Once you talk to Bart and choose to start the operation you won’t have a chance to upgrade equipment for a while, so consider doing so early on this week
Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!
Spoiler Courtesy
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Discussion
Explanations? In MY Xenogears? No but who else thought they’d drag it out 40 more hours?
Participation
Will you be playing with is this week?
I am playing along.
I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this part yet.
I am no longer playing.
I’m just here for the discussion
0voters
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Apart from that, ouchie ouchie ouchie this week was so hard.
The conversation between Sigurd and Citan was hard, and the war strategy discussion even worse. I don’t have the Japanese level at all to be playing this game.. This week the script wasn’t even enough, I also watched the English playthrough afterwards.
The Japanese in this game is really difficult! Parts that gave me the most trouble included Citan & Bart’s conversation on the bridge, where Citan is talking about Sigurd. The strategy room was another very difficult part. My prior knowledge of the game came in handy here because I remember Fei’s part of the upcoming operation.
I find a lot of the time I can read one complicated sentence fairly well but my brain has trouble connecting the meanings of multiple sentences in a conversation for overall context. It’s like I concentrate so hard on understanding a sentence that my brain throws out recent memory, haha. Citan and Bart are talking about Sigurd, oh wait now they’ve changed to Solaris. (Re-reading the script) That’s not right, they were talking about Solaris and Aveh and how they fit into Sigurd’s thinking… I need to make a more concentrated effort to improve on this for sure.
In other news, 頭角を現す is a funny phrase I learned with this week’s section and I couldn’t help but imagine ラムサス’s head peaking up out of a crowd of solaris soldiers.
Also, I love the cathedral so much. Even if the camera angles make it a huge pain to navigate!
Mostly reading this week, and yeah that discussion about Solaris was rough. I’ll be honest that I didn’t go super intense on it and just sort of skimmed through parts, just getting the gist. Similarly with the strategy meeting, although I did better with that. シタン likes his sayings and 4 kanji phrases.
It’s probably more a consistent sustained level of technical discussion than anything really harder than the game has already been at moments, I think?
Super long convos without any gameplay or anything else going on have always deeply annoyed me in RPGs (I’m not reading a book!) but damn, in a language I don’t handle very well it’s really frustrating.
I feel that, in true JRPG fashion, they didn’t even say all that much despite talking endlessly. At the end it’s a fairly simple strategy to fight Ave, although I’m very skeptical when it comes to also taking on the Solaris future tech civilization.
I considered checking with an English video if I got it wrong but I guess it’s more fun if I discover that I have no idea what I’m doing in a week or two.
The fully 3D CGI of Weltall leaving Yggdrasil wasn’t great, even for that time, especially coming from Square. Very plastic-y.
To expand on that, I actually thought that the conversations in the cathedral were really good because there was a strong visual component and it flowed well. It felt organic and interesting.
The issues began when you return to the house and suddenly it’s “ok, backstory time! Please select from this list of topics so that I may monologue at you for 5 minutes”.
Finally weekend and enough consecutive hours of free time to catch up!
Week 10
Yup, like you all already said, a lot of hard Japanese in these big back-to-back talking sessions… but at least we finally got some explanations from シグ and シタン!
二サン is yet another cool city with some verticality. This is how I found where バルト went.
Having played the game before, I really have no idea how it feels to play this blind and in Japanese. Still, I like that the game doesn’t try to keep things simple for us. There’s a lot to cover with ソラリス and this week we got something concrete to start building that foundation on. Onwards to battle plan…
Sigurd please don’t create death flags for yourself
シタン
「私は彼よりも数年あとに……▽ やはり同様の手段で出奔したんです。▽
I kinda…don’t believe you?? You still talk to the emperor guy!
Not much to say about the rest of the week. I saw from the above posts it’d be kind of annoying so I read it from the script and I’ll catch up the game tomorrow. its definitely not because I’m too lazy to crawl out of my heated blanket to turn on the computer of course
