Ok let’s do this:
FF2 start date
- December 13
- January 3
- January 17
- Other (discuss below)
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voters
You can select multiple options.
For reference, we have two weeks left on FF1, I’ll post the final thread on November 21~22.
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If we start Dec 13 are we going to be playing through the new year, or will we start and then break?
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THIS CLUB HAS NO BRAKES
No I don’t intend to stop once we’ve started, it’s one thread/week until the end.
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By the way @Akashelia already transcribed all of FF2’s script as penance for her filthy preplaying, so I’ll just use the same format as for FF1 in the spreadsheet.
I’m aiming for ten-ish weeks total, perhaps even quicker.
I’m looking forward to getting to the Super Famicom games that won’t be as technically limited, although the Xenogears club scratches my itch of playing “golden age” JRPGs very suitably in the meantime.
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Love the fast pace! I too can’t wait for the golden age games. Obviously opinions can differ but very few would consider 1-3 to be the best that FF has to offer.
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Sacrificing myself for the greater good!
While I wouldn’t say that FFII is the best FF of all time (or one of the five best), I had a great time playing it!
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Your effort is appreciated!!
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What do you need for your deck precisely? Do you want the weekly lists or would a single list with the whole game’s vocab be acceptable? Because I haven’t finalized the weekly schedule yet.
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I wonder if my planned setup for FF2 is overkill...
I have the PC version, but I plan to play it on the Nintendo Switch.
『ニンテンドースイッチ』を手に入れた。
As such, I’ll be piping the video into my PC via an Elgato.
『ＰＣ』を手に入れた。
『Elgato HD60 S+』を手に入れた。
That will run as streaming video in mpv.
『mpv』を手に入れた。
Pressing “s” takes a screenshot.
A Python script will watch for screenshots and feed them into LM Studio for OCR.
『パイソン』を手に入れた。
『LM Studio』を手に入れた。
The Python script takes the response and copies it to the clipboard, which is monitored by Migaku running on Chromium.
『Chromium』を手に入れた。
『Migaku』を手に入れた。
Here’s what that looks like:
Text streams into Migaku and auto-parses, putting furigana on any words I don’t know the kanji for, and giving me a pop-up dictionary for unknown words. I can have that up as the majority of the screen while I’m playing on a TV, with mpv accessible for saving screenshots as needed.
Next step: add image processing to see if I can get a better OCR result, as I already spotted an error (highlighted in the screenshot above).
Edit: I thought simply cropping to the textbox before performing OCR did the trick until I saw the AI hallucinated an う near the end.
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Now you just need to add an integration to the spreadsheet to fix the text!
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That’s a pretty cool setup actually.
I’m happy because I’m reaching the point where I can play those types of games with only minimal lookups. Yesterday I played Trails and Xenogears for a couple of hours and must have done fewer than 10 lookups overall. That doesn’t mean that there only were 10 words I didn’t know but a lot of the time I can use context and kanji knowledge to fill the blanks.
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No rush, I can wait! I think weekly vocab lists works best, that’s what I tried to do last time. Although if others just want the whole pile I can do that too. For now I started with magic, items, weapons, and armor. There’s 175 cards in the deck already if anyone wants to start brushing up on the vocab list while we wait!
As with FF1, I did my best to approximate with the best available option since many of these words are made up for fantasy games, so words like 源氏の兜 (Genji Helm) aren’t in the Bunpro library but instead there’s a card for 源氏 and a card for 兜. With spells like ブリザド I found the nearest, which is: ブリザード. But some words just don’t have a near enough equivalent, so プロテス has no card since the nearest was プロテクション and that felt like a different enough word, “protect” vs “protection”.
I’ll add story vocab as it’s available, and I’ll continue adding system/menu/etc items in the next few days/weeks, but for now, enjoy!
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I may or may not have bought the Elgato 4K S during Black Friday so I can copy this setup 
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Ok cool, I was actually thinking of using @Akashelia’s script today to layout the first few weeks, but then I got lazy. I’ll do that within the next few days however, and I’ll let you know when the first word lists are available!
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scheduling discussion, SPOILERS AHEAD
@Akashelia I was perusing your spreadsheet and considering the schedule (in order to generate the vocab list) and I wanted to discuss the matter with you and anybody familiar with the progression of FF2 to decide how we do things before I start shuffling things around in your doc.
What I have in mind for the first few weeks:
- Week 1: ends after the ring is brought back to Hilda (effectively completing the first quest). Fairly light week but I think it’s a decent intro.
- Week 2: finding and bringing back the Mythril.
- Week 3: search for the 大戦艦 + Snow Cave (pretty busy week, but I think the search for de 大戦艦 alone is too short to split apart, so I have to put it either in week 2 or 3, and I think it makes more sense to ramp up to week 3 rather than having a heavier week 2).
- Week 4: search for the flame + 大戦艦. Those are two big dungeons, maybe I should split those? I guess we can see depending on how week 3 goes.
- Week 5: Flying dragons + 闘技場
- Week 6 and onwards: TDB
Thoughts?
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Discussion about pace, spoilers
We could also look at this playlist, took them 20 videos to complete the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSBF5kxbKk&list=PLBMv-IHcD2ChuaaWoelK1UM9YmfOKeYIi
But I see to remember that you want to go faster than FFI, so maybe 2 videos per week?
I will give it some thought and write again soon.
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more pacing stuff
Yeah looking at this video that’s about the pace I imagined, with the first video being week 1 and then two videos per week after that roughly.
I hope that it won’t be too hardcore but at the same time we have to up the pace eventually. I don’t want to spend 20 weeks on FF2 and the amount of text per game is only going to increase.
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Here’s @Akashelia’s transcription:
I’ve added the vocab list for the first week in the “W1 vocab” sheet.
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Pacing thoughts
I’ll just be completely honest, I have no idea what’s a good schedule and I’m happy it’s you and not me having to make the decision 
That being said, I don’t think your suggestion is a bad idea. I don’t consider myself a very fast reader without crutches as I have only played one game before, plus I wouldn’t say that I have a lot of free time to play daily compared to others. Despite those two things it took me only 9 days to finish the game while retranscribing every piece of text too. The language level is not as hard as Xenogears or Fata Morgana.
I did get lost a couple of time, and had to trace back and retalk to a lot of people, but with the spreadsheet or a guide this shouldn’t block people too much I guess.
So I say the proposed schedule is good enough! And in doubt, you can try to follow from the poll and or discussion how it’s going, you can always adjust later.
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