Right but is it 80% of all words or 80% of unique words in the deck? Because that’s a big difference. If it’s 80% of the full deck it’s going to translate to a much higher % in practice because common words are going to be over-represented.
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I think coverage is the total (non unique) known, and the % is unique words.. but it’s been a while since I looked that up. Now that I’m thinking about that too, I was talking about coverage before (so @Akashelia should be set for this 
).
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Alright, so I’ve downloaded DuckStation, but now I’m stuck.. I’ve only ever played emulated games up to about the SNES era and there’s a lot of things it wants from me and I’m just… あれ?
I’d appreciate any help. Feel free to msg me over on Natively (same username) if we don’t want to muck up the home thread.
Edit: got it sorted, tyty 
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80% coverage is enough?? I’ll just leave that here.
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80% of the deck isn’t 80% coverage!
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So I added the first two sub decks to my jpdb and… That opening is going to absolutely destroy me lol
Thankfully the actual game seems much more doable… Hopefully.
As for my story with Xenogears, I watched a let’s play long ago so I remember just very vague things about the plot, cool music, and how much the let’s player couldn’t stand a certain character, so it will be interesting to get into this.
I’ve also had the intention of playing the Xenoblade games on Switch since I got it, but getting into a trilogy of 100+ hour long JRPGs as I still have multiple things to finish playing on that console has proved quite difficult… I will get to it one day!
I’m just very vaguely aware that Xenogears/Xenoblade are supposed to be… Connected? But I have no idea how.
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The opening is pretty hardcore. I was going through it the other day in order to take the shader screenshots[1] and I was thinking about how some people compared this to Final Fantasy VII. Imagine if FFVII had started with a slab of lore about Midgard instead of the legendary Reactor 1 attack. I feel like it wouldn’t have had the same impact…
Doesn’t count as preplaying ↩︎
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I closed my eyes during the intro to get to the point where I could move a bit and test my controller. But from what I’ve seen, I’m very happy we have the whole script going into this. I’m predicting that I will unshamelessly Yomitchan it all.
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tl;dr: They are only connected by sharing a small handful of people working on all of the games in the series of series (Tetsuya Takahashi, Soraya Saga, Yasunori Mitsuda, Kunihiko Tanaka and Yasuyuki Honne).
There is some thematic overlap and some easter eggs / references between the three series of Xenogears, Xenosaga and Xenoblade, but they’re owned by different companies and both of the latter series are standalone.
Longwinded history lesson constructed from memory follows...
Xenogears was supposed to be episode five of a millenia-spanning six game series. It barely missed the sales target set by Squaresoft and while Squaresoft became the Final Fantasy studio, the director Tetsuya Takahashi realized they wouldn’t fund any other games in the series and walked away, founding a new company called Monolith Soft under Namco.
They created a second trilogy of games called Xenosaga, still narratively heavy and supposedly reusing some ideas from the first episode of those unmade games. Despite some pretty clear references, it’s just a spiritual successor.
Later Namco got into a huge merger with Bandai and Monolith Soft got sidelined with their creative freedom reduced. To everyone’s surprise Nintendo (!) decided to buy the majority of Monolith Soft’s shares from Bandai Namco and became the majority shareholder (and eventually sole owner) in exchange of every Monolith game from then on being Nintendo exclusive.
(Two out of Monolith’s three studios are mostly working as Nintendo’s support studios these days, having a big hand in making Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom possible. They’ve worked on every Zelda, Animal Crossing and Splatoon game since the acquisition.)
With this setup and some Wii titles under their belt, they started yet another series called Xenoblade Chronicles. I feel these games have put bigger emphasis on gameplay and tech – storytelling is still there obviously but even as a fan of the series I think it’s on much safer ground than the previous series.
There is one iconic character from Xenosaga that (somehow) might make an appearance if you’re incredibly lucky.
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Week 1 is up!
I intend to drop the weekly threads more or less around this time (Friday afternoon for me) going forward.
Happy Halloween!
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Still have to properly sit down and start playing, but I’ve been steadily adding the JPDB story sub-decks one by one so I can pre study some vocab I’m missing. Usually I was missing just 10/20 words in the first few decks, which has been encouraging.
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Week 1 is pretty light IMO (well, except for the lore dump at the start). Most of the convos in the starting area are optional and fairly casual.
That said I’m calibrated by the Trails club, maybe my expectations are a bit different from other participants…
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When I was setting up the schedule I didn’t have a good sense for participant levels and time commitments so I’d already planned to check in on pace around week 4 or 5. I’ll make a poll here then seeing if we want to keep pace or adjust.
Week 2 may also seem a bit slow, while week 3 has a more typical gameplay/story mix.
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Week 2 is up! Early even.
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Week 3!
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Got behind already but will catch up this weekend!
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So… I’ve been having some problems with Retroarch. Before, when simply running the game, Retroarch would simply tell me that there was no bios file found but still launch the game fine.
Then I changed a couple of things in the settings trying to get those CRT filters to work, and while I was there I actually added the bios files in RetroArch/system, since it said that it was looking there for it.
Now it stops saying that there’s no bios found, but the screen is completely black with only audio. I can load a savestate and I can press button but only get audio, nothing on screen.
I deleted everything and reset the settings as they was, still nothing.
Any idea what I managed to break?
I only had one hour or so of play, but since I’m already one week behind and wanted to catch-up with at least week 2, I’ll be pretty bummed if I have to replay all from the beginning… I’m setting up duckstation now and trying to find my save file in the Retroarch configuration files…
Look for .mcr files, those are memory card files (and should be compatible between emulators). They should be in the saves/ directory inside retroarch by default.
Do you know which PlayStation core you were using? I recommend beetle and I don’t think that one could work without BIOS, so I presume you were using something else.
If you don’t find it and don’t want to start from scratch, here’s my file:
I create a new save every time I get to a checkpoint, so if you load one of the first ones you’ll be set.
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Apparently I was using PCSX “Rearmed”, and inside saves it created a single file with the same name of the game and a completely different extension that duckstation doesn’t recognise, no idea what is going on at this point. Worst case I will use your file, thanks!
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Do you know the file extension? I may be able to convert the file.
EDIT: it’s an “srm” file and is 128KB in size, it may be exactly the same thing as MCR and you might just have to change the extension.
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