Added it to my bookmarks and it’s so cool to see that right out of the bat I already know half the words.
Progress!!!
Curious to see how many more I actually know after I finish marking as known the FF2 deck!
The frustrating thing about filthy-preplaying games for this club is that there are things I’d like to comment on as I’m going through the game but I’ll have to wait like two months now… Very mad.
In other news I have 4 weeks worth of FF3 already prepared. I expect that the club may end up being a bit longer than FF2’s 10 weeks but not by a whole lot, assuming that the dungeon/dialogue ratio remains relatively steady from here on out.
Language-difficulty-wise it feels very similar to FF2.
How about the dungeon quality and boss quality?
Dungeons and progression feel much closer to FF1. Bosses are a mixed bag.
I’ve finished or started all of the pixel remasters, and one thing they always do is start using tons of new vocab that never once appeared in any previous game.
The intro to FF3 added 43 new cards to my deck.
The intro to FF4 added 54 on top of that.
For reference, FF1 in total added 269 and FF2 has added 350, and my total number of notes is 10,500. It’s crazy to me that I have that many words in my deck already, and yet every FF adds dozens of new words right off the bat.
These games have been pumping out new, obscure vocab at such a clip that I had to start a new Anki strategy. Basically, I add the word when I see it. Then, if I see that word in a totally different book, game series or other context, then I schedule it to be learned at a random point in the new future. Otherwise I’d be utterly overwhelmed with reviews of words no one uses.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how FFs 1, 3 and 5 all have easy intros and are very mechanics heavy, while 2, 4 and 6 have much longer, story-driven intros and an overall heavy focus on story. Four even has lots of references to FF2 that I missed since I’d never played it, while 5 continues the job system from 3.
It’s almost like they were developing two concurrent series that they swapped between. With 7 they finally merged the two halves of the series.
The beginning is tricky because your weird little group of hoodlums likes to speak in super casual japanese that doesn’t match how everyone else in these games has been talking, leaving out particles and using slang. Once you get to town and talk to townspeople and kings, everyone starts talking like a final fantasy character again..
I’ve noticed that too! I’ve been watching my progress on the bunpro decks and I think I when I started FF2 I was only at around 60% complete on the FF1 deck. (I don’t remember my started percentage on the FF2 deck, I should’ve noted that before learning the deck!) I kept thinking that FF1 probably had a lot of the same words and so by working on the FF2 deck I would end up covering the stuff I missed from FF1.
Well, today I’m at 1,212/1436 words learned (84%) on FF2 but FF1 has only come up to 65%. I didn’t realize just how much difference there would be between the two games.
Interesting. There’s definitely a shared pool of vocab eventually, but it’s probably big enough that you need to go through multiple JRPGs to really get to the bottom of it.
The thing with reading ability is that the better you get, the faster you get better because you can read so much more in the same amount of time. I hope that the people following this club will get the benefits of this virtuous circle by the time we reach the PS1 games because the amount of text will aggressively increase as will the diversity of vocabulary and grammar.
For reference I checked with a random dump of FF7’s script and what I would consider to be a reasonable Week 1 content adds up to around 11k characters. For those familiar with the game that’s the Reactor 1 sequence + the train sequence after that, before you arrive in the slums. That’s at least thrice as much text as any week we’ve done so far in FF1 and 2, and it’s basically all mandatory text, not optional NPC dialogue.
I remember that this lore dump by Jessie took me an insane amount of time to get through ~3 years ago (actually I mined a card on my old Anki deck from this convo so I have the exact date: 2023-04-08):
ね、クラウド。いっしょに見ない？
ミッドガル列車路線図ディスプレイ。
二人で見ればきっと楽しいと思うの。私、説明してあげるね
私、こういうの好きなのよ。爆弾とかモニタ画面とかハイテク関係
さ、はじめるわよ
これが魔晄都市ミッドガルの全景フレームモデルね
スケールはだいたい１/１００００ってとこかな
上のプレートは、地上から約50Ｍ離れているの
プレートを支えてるのは中心の大きな支柱と各区画に建てられた柱･･････。
柱は、機械塔とも呼ばれてるわ
ヒソヒソ･･････（爆破した壱番魔晄炉が北のはずれにあるの）
そこから順番に２，３･･････８番魔晄炉まで
８つの魔晄炉がミッドガルの電力供給を支えているのよ
それぞれの街には、名前もあったんだけど
ミッドガルに住む人は誰も覚えちゃいないわ
名前なんかより、番号で呼ぶの。そういうところなのよ、ここは。
ふぅ･･･、次はこれ！ほら、見て
私たちがいま乗ってる列車のルートがこれよ
プレートを支えている大きな柱に螺旋状にレールが通ってるの。
今は柱のちょうど真ん中あたりね
各通過ポイントにはＩＤ検知エリアが設置されてるの
乗客すべての身分やらなにやら全部！
神羅ビルのホストコンピュータと連動してチェックされちゃうわけよ
ひそひそ･･････
（私たちはどう見たって不審人物ニセのＩＤで通過してるの）
噂をすれば、ね この光がＩＤ検知エリアのサインなの
ひそひそ･･････
（暗くなるからチカンが多いのよ。ＩＤ検知エリアは･･････）
ま、それはさておき。もうすぐ地上に帰れるってわけ。なんだか、ホッとするね
The good news is that it’s a fairly comfortable read now.
