Well it would be nice to get that one and even Haruka over I would as I said prefer Sekai greatly… But I would buy both… as for butlers … I am not so sure I would be adding that to my collection very quickly as it doesnt seem entirely my ‘thing’
However I would hope its not a 3 year wait … but 3 years is better then never I suppose.
Well this thread is already about a year old anyways.
I’m playing Haruka right now, and I think it’d be a good game to bring over. It’s giving me a much better vibe than PW (the story actually branches off early on and there’s character development!), but I haven’t finished it, so I can’t comment on it that much. My Japanese reading speed is so slow that it’s going to take a while. :lol:
By the way Narg, if you read this, you have an error in your review. The dorm choices for which girls you can get are opposite of what you wrote.
Well, I finally finished one path of Haruka since I was busy with school and my Japanese reading speed isn’t the fastest. :lol: I can’t believe it’s by the same company that made Princess Waltz. It’s orders of magnitude better than PW since it actually has good character development and it didn’t try to tack on sex scenes and character paths for the sake of having them. The relationships (at least in the path I played) are developed over a long period of time, and unlike a lot of even story-based games released in English, you don’t suddenly wonder why they’re having sex. The game isn’t original (neither is PW), but it’s enjoyable because it’s so well done. However, like PW, I didn’t find its comedy that funny.
I’d buy the English version if it came out here to have it uncensored, though I doubt I’ll play it again. It’s quite a long game, and judging from the path I played, there’s not much overlap among the character paths.
So my vote remains for Haruka and Bullet Butlers (though I don’t know much about BB, but it looks interesting).
Thanks. I’ll get it fixed.
Blaspheme. The antics of Misaki and Miyabi are hilarious. 
Whose arc did you follow? Girls of Misaki’s dorm are much more interconnected than the other, and share the same initial scenario. However I’m not too sure what you mean by overlapping… there’s interaction between the cast, although heavily restricted towards the dorm occupants. Also each girl eventually has her own unique arc - its not like PW, where 90% is the same for everyone - which I think is a plus, not a disadvantage. Isn’t that the point of different arcs, thus encouraging replay (i.e. it’s a different tale each playthrough)?
I found some parts to be amusing, but it was never laugh out loud funny for me, but then not many things are. I guess it’s not easy to make me laugh.
I played Miyabi’s route. By overlapping, I meant it didn’t seem like there was much shared content among the arcs, which means the game is long. And since I’m behind on enough stuff as it is, I wouldn’t have time to replay it since it’s so long. But it’s definitely a good thing since replaying the game won’t feel like a chore (unlike PW).
Is Miaybi’s route the most independent? It seems like it is since the other winnable girls were barely in her arc. I didn’t see Sumika at all and Yuuna only once briefly after getting her arc. It must have been because her arc depended on only a few choices that happened early on. Hm… now I want to go back and play Sumika’s route. I don’t know if I’ll bother going through all the routes since the game takes so long for me to play since it’s a kanji rapefest. Especially when Lida speaks. I just have to listen to her instead of reading it. :lol:
Yes, pretty much.
Whaaaaaaat? Haruka ni Aogi is not a kanji rapefest! Damn, we need to get you playing some games that are kanji rapefests. I’ve heard Ignosco’s been having fun with Mugen Kairou… =P
EDIT: no->ni >_>
It is compared to anything I’ve read before. I guess I’m just not used to more polite Japanese since almost everything I read is extremely casual. I tend to avoid things that look like a kanji rapefest.
I think I’m going to move to the opposite end of the spectrum and play something easy, like Quartett. It’s been sitting around for a while.
I know I don’t really have any room to comment seeing as how I haven’t even played one untranslated title yet, but isn’t it a good thing to challenge yourself with titles with lots of kanji? It might take longer, but don’t you learn more? I don’t know about anyone else here, but I consider these games as a kind of self study, even the translated ones (as listening comprehension, which is fun when you encounter bits you don’t agree with and wonder what the hell the translator was thinking). In fact, as I’ve stated in a couple of other threads already, I’m planning on taking on my first untranslated title (which I’m thinking will be Yosuga no Sora right now) after this semester of Japanese I’m currently in, partly as one way to keep up my skills over the summer break. The only untranslated works I currently truly shudder to even think of attempting to play are written by Nasu (Tsukihime, Fate series). I’m not planning on trying to take on anything like that until some years later after I’ve passed the highest level JLPT.
Well, while it can be good to throw yourself in the deep end every once in a while, it’s not necessarily good to try and ruin your ambition by making your first eroge something like Saihate no Ima or 3days. That said, I don’t consider Haruka ni Aogi to be anything like either of those.
And, yes, I consider VNs to be a method (although not necessarily optimal) of learning Japanese. In fact, VNs are the only Japanese education I have ever had.
That your only education in Japanese is from playing these games is interesting. While I don’t doubt that you have learned from these games, I’d be curious to know how well you do in various areas of the language. For instance, I imagine that your listening comprehension and reading ability are at the very least decent, if not good or excellent, but I wonder how well you can write and converse. After all, phrases such as ??? have extremely limited use. :lol:
Actually, that should only work for a person in question has a photographic memory.
People whose memory can’t pick up huge amounts of information instantly and make them at the same time directly useable would find themselves looking up the same kanjis again and again and again and note quickly that they make small or even no progress in the story/text - which would lead to frustration and most likely quitting.
At least, it worked for me best when I first played a game that was not at all geared to an adult audience (in my case: “Galaxy Angel”): it still contained iots fair share of kanjis, but most of them wree used repeatedly and could sometimes even assigned to particular characters.
Actually, I might have been particulary lucky because the characters in this game use different levels of speech and thus also different complexity of kanjis in their language: Millefeulle uses rather simple kanjis in her speech, while Minto’s over-polite manner of speaking is loaded with keigo-kanji.
Before that, I only played games geared to a mature audience - and I usually only barely could make sense of the sentences that I read there - mostly guessing from the voice-acted passages of the female characters. But after I build a foundation by playing though “Galaxy Angel”, games that I played before got quite a new appeal for me. I currently plan to start playing “Dokusen”, “Utsukushii Hime” and “Kairaku” from start again - this time really understanding what I am doing and not just trying my options after saving and later reloading when I realize that I made a wrong decision.
Maybe, I even go again for “Haitoku”, though I really hate the way its system works: forcing the player to play through all bad endings before the good and best ones even become available!
Though I think that I might rather replay “Darkcrows” instead - or “Brightia” - or “Deep Fantasy” …
Yes, Mugen Kairou is definitely a ‘fun’ and challenging read in places. The main things that have made it difficult are: 1. Written entirely in 1st person 2. Very detailed descriptions 3. Deliberately vague and/or philosophical passages 4. Very large vocabulary and a kanji-rapefest in places (although there have only been a few that I haven’t encountered before). Granted, the ??? (the term used for the ‘training/breaking’ sections in the game) segments are mostly very straightforward, but for me, they aren’t really what the game’s about. On the whole though, it’s probably an easier read than G-Senjou no Maou. I can see why people might hate this game and consider it as inferior to everything else Black Cyc had done, but that’s a topic for a different time + thread.
Like Lancer-X, my only real source of Japanese education has been via VNs. As a result, I’ve focused exclusively on learning how to read Japanese, and so I started by learning how to recognise/write around 2050 kanji with a rough idea of what each meant (but I didn’t learn any readings at this stage) before I learnt any vocabulary (I did pick up some words along the way of course) or grammar. After that, I started learning vocabulary etc. in the context of sentences and whilst continuing to increase the number of kanji I can recognise. I started playing G-Senjou no Maou after I’d been learning for around 10 months or so. It certainly wasn’t an easy read and although there were a few passages that I wasn’t able to understand at all, I was able to finish and enjoy it (there were a lot of words that I didn’t bother looking up whilst playing though, as their meaning was either clear from the kanji they were formed from, or from the context of the story). This learning method might not work for everyone, as I don’t have any reason to speak or write Japanese at the moment, so at this stage, I’m just focusing on what I want to learn.
Anyway, this thread has kind of gone off topic.
