Flashing Light Warning
Chapter 4 has some pretty significant flashing lights. It starts roughly when you’ve headed down the mountain to get back to the village, and continues until nearly the end of the chapter (about 5-10 minutes I’d say).
回避 - Evasion (how can ANYONE read that second kanji?!)
エーテル – Ether
エーテル防御 – Ether Defense
素早さ – Speed/Agility
Note the English uses Hit% and Evade%, but I am not actually sure those are percentages…
Unique Missables
クモ/Spider. In a tree near the end of the map. Jump into it several times.
*ミドリの指輪/Midori’s Ring. Behind/in the flowerbed
"FMVs”
In Chapter 4 after returning to the village. Only one word of dialog.
Walkthrough English Guide Ctrl+F WK02 to go directly to relevant part of guide. Nice ASCII maps, minimal spoilers. Boss names not hidden. Japanese Guide Multiple chapters on the same page, so beware of reading ahead. Good maps, minimal spoilers. Boss names not hidden.
Discussion Guidelines
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
Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.
Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
Avoid posting any information from later in the game than the current week’s reading. If it is necessary to doing so, it needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags
Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1”]).
Discussion
What do you think of the combat systems?
Now that we are heading to the next area, who was your favorite NPC?
Anything in particular you really liked or disliked?
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
Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!
I like the attention to details! Especially since you have a compass visible on the HUD at all times, so they could just have used cardinal directions…
I hope that nobody is epileptic, because this week is 50% flashing lights.
w2
I liked exploring the small “dungeon” area leading to the 先生’s house. I still miss a minimap or, at least, being able to better orient the camera to look around. Everything looks a bit the same in that area and I found difficult to navigate despite being so small.
I saw that I could steal an egg in the guide so I did it, then I felt bad so I gave it back.
I really love the house of the 先生. What a cute little diorama with so many details to explore and interact with.
I wonder how the new generations who grew up with “modern” graphics see this early 3D. Does it look ridiculously dated to them, like the way I see Atari 2600 graphics?
I forgot that things escalated that fast in this game. Just some casual war crimes, and some strange visions. I’m not sure I 100% understand what happened exactly with that big explosion. I expect that the enemy troops were not entirely wiped out? That’s what the discussion afterwards seems to imply, and I’m sure we’ll meet that boss-looking mecha again.
I looked up the English version out of curiosity to see what the translation looked like. It feels rather stilted to me, everybody speaks like they’re in a play:
The banner quoted four phrases from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “be like a wind in a rapid march, a woods in a steady march, a fire in a raid, a mountain in a standoff.”
That’s a good catch. That and the “be fast like the wind”, and also the fact that he seems to know more about Fei than he lets out… Also his “telescope” that’s pointed at the surrounding land… I wonder if this foreshadows something sinister.
That also looks significantly less cool in the English version:
By the way, the scene at the very beginning of the game didn’t play out during the attack. Should I assume that it was just skipped? But the 先生 and Fei weren’t together when he got into the mecha, so at which point could it have taken place?
Doing big jumps over cliffs is my favorite part of going to the doctor (spoilers)
In combat I’m definitely just pressing buttons, but it worked out well. I’ll try to figure out the systems eventually, but maybe that’s not too valuable anyway, apparently. The presentation is so cool, the way they put in 2 cliffs for Fei to zoom between is a really inspired choice.
I’m with you on navigation – I mean I didn’t get lost but felt a little unsure at times as I was moving around. I think the camera is in really close for the kind of 3D navigation we have here, but I’ll see how I feel a little later on. Personally I’m happy they don’t do minimaps specifically cause those usually take over the focus of your attention more than the world itself, but I do agree the game can be a little disorienting already.
This is the big event I remember, and it’s weird just how fast my memory fades. I’ve got some little things here and there I recall but I focused everything into this. I remember these cutscenes feeling so surreal and sinister when I was a kid. They don’t quite have the same power now, but they’re cool all the same.
Very curious what the doctor knows; there’s way more at play.
Pictures don’t quite do the in person experience justice but this game is really beautiful on this TV, wow.
As for the visuals I do imagine for a lot of people this looks too old and “outdated” but I couldn’t feel more differently. I actually spent a pretty long period playing predominantly newer things that came out and didn’t really dig back into these old games for a while. Back before, I probably thought this stuff was fine, acceptable, but surely a product of its time.
These days, personally, there’s room for lots of stuff to look good in its own way but if pressed to make a sweeping statement, I outright prefer the look of something like this. The technology involved to make something look realistic is impressive, but I’m not personally moved by realism in itself. Not to say more realistic graphics can’t be in service of strong art direction but I feel like regularly you get “realism” for its own sake and… sometimes it’s nice but I’ll take strongly felt intentional touches over it all the time.
I guess for me, I like some artifice in my art often, and the way that everything can’t really look accurately like what it is means there are interesting decisions being made for pretty much every object and sight in the game. The ways people come up with to represent objects are so much cooler to me than looking at my 4k TV and seeing objects.
You can’t do this part justice without it being in motion but this fight was such a highlight for me. This barren, fiery hellscape that feels like it’s disconnected from any world we were previously in leaves such an impact.
I’m in the same boat with this game. It took me around 10 minutes to “adjust”, and most of that was just getting used to the fixed camera angles.
I absolutely love how far we’ve come with graphics technology, but it is far too often the case that we lose a lot of good art direction with engines like UE5. This game feels completely handcrafted in comparison. The environments are very carefully constructed and I find this early low-poly 3D very endearing. There is a reason some modern indies try to imitate this style!
