The rat tail’s true purpose: Nuklear Power » Archive » Episode 634: You were right.
Anyone have any damn idea why they introduced a guy named Underhill who works at the caravan, then never bring him up again? Honestly, I had a hard time figuring out Underhill was name and not a literal geographical formation.
The wiki says:
Underhill’s name comes from the first Lord of the Rings book, Fellowship of the Ring, where it is used as Frodo’s traveling name to escape from the Dark Lord Sauron.
Make of that what you will.
I suspect it’s less confusing to Japanese natives who may not know what “underhill” means.
Yeah I realized the reference, but when you meet him, his name isn’t Underhill! It just says “caravan”!
I think lotr had just been translated into JP in the seventies or eighties, so they probably expected people to get the reference. I’m just irrationally bothered by the fact that his name is only in the one spot. Like, did I miss something?
I don’t think there’s any logic to who gets a name and who doesn’t in this game. Some very minor characters like the pirate in pravoca get a name, but for instance the king and the elf prince don’t.
It’s not really human trafficking if it’s a fairy:
Nah bro just chicken and rice. 100% natty. 
…you can select some equipment in battle. I didn’t even notice. I can see how the healing rod can be game breaking…infinite low level heal. Still need the bigger guns for boss fight but insanely useful for grinding. You don’t even have to equip it?! And Gauntlet gives Thundara!
…after just raiding a dragons treasure trove this sounds like a threat
Instead the dragon king made everyone taller lmao. Knight can now use some low level magic! Magiknight!
You really are tearing through this today, nice work! Will be good to have you back with us.
Edit: Ok 5 minutes before I posted this you updated that you were completely caught up haha.
You may not like it but this is the ideal black mage body. This is what peak spellcasting looks like.
Silver Case mentioned, let’s go. I see your Shiroyabu avatar. I’ve also played through Strange Journey but only in English back when it first came out. Maybe someday I can do it again in Japanese.
Yeah! A little while back I played The Silver Case, then Flower Sun and Rain in Japanese. I’m going through the 25th Ward right now. They’ve all been fantastic.
I’m a big Suda fan so I’ve played through a lot of his games. As much as I love those three games in particular, sometimes the plot was difficult to follow in English so I shudder to imagine trying it with my current level of Japanese. Maybe someday. lol
Week 9
Finally got the job upgrades. I swear I stepped on every possible wrong teleporter. Even the room with four, I managed to go through all three wrong ones before I got the right one. At least I remembered the way back well enough that I didn’t get caught in any loops. I did forget which cave Bahamut was in though and spent forever trying to find him again.
The dragons had some interesting speech patterns and a few new words so I had a little difficulty with them. I ended this week at level 33 with 9:11 on the clock. I feel like the reading has definitely gotten easier as I’ve gone along so I’m confident I’ll hit my goal of finishing by the end of June.
+1 for Megaten club! Megami Tensei 1 can be pretty brutal but Megami Tensei 2 is actually a really great game, it’s really impressive for a famicom game. It’s honestly my favorite of the old games up until Soul Hackers.
Progress
Pretty easy week as far as gameplay goes. Made it to the Castle of Ordeals after a long walk, though I should have gone here when I was looking for the airship. I couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I remembered it being in a desert, so I had taken my boat all around this continent and could have stopped here at that point.
The trial wasn’t too bad at least, I think this is the first dungeon I didn’t get totally lost in. Grabbed the rat tail and unlocked the new jobs at around level 34. Guess I should backtrack to some of those towns and learn the spells I couldn’t pick up earlier.
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Language
This week didn’t hold back on the Japanese difficulty. Tons of new words and some sentences that really gave me trouble. Of particular note is the drunkards 「飲まずにいられるかってんだ！」which confused me until looking at the spreadsheet and seeing the original script. I really struggle with casual speech in stuff, so no surprise here.
Bahamut had a line, 「勇気の証を持ってくるがよい⋯！」, that used one of the newer N0 grammar points that bunpro added, which you can find here. I think their description of it fits a dragon king perfectly: “…the person using がいい is in a very high position, or perceives themselves to be in a very high position such as a king, emperor, wise wizard, or something similar.”
I also might have found a typo?
I couldn’t figure out this 習し until I checked the spreadsheet, which had it as ならわし. But it doesn’t seem like 習し is a valid spelling. I did see some hits on google for it this way, but it wasn’t in the dictionaries I checked.
Art direction
First things first, everybody’s favorite pose
The next sprite for this week is all of the swords in Bahamut’s chamber
It’s been decades since I first played this game on the NES, but I didn’t remember this room decorated in this way. Let’s take a look and see what we had before.
That’s a lot of candles! But what about the Famicom version?
Oh nice catch with the candles, I wasn’t aware of this change!