The Bravely Default II Demo is out on Nintendo Switch, and I figured this would be a good chance to do a play through and learn some Japanese. I will be updating the main post as I go along and reserving the first couple of replies. I’ve never tried this format here before so let’s see how it goes.
Note: The screenshots are at home on my Switch, so I’ll be uploading those later on. For now, I’ve been watching let’s plays to get the text so I’ll change the placeholders once I do that.
About the game
Bravely Default II was developed by Silicon Studio and published by Square Enix and Nintendo. It’s an old school JRPG with a unique battle mechanic and an interesting story. I’ll go over the battle stuff when we get there, but it’s got a great pedigree and should be a good game overall.
How the Let's Play is going to work
This is basically going to be shown via screenshots of the game as we go through. I’ll write some commentary for each and go over the translations.
Japanese Translation
I’ll be providing the original game text and then my own translation as far as I can manage. The English will be in spoiler tags as will the furigana. I was going to provide a summary of the original localization, but I think it just makes everything look a bit too messy. I can probably provide these later if anyone is really interested.
I’m going to do my best with the translation without using anything other than Jisho and maybe DeepL, so feel free to comment and correct anything you see that’s wrong or just off.
Spoiler Rules
It’s a new game and the demo story is an offshoot of the main game, so I don’t think we need to worry too much about spoilers.
Vocab and Unusual Kanji
I’m only level 29, so I’m not sure how unusual some of these are, but they were ones that stood out to me.
体験版 - demo version, and I believe adding 先行 to the front means pre-realease demo
難易度 - The Kanji are all familiar, but when relating to games, this is difficulty level. And I’m sure most people who play video games should be familiar with 難易度チューニング.
Looking for Elvis??, we’ll look for an asterisk??
(Cheated again, “Elvis hired someone to help him look for stones called Asterisks”)
(Maybe it’s a placeholder in the demo?)
オート再生 here is for automatic playback. You can let the dialogue continue automatically without input if you just want to sit back and read the story. 再生 is interesting here because I know both Kanji and can figure out what they mean when used together in this context even though the literal translation is “automatically live again”.
スキップ is self explanatory if you’re used to JRPG dialog boxes.
Moving forward, I won’t spoiler the interface parts since they take a bit of explaining and the translations are fairly simple.
I’ve never heard of this game; it sounds interesting (and of course very FF-esque)!