Yeah, I got tired of learning Japanese slowly in school, so I decided to throw myself into the deep end. I made a decision to only consume Japanese media in Japanese now (and trying to lower English media consumption), so I have to force myself to learn. I’m also buying a bunch of things in Japanese so I also have a financial motivation to learn, so I don’t waste my money (not like that works for me since I have 50+ English games left unplayed :lol: ). I’m probably going to make another eroge purchase tomorrow, so any recommendations are welcome.
And you don’t really need a photographic memory to learn from reading. You can just use some flashcard program and write sentences with new vocab/compounds/grammar and review them. You should be able to learn that way since the repetition should cement it in your mind. Honestly, I could probably learn written Japanese 5x faster that way than in class since I can go at my own pace and I’m not forced to write horrible Japanese.
Thankfully this isn’t an issue at all. You see, I never wanted to learn Japanese. I still don’t want to learn Japanese, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to learn Japanese.
I just wanted to play VNs. Yes, that requires learning a sizable subset of Japanese, but the main thing was that because I don’t want to learn Japanese I’ve never studied it, only played VNs. Learning more of the language would likely require study - which I don’t want to do =P
I keep thinking about how exactly someone would go about learning Japanese through these games without formally learning some important subtleties in Japanese grammar that can really influence meaning, but can’t seem to wrap my head around it. I don’t suppose any of you who has done such a thing can explain how you did such a thing, can you?
Well, they obviously haven’t been my ONLY reference - I mean, that’s totally impossible. You can’t feasibly learn kanji if you never know what they mean, for one thing. I’ve historically made very heavy use of dictionaries and various other materials to use as a grammar reference. I use dictionaries/references much less nowadays, as I only need to look things up occasionally.
It is worth considering that I play a wide variety of eroges, and they make up the vast majority of the reading I do (I read far more Japanese than English). What sort of subtleties were you thinking of, anyhow?
I’m starting to get sleepy, however I can still think of one good example. The best way I can think for us to do this is if I give you something to translate, and then I will make any corrections if needed. So, I’m going to give you two simple sentences from a dialogue, and I’d like you to tell me how you would translate them, along with any subtleties you can pick out from the sentence. Then, if there is anything missing from your translation and subtleties, I’ll tell you what is missing.
In ultra-literal mode:
Nakagawa-san: Are you free?
Yamamoto-san: Yes, free until 10 o’clock.
I’m sorry, but I don’t really see anything worth noting as far as subtleties go. No matter how many times I look at it, I can’t see anything beyond an incredibly trivial exchange (actor 1 asks actor 2 if he presently has free time. actor 2 replies that he does have free time until 10 o’clock), so yeah, I guess I fail. While my highly unorthodox method of learning the language may not be perfect for getting every last scrap of wordplay out of a sentence, it usually ends up being sufficient for what I use it for. Post the answer, please.
(For bonus points, though, translate the rest of their conversation, noting any subtleties in the text)
I admit, the exchange is quite trivial, but then again, I am only a Japanese II student currently. Perhaps you’d care for something more complex from the dialogue I’m writing for my class tomorrow? Anyways, on to the subtleties of my simple exchange, since the translation if fine. First off, since Nakagawa used ?/? in his construction of the sentence, we know a few things about what he is thinking. That being, that beyond wondering if Yamamoto is free, he also is curious as to the reason Yamamoto is free (?/? requests that the listener explain when used in a question). Also, in his asking in that form, we know that he already is assuming that Yamamoto is free. The reason we know this is that he wouldn’t be asking Yamamoto to explain if he didn’t already think Yamamoto was free. As for Yamamoto, there really isn’t that much of subtlety. Yamamoto’s use of ?/? is mostly in response to Nakagawa using it in the construction of his sentence. Having ?/? in a statement is roughly like having “It is a fact that…” in an English sentence; thus in a translation that is overly cumbersome, it would be along the lines of “Yes, and the reason I’m free is that I don’t have anything I need to do until 10 o’clock.” being said.
As for what you wanted me to try and translate, I can only make out bits of it. As I’ve already stated, I’m only a Japanese II student currently, so there is much I still don’t know. From what I can make out with help from WWWJDIC, it sounds like I should apologize for coming across as condescending. That really wasn’t my intent; I’m just truly curious as to how much of the background information you are picking up. I wasn’t trying to imply I was superior because I’ve taken formal classes. So despite my intent, I say “???” to you.