So started off this week with the trek up to シタン’s house and getting to grips with the combat again. Nothing too hard, and the meat you get from the basic enemies lets you stay topped up on health so it’s not like you have much trouble with resource drain yet.
This week’s big event being Fei losing himself and killing most of his village is something I remember being quite shocked by when I first played this a few years ago. This is the point I felt that this game was not going to be the average JRPG - it’s a very ballsy move to have your protagonist do something like that and to do it so early into the story
On the graphics discussion, I grew up on the PS2 transitioning into the PS3, but I love games like this which do sprite-based characters with 3d environments. I don’t dislike the other way around with prerendered backgrounds, but I think I overall prefer this way. Games like Trails in the Sky, and this, are my ideal for this style of graphics. I also really love PS2 level 3D graphics - I think fully 3D games from the PS1 end up being a bit too low-poly for me to get behind fully, but I don’t mind them either. This week I also did finally start using a CRT filter on my emulator (DuckStation) and I think that improved how the game looked quite a bit so I’m glad I did it. I’m not sure what the best CRT filter and settings to go with are, but I’m happy enough with just the preset I’ve gone with
Ok the chicken jumping out of the shed in 先生’s house scares me every time. The cluck sound effect is like something out of a horror game…
You’re definitely not alone in feeling this way, even as a kid I thought the English dialogue was really stilted. Now, it reminds me of the way some of my friends who know English as a second language write, like rarely using common contractions, overly formal at times, etc. So the Japanese text ends up feeling a little more natural to me, too, even though I’m definitely not good enough to say what’s natural sounding in Japanese vs what’s not. I also remember it wasn’t helped by the English dialogue being very slow in coming out, like you could read much faster than the game was able to output the words. In comparison, the Japanese text seems to go so fast and I read it so slowly!
The battle menu text is so hard to read that I’m actually laughing. What is this!! A jpeg? I can intuit that this is エーテル機関 from my vague memory of the English name, at least. In the smol person fights, 防御 is also really bad (at least, I think it’s 防御). Mind, I think it looks especially bad for me because it’s blown up on my mid-size PC monitor.
I kinda love the way the weltall/black gear is framed when it’s put into focus here. Big, dark, slightly off-center, foreboding. This game was made when 3D was brand new and nobody knew what to do with it, but they did a fantastic job with the ominous vibes in these opening scenes.
Well spotted! I didn’t notice this decor going through as a kid and not this week, even. I like them, though I won’t say why I like them
You need to go into the “post-processing” settings in Duckstation and enable it. Then you add a shader (one of the ones that says CRT) and then it should apply the shader to your game. You can download some extra ones - not sure if people have a most-recommended but I’ve seen that some people quite like CRT-Royale
CRT-Royale is good and very configurable but you need a high-res display (ideally 4k) to make good use of it. It’s also pretty resource-intensive depending on your GPU.
Here’s a comparison between no shader and what I’m currently using, with an svideo filter on top for extra analog goodness:
I’ll admit that I have very little idea what I’m doing with the config, but I’ve got a 1440p screen and default settings look nice enough for me for now. I did try playing around a bit but found it’s very possible to make things look bad with certain setting combinations (like one of the mask types looks really bad with the default mask width etc)
Yeah you can spend hours messing with this, but in the end unless you stand very close to the monitor the difference between a basic CRT shaders and a super fancy one is usually not immense.
I think it’s read シン (しん, truth) on this kind of banner.
Basically a kind of motivational poster/decoration.
I once visited a Japanese native who had a banner with 空 on it, and she said it was pronounced クウ (void/sky, 5th element in Japanese Buddhist thought besides earth (chi), water (sui), fire (ka), wind (fū) (wiki - Godai - Five elements).
This is just a guess, but it could be onyomi because Chinese used to be the language for buddhism, philosophy, scholars, or any writing for that matter in Japan before written Japanese was developed, like Latin was the scholars’ language in Europe.
I saw one in a Chinese restaurant with just 富 (wealth), I guess that would be read フ.
Jokes aside, I do think it’s interesting how they started with the protagonist inadvertently killing half the village (including his best friends), and that it isn’t forgiven (even with Citan’s excuse that the Gear went out of control). Also got that small-town vibe where people who were accepting of Fei before suddenly remarking about how they were against bringing in people of unknown origins to the village, etc. I hope the aftermath gets explored!
For the record my favorite NPC was the kid on the roof dreaming of freedom…sorry bud. Gal questioning the patriarchy might be my second. Bearcow lady who feeds them Aquasols of all things is probably third. I should go back and see if any of them survived, actually. I bet someone has mapped the survivors to their earlier sprites to catalog who’s who.
Funny combat system, so you can both cast spells and punch?
I never played a punch game before (except Tekken 2 or should I say 鉄拳2), so I don’t feel super comfortable, but ready to try it.
Doesn’t hurt that I can just reload the fight and try again thanks to the emulator :x
Also I’m not used to the healing item not being called a potion. What’s an アクアソル？
And first time I see かもしれない spelt かも知れない.
I didn’t find the spider but will probably survive without it…
Wow, wild signs. AI powered for sure.
Oh I only saw that it was possible because of the dialog option in the script but didn’t see how. I saw the chicken outside but no egg. Maybe I should read the guide. Oh well, dinner seemed to have been tasty anyway.
Flashing Light Warning
