary to get to new dialogue
- Runs poorly on my laptop
- Steely feels tedious sometimes
I should get back to the other two games tho. Am kinda wishing I had an actual PS Vita (or a laptop with a working screen lol) for the portability
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I forgot to post yesterday, but Justin visited! Man, if I’d known he’d come by literally the next day, I’d’a saved those fish to sell to him, but oh well. At least I’ll be getting a coelacanth model in the mail today!
It turns out, Rex makes the models for both the bugs and the fish. Though Justin said he usually makes models of bugs and stuff, so I wonder what else he makes… We probably don’t find out, huh.
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ヒラヒラヒヒル from a company that made -ATRI- and 徒花異譚. Works as a visual novel so far, but on a harder side.
Played STEINS;GATE and STEINS;GATE 比翼恋理のだーりん previously, but didn’t find myself wanting to play STEINS;GATE 0.
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Been playing Fallout: New Vegas, Battlefield 2 (2005) and Call of Duty (2003). Fallout: New Vegas has been in my backlog forever and I am about where I was when I did my first run 14 years ago.
Call of Duty 1 was a game I got very close to finishing when I played it but never beat it. I beat United Offensive (the expansion) funnily enough before finishing 1. haha
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I started playing Buddy Mission Bond this week! After watching some of Game Gengo’s videos on Youtube (especially the Switch tier list) I decided to finally get back into playing games in Japanese. This one is a mostly fully voice acted visual novel in a really cool comic book art style with character designs by Yusuke Murata. The art is the biggest draw for me but I also like that there are exploration and investigation elements that break up the game a bit. Only downside so far is that I’m feeling a little guilty about starting a new game instead of continuing any of the five games I’ve started and shelved for so long 
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I recently started playing “Little Kitty, Big City” on Switch. It doesn’t have furigana support but there is an option for full Japanese text. The game is relatively simple in terms of figuring things out (shows you objects you need as emoji as well as naming them etc) so could be fun to play for Japanese reading practice but you should be able to get the gist even if you don’t fully understand. You can also change the language mid play, so no reset required to change if the language is too much for you.
Some conversations are a bit long (several speech bubbles of text in a row from one side of the conversation). Not sure what roughly level it might be, possibly somewhere around N4/N3 maybe, with some obscure vocabulary used, like specific animal names or object names (there was a racoon and also a rhino beetle I came across as well as some crows in the first few hours of play).
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Still playing through New Vegas. The Dead Money DLC has been a real chore to get through. I’m 2/3 of the way finished though. Can’t wait to get back to Mojave proper T-T
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五等分の花嫁 game 2: Started back in on this . Not very far in, but enjoying it when I occasionally pick it up. It’s more linear, and you start out by picking your partner. Unlike the previous one, this one I’m actually interested to explore various characters’ routes, bc they seem like they will be meaningfully different. Unlike game 1 there’s no scheduling/tutoring mechanic, so it’s much simpler. Language level is comfortable, and I don’t mind the lookups.
SAO Integral Factor: Been playing a bit. The story is easy enough to understand. Even with a a lot of the vocab, I can piece together the meaning without knowing the words or readings super well. I haven’t had the energy to do lookups while reading, so there’s a lot of forgotten readings. Otoh the interface and player skill mechanics are pretty complex, linguistically and mechanically… So that’s definitely gonna be a slow climb.
While I’m reading SAO 28 now, a lot of the SAOIF vocab is specific to the initial Aincrad setting, so I’d really have to reread the Progressive novels to level up on that. Anyway the game is fun, tho not as fun as when I first started playing (at least 4-5 years ago probably)
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Started playing テイルズ オブ シンフォニア (GameCube JPN version) last night and it is going surprisingly well for me. It is one of my childhood favorite games and I played through the English version multiple times in my life.
It’s really cool to experience a story that I know by heart in it’s original language because I don’t have to worry about missing the plot. So I get to choose when it’s important to look words up and when I can just move on with almost no loss in overall comprehension.
I also notice a lot of little details in the language because I already know what the characters are feeling, like when a certain character has deeper reasons for choosing the word さよなら.
There is a lot of fantasy and religious vocabulary which is tough, but I am picking them up quickly because I know the English counterpart. Vocab like 神子, 人間牧場, and 救いの塔 are just clicking immediately in my brain.
On top of that, the cutscenes and character skits are voice acted so I am getting way more listening practice than I normally do!
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That sounds great!! I started Fate/Stay Night (again!!) recently. But Tales is on my “I should play this eventually” list
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Ah, I love Symphonia! Hope you have a great time with the game! Playing it in the original JP has been on my bucket list for a while… I guess there’s nothing holding me back now but time.
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I love the Fate series. But I have only watched Zero, Stay Night, UBW, and Heaven’s Feel with English subs because it was before learning any JP. I think it would be cool to check out the games someday. Hope you have fun with it!
Nice to see a fellow Symphonia fan! It’s such a good game.
It is really hard to make the time but I am in no rush so I just plan to chip away at it. Despite the language complexity, I am actually finding it more relaxing than my other immersion right now.
I have played a lot of the Tales series (Symphonia, Abyss, Vesperia, Graces F, Phantasia, and Eternia so far). At this point I want to try to play them all! The JPN exclusive games were next on my list but I decided to replay Symphonia until my language ability gets better.
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Ah, and by the way: I don’t know if you’ve checked out the Symphonia manga; it’s a shortened re-telling of the game. There isn’t really anything there I’d recommend to a fan of the game, unless you’re just really excited to see (some) key scenes in manga form, but I did really enjoy テイルズ・オブ・シンフォニア EXTRALOAD | L24, which is just bonus stories that explore some backstory and stuff the game talked about but never actually showed. I don’t know how canon they are, granted, but they are from the official manga, so they’re probably close enough.
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They’re really worth it… The characters (especially Shirou) are much more fleshed out, and less idiotic-seeming, and the magic/setting mechanics can be interesting in their own right. Heaven’s Feel arc especially wasn’t done justice by the movies. They’re also insanely difficult. Playing them side by side with the (new) official translation definitely helps!
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Are they worth reading if you’ve never played?
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Hmmm. I’m kind of a game purist in this regards and would leans towards ‘no’. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with them, but they’re going to tell a rushed story, and I feel like the experience would be worse overall. You could read the first volume to try to get a feel for the story, since it’s probably the least-compressed out of all of them, at least.
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