I really have no excuse, I have no idea how this -1 ended up there. Maybe a careless copy/paste…
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I couldn’t resist, I installed retroarch. Big thank you to @simias for going through the crt filters and making recommendations in the home thread! The PS1 startup sound and all the sound effects are so nostalgic. The blasting engine sound on save especially, I always thought it was weirdly intense compared to how other square games at the time handled it.
It seems a few here have played this before but don’t remember the plot. Not the case for me, I’ve played through the game fully at least a few times over the years and remember all the juicy stuff. I’ll be careful not to spoil anything!
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It stood out to me as well, alongside the intricate progress bar.
She would never.
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Done everything but talking with アルル. I’ll do that tomorrow along with testing combat a bit. I refuse to be late on week 1 of my own thread!
Can confirm–this works! Amazing, kid me didn’t have to save scum just use their brain. 
Honestly it hasn’t been too bad grammar wise, but I’m glad we have the scripts. My unofficial goal is to have ~75% of XG vocab I don’t know to advanced SRS levels by the time we’re done. I really need to improve the breadth of my vocab but it’s so painful. 
Also did anyone notice what some of the animals are called? They aren’t cows. クマギュウ. It’s a very ATLA situation I guess.
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@Daisoujou changed his avatar again.
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Didn’t notice it, but that seems to be a combination of くま bear and ぎゅう cow (e.g. 牛肉).
(you probably noticed that too. not sure what ATLA is)
That’s what I felt like a few months ago. Now that I’ve added a lot of vocab to Anki I didn’t know from playing through several games (I don’t add all unknown words, but those that are frequent or interesting), I feel like my breadth has improved a lot and it’s much rarer that I need to look up a word (unless it gets very technical, like Xenogears Opening). And I specifically see a lot of words from my Anki reviews again in games. So, it gets better 
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I felt too seen by the second protagonist in The Silver Case, who spends all day alternating using the computer and going to bed while complaining about the noise around his apartment.
Would appreciate if everyone can listen to this while reading my comments now.
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ATLA is avatar the last airbender. The animals are all like “turtleduck” and “squirrelfrog”.
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Finally made it. Although my plan to connect my laptop to my TV and couch game didn’t work (the sound was choppy over HDMI for whatever reason but fine through the speakers 
and I regularly use the same setup for connecting my iPad to the TV, so dunno).
Week 1
I completely zoned out for the FMV (I may go back for it with the script but I also may decide not to. It was pretty clear from the visuals what was going on). The lore dump took me so long I got exhausted by the end and stopped looking up words. If @simias’s translation was anything to go by, it was even boring in English 
We got started with the game and I remember exactly nothing about this. I know I didn’t play it for very long, but if anything was going to jog my memory it was the starting area, and nope, nothing. Which is kinda exciting since this will be a whole shiny new game for me.
The town dialogue was all fine, comprehension-wise. I didn’t look up everything and kinda just got the vibe of some of the conversations. All the main ones were plenty easy and didn’t really need any lookups. I can tell I’m already going to have trouble keeping all these katakana names and places straight. I did a sweep of the town, but based on other ppls comments I missed some interactions. I’ll probably go back before heading out into week 2 content. Having the NPCs wander around a bit gives the town a lot of life, but it’s harder to keep track of where I have and haven’t been yet.
Someone else mentioned this earlier, but the sprite work is so charming! The textures and colors are not quite, but trending towards that early 2000s brown/grey mush aesthetic that has aged so poorly, but the sprites really make up for that.
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This plus the fun use of dialog boxes is really neat. And I think there was even a npc that scolds you for bumping into them, a few that call out to you. I really liked how they used the boxes to show people talking at the same time as well. It really gives the dialog character even without voice acting.
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These overlapping dialogues are always stressful for me who reads Japanese so slowly however… At least with the emulator I can easily freeze the game at any point.
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I loved the crap out of this game back when it came out. It’s been on my “games to play in Japanese” list, but knowing where the script goes I figured it’d be many, many more years before I ever attempted it. It’s nice to have this book club to push me into tackling it now rather than later!
Week 1
Oh boy, that opening FMV. I don’t remember the mixing being that bad in the English version. Between the mixing and the technobabble I caught almost nothing just watching it raw — thank goodness for the script link! Even with the script it was still a slog, with all the ship and military jargon.
The opening text crawl after was more comprehensible. It probably helped that I remember the story quite well, even after several decades. It’s interesting to me to see some of these names spelled out in Katakana and learning their unambiguous pronunciations.
Talking to everyone in ラハン is what took the bulk of my playtime this week. There wasn’t much vocabulary I had to look up, but a lot of the grammar and dialect stuff slowed me down.
The scene with アルル brought a tear to my eye. The love triangle, their hesitation to breech the subject directly… it felt more poignant than I remember it being in English. Great stuff.
And the soundtrack by 光田 康典 is fantastic, even if it’s not remembered as well as his work on Chrono Trigger/Cross.
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Ooh, that’s why I got CT vibes from it…
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All my 4+ hours of work meetings got cancelled and it’s technically my day off, so here’s the thread a few hours earlier than expected.
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