I really really hope I continue to get faster because like you said, these games are going to grow their dialog significantly…
for folks who are unaware, here’s the line/character count for the Pixel Remaster versions (excluding punctuation):
| FF | Lines | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 443 | 14,262 |
| 2 | 829 | 28,160 |
| 3 | 1,243 | 29,222 |
| 4 | 2,598 | 43,105 |
| 5 | 3,426 | 50,670 |
| 6 | 4,205 | 75,067 |
Even that jump between 8-bit and 16-bit eras (FF3 → FF4) double the amount of dialog (by lines but not pure characters).
2 → looks like a big jump by lines, but then you see it’s only another 1,000 characters so it shouldn’t be any more difficult than 2 has been, yeah?
I found a tool online that lets me dump the text directly from the FF7 discs so that I could check the amount of text myself because I couldn’t find a very clear answer online as to the size of the script: GitHub - cebix/ff7tools: Translation tools for the PlayStation 1 version of Final Fantasy VII
I end up with 1,134,981 characters. So a slight increase from FF6’s 75,067.
EDIT: After cleaning up a bit and removing the 「」 etc I’m down to a cool 1,050,123
Hey! I apologize for that, I determined that large sections of vocabulary were actually out of order so I went to clean it up but then was having trouble last night after cleaning out the deck.
I’m getting the sections back up now, 1 and 2 are available as of 11:40PM EST.
Once I finish getting the sections back up I won’t be touching it again!
Sorry again 
No worries! I’m behind enough on the FF2 deck that I don’t exactly need another one, but it’s nice to feel like I’m getting ahead of this one.
Ooh, I made the mistake of counting a number of bytes instead of number of characters like a noob. The actual count is 337,483. Which is still a huge increase from FF6 (and more than 1-6 altogether) but it’s “only” 4.5x bigger.
That’s unreasonable. I’m not surprised though. This is the beginning of that era when every japanese game insisted on itself, hard. In the writing, anyway. There are so many damn games that start like this:
Good morning!
Good morning!
How are you?
Oh Im fine.
Big day ahead of you huh?
Yep, it’s the big day.
How do you feel about that?
…
50 lines later you’re allowed to leave the house, and get another cutscene full of text that is equally vapid.
FF7 really isn’t that bad in comparison, but something like Trails is full of text that doesn’t even need to be there, and even Trails is far, far from the worst I’ve seen. Get a damn editor, JRPGs!
Just to add some positivity, FF Tactics (at least in the English version) is spot on. Plenty of text, but it never feels like pointless meandering. The translation in the remake is wonderful, too.
The Yakuza/Like a Dragon games are terrible with this. So many scenes could be improved by just cutting like 2/3 of the lines. I also started enjoying FF16 more when I started just skimming through all the redundant sidequest dialogue instead of waiting to hear the (actually quite good, but very slow) voice-acting.
I think the problem is even more stark when you compare to a “western” JRPG, like Claire Obscur. The script is super tight, yet it still does everything it needs to, and not in a barebones way either. It just doesn’t babble on and on about nothing.
I think this type of chit-chat is especially infuriating for people like us who are not very fluent and for whom it’s a huge added workload to go through this effectively pointless dialogue, but obviously the devs do not cater to our small community. I think when you’re fluent it can be “comfy” to have all these small, pointless dialogues. Makes the place feel more alive.
In contrast I find the dialogue in the early FF that we’re now playing to be too utilitarian and therefore a bit immersion-breaking. Everybody has something to say that’s immediately relevant to our quest. Nobody seems to have anything going on privately (well, except Paul the thief I suppose).
Counterpoint - I was criticizing that kind of dialogue IN ENGLISH. Still a hateful waste of time. I know it’s supposed to be “comfy”, and that just makes it more infuriating to me, not less. These people typically have no personality outside of tired tropes, and they can only speak in tired tropes… endlessly.
You’re right that this old stuff is very utilitarian, but I’m not comparing it to a 40 year old JRPG. I’m comparing it to… I dunno, every single half decent movie, TV show or book I’ve ever consumed. I’d rather read one sentence telling me what I need to do than 12 sentences of nothing, but I’d much MUCH rather read just a few well crafted sentences that pack a lot of meaning into them, and properly flesh out a unique character. I basically peace out on these games in english, I can’t imagine bothering to try them in japanese.
There’s a lot of this in Hundred Line, since it has a lot of VN origins/influence. Yeah, I fucking get it, this character has a single defining trait and you’re going to back to that single trait with several lines of pointless dialogue every time they appear on the screen. Ugh. Fortunately, it’s easy to skip and there’s plenty of other good stuff so I keep on with it.
Yeah maybe I just don’t have played one of those games in a while. I never played Yakuza for instance, so I don’t know how I would feel about that.
Usually what frustrates me at the beginning of videogames is when there’s a protracted, unskippable, completely on rails tutorial sequence that forces me to do basic things even though I already played dozens of similar games and I know what to do.
Oh I can crouch for stealth? And if I sneak behind an enemy there’s a killing blow? And I can collect Xetherdonium Shards 
to improve my character through a skill tree? Wow, tell me less!