Even though the story ultimately is shallow, Iâm shocked they even tried a weird time travel tale. Most games of the time didnât have a story past the manual. Those that did have an in-game story, it was quite literally nothing more than "bad guy is bad. stop bad guy. maybe bad guy has princessâ. The time travel, the sky people, the internal elf war, the lady who thinks we borrowed our legs from someone else - this is all so far beyond 99% of the content of the NES library. If you were a PC guy at the time, or if you look at it from a modern perspective, youâll scoff, but there was nothing like it.
Hidden because of length ;)
Anyway, Iâd like to share my thoughts about the game as a piece of Japanese learning material, rather than as a game. This is a Japanese learning club thread, after all.
The difficulty with using games, Iâve found, is that they almost always want to charge ahead without you. Unskippable and unpausable cutscenes, dialogue that plays once and is impossible to see again without finding an LP, spoken dialogue thatâs moved on before you can even read the first three words - most of most games are like that damn bridge crawl in FFI, but worse.
Modern games compound this with more spoken dialogue than ever (dialogue that usually doesnât wait for you to press A to move on). Also, modern games have grown with their audience. The average RPG in the 80s was meant to be understood by children, the primary audience. Those children are now adults, so RPGs now have appropriately difficult language. Something like Trails in the Sky seems like it expects you to have a Masters in Japanese just to play it, and even that is over a decade only. You end up having to play a Pokemon game (and Pokemon games bore me to tears nowadays).
All that is to say that I think this was an excellent choice for first game. Iâve played a few hours of several games, but this is the first one Iâve finished. Practically every dialogue can be replayed infinitely. The grammar is more interesting than beginner manga dialogue, but not impenetrable. It isnât too long, or too difficult, and stopping/saving was really easy, letting me do small chunks at a time. Do you guys know how many JRPGs that you canât save until you get through a 2-hour intro? It took me multiple play sessions to get through Trails intro, because I had to keep quitting partway through!
Learning japanese in this game was never a chore. It had a lot of grammar patterns and words that I didnât know, but they werenât too obtuse (outside of the archaic language), and tended to be repeated a lot. That wouldnât fly for me in an english-language text - frequent repetition and reuse of the same words and grammar patterns would seem amateurish and poorly written. In this context, though, itâs perfect, like a childrenâs book. No, that isnât meant to be the back-handed compliment that it sounds like. By the end of the story, all the weird archaic stuff, the ăăȘăăăs, the masu stem as ăŠ-form analogue, the weird use of ăŹ, using ăă instead of ăă all the time, the half dozen different ways people command you to do stuff and many more - none of it fazed me by the end, since Iâd seen it so many times.
This game was a real sweet spot of difficulty, and I look forward to the next one. Thanks, Simias, for all your hard work.
