🍔 Mother 2 / Earthbound (Game Club) - Week 2

Japanese Language Book Clubs
21

Ok, I finally took the time to finish this week.

w2

Is giant steps a joke because it’s a literal giant footprint but also you have to climb giant steps to get there?

The snake boss music surprised me because I heard it in many a dank maymay and I didn’t know it came from here:

https://youtu.be/A_Gj-RJeeng?list=PL1kU0pk5M3GCwzveqamX71sW3RmCzuXB5

I expected that I would gain something from reaching the giant step. I guess it’s about the journey, not the destination.

I would enjoy exploring Twoson 200% more if there was bloody kanji. It’s weird that this game never got “remastered” given its cult following. All millennial/Gen-Z hipsters would line up to buy it I’m sure.

It could be partially because of my skimming the dialogue and not understanding 100% because of lack of kanji but I feel like this chain of event is very weird, no? Like we reach the giant step, then a cop tells us to go to the station (but doesn’t bring us there, for some reason), then we get assaulted by a bunch of cops, then we reach Twoson and get assaulted by some dude who wants us to go fetch someone else.

It’s like I’m playing Final Fantasy 3.

22

Glad to hear you’re starting to feel better! Hopefully that has continued in the 5 days since you posted this! And thank you @ChristopherFritz, for creating the board!

I finally got around to playing through the Week 2 content this weekend after completely disappearing from the forum for almost 2 weeks…

Long RL story...

My company suddenly let go a bunch of people, blindsiding everyone, and didn’t offer any explanation for two days. Then when they did ‘explain’, they said “we’re restructuring, but it’s not because of AI,”… then proceeded to talk for 45 minutes about how we need to use AI… I wish I could have jumped in and yelled that they weren’t fooling anyone, so they might as well just be honest. In any case, while I still have a job, a lot of people I’ve worked with for a long time did not get so lucky. And I’m also being pushed into a role I know from experience will cause me to burn out sooner or later. :face_exhaling: Hopefully pummeling video game enemies will be a helpful catharsis over the coming weeks, though I’m thinking I need to start spending more of my time updating my resume and looking up job listings…

Back to the Game

I got a game over against the Giant Step boss while playing in Japanese, so when I switched over to my English save I decided I’d grind for a bit to avoid that…only to instead die to an ever increasing swarm of ants that just kept calling for help. Ugh. I then proceeded to also die against the police chief, whom I had beaten easily in the Japanese run-through. :person_facepalming: I was amused at being told by a police officer that I should be playing video games instead, though.

I was downright cackling when I stopped by the Twoson preschool in my English run-through, though. My Detective Conan naming scheme turned out to perfect, considering how often Ayumi in DC gets kidnapped or held hostage. Also, the line from one of the kids in the school was perfect: “Ayumi is like a mother to me. You may not be able to comprehend my emotions. I might have a baby face, but I possess the mind of an adult.” Sorry kid, but I’m Conan, so I’m the one who has a kid’s body and the mind of an adult! :laughing:

I did note several things about translation differences this week:
The billboard entering Twoson breaks the 4th wall asking if we ‘got the joke’ concerning having ‘two’ in the name. