Oh cool, I wanted to jump down as a shortcut back near where that diagnostic robot was but it wouldn’t let me, that spot seemed to have invisible walls (unless I was just hitting it the wrong way?) so I figured it all did. Glad to know you can in some places.
Same general readings as you though I imagine it’s ぼうしゃへき most likely for the wall, following patterns like 防壁 .I basically referred to similar real words to make sure they likely used onyomi, like 降雨 and 潜水艦
That cave was really lacking some nice ambient music.
So the bustling mining town couldn’t get parts for your mech, but the hermit in the abandoned cave has upgrades for your cutting edge mecha. I can’t tell if it’s just game design contrivance or a way to foreshadow something about the 爺さん.
That’s one way to put it…
I was so happy when I realized that it was a small cable car. I really enjoy these changes in scale, when you spend a while in the mechas it’s easy to forget how huge you are.
Do these huge sideways platform elevators really exist IRL? I feel like I see them regularly in Japanese media especially, but that seems a bit impractical. Very Metal Gear Solid at any rate.
I almost expected the 爺さん to be in control of the boss. He mentions him by name after all:
The bossfight itself was by far the best encounter so far. I could put my newly acquired ギア knowledge to good use.
I’m looking forward to exploring the ship next week!
The person in front of the door leading to the savepoint says:
別に壁を壊して隠してるとかそんなんじゃねぇよ。
Which I can’t make sense of… Any clue?
I’m like 90% sure the kanji is 砂 but maybe I hallucinated it.
At any rate I’m with @Daisoujou, it’s full onyomi IMO. I remember having a similar doubt with a 壁 word and it was also へき (or maybe べき). I eventually got confirmation because in that game one character speaks in full kana, which was convenient for this purpose…
Also it just seems to be pronounced that way when used as a suffix:
Yes it is 砂, though 沙 has the same readings and meaning as far as I can see so not too bad a mistake haha.
Out of interest I posed the question to some Japanese people to get their opinion and they agreed that they’d read 砂 as さ in these words. One raised the point that 防砂 (ぼうさ) is a word, so they’d based their readings off of that. They also agreed that they’re probably full onyomi readings.
True but I always found that 砂 looked better and made more sense, especially in the context of a 砂漠.
Oh, I always forget さ exists in addition to しゃ, ugh.
So for you the game takes place in a shabaku.
Man I dunno sometimes words are just words and not their parts. I don’t know the last time I was even conscious of what kanji are in that word.
I also noticed that you can get out of your Gear and run around, but didn’t dare trying it in this cave. What if May Shrimp came at me again while I’m tiny.
I tried and got into a fight with those giant electric squids and got worried for a second but it turns out that my damage output bare handed wasn’t much lower than in a giant mecha oddly enough. I didn’t get attacked though, not sure if I would have been able to tank the damage in poodle mode.
Oh indeed, I had the exact same experience. I thought it was strange that they wouldn’t let you fall down there, but maybe they didn’t want to bother figuring out where the invisible walls had to remain to prevent you from falling in the abyss below. It was easier to just wall everything.
Week 6&7 is up!
Finally back into groove after a little 空の軌跡 detour, as some of you might have noticed… Good timing with the double-week here. EmuDeck had switched from DuckStation flatpak to AppImage, which I feared would have caused me trouble, but even the save states were migrated properly. Good.
The game moves on to バル爺 so fast that you might blink and miss his full name. As we now well know (even exclusively through Japanese media), Balthazar is one of the three biblical Magi, translated to “three wise men” in many languages. They appear exclusively in the Gospel of Matthew, coming from the East and bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus.
(Later, to fit with the earlier prophecies, they are retconned to be kings, as the supposed messiah would have to be worshipped by kings.)
I guess many of you have seen 新世紀エヴァンゲルイオン?
There are many similarities between エヴァ and ゼノギアス. While this is a surface level one, I can’t help but think of 碇シンジ and フェイ being so reluctant to get into their mechs as a deeper one… I guess it was just the zeitgeist?
I also thought these dudes made appearances in Chrono Trigger, but it was only much later that I realized they had completely different names in the original Japanese! (ボッシュ、ガッシュ、ハッシュ.)
It’s only natural to start wondering if メルキオール and ガスパール might make an appearance as well…
The lighting doing wonders here. Happy that you had deciphered this word for me, as I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen 憑代 before. The game wants to move on quickly, but it’s quite the reveal that バル爺 already knows about ヴェルトール.
Overall this whole dialogue is yet again very informative and paints a lot of background in a relatively brief moment – kudos to the writing team! Lots of answers but also lots of new questions raised, as it should be.
First bossfight that counts as a proper challenge. I finally remembered how this whole deathblow system works and grinded level 2 deathblow for バルト as well… but yeah, when you engage booster very early on in a long fight you seriously risk running out of fuel. I didn’t have all that much left by the end.
Love the colors. Feels very handcrafted.
Sadly I just missed the いててて here, lucky @Voi had quicker screenshot reflexes! This “let’s drag a character away” thing has happened multiple times in 空の軌跡, fun to see it here as well…
Onwards!
In France this is a big thing so we know their names well (though we say Gaspard and not Casper), and we celebrate by eating a Galette des Rois in early January. And this tradition seems well known in Japan too, as I have already met more than once (!) in a Japanese manga, people eating a ガレット・デ・ロワ !!
I took the opportunity to switch my emulator from DuckStation to the Beetle PSX core in Retroarch, which I believe is based off of the Mednafen PS1 emulator. It seems about on par with Duckstation for me - can’t say I love appimages and had separate reason for messing about with Retroarch. I do quite like it as a way of organising multiple emulators while having fairly standardised settings. Moving my save over was as easy as changing a file extension (.mcd to .srm). Don’t know about savestates, but I tend to only use them for backups or if I need to exit between savepoints anyway.
Savestates will certainly not be compatible between emulators. I also only use them for backup purposes, unless the game is really annoying and I feel like cheesing.
Wow, that looks good. So much better than in my emulator. Is that a real CRT? Or an emulator filter? If so, which?
In my emulator, even with a CRT filter, I still mostly see a pixel mess. In your image, it looks so deep, complex surfaces (e.g. bottom left), it merges together. As designed, I suppose.
Ackshually they can in this dungeon, apparently you sometimes (rarely) encounter a repair bot in this cave which, if you don’t attack him, will slowly repair you.
I had to research this because I failed the boss fight multiple times. I’m surprised almost noone else seemed to have big issues. I guess I let my hp get too low. I had even done a lot of fights, close to grinding, earlier in the game, and bought gear upgrades from the geezer. But I didn’t learn level 2 deathblows, didn’t know you had to do it on foot.
Still, a fun week. That hangar looks so huge and impressive 
Oooh, of course, I wonder why I haven’t made the connection yet. I’m a huge Eva fan.
(minor spoilers for Eva I suppose) Another similarity is that the gears seem to have a life of their own sometimes. Fei in the village basically went into a “berzerk” mode, just like Eva-01. And in the cave, Fei did some mysterious kind of dark magic martial arts moves when an ally was in danger that he apparently didn’t know how to do consciously.
So, there’s more to operating gears than pushing the right buttons.
It’s a photo of a real CRT, yeah. Bought one a few months back and I couldn’t be happier with that decision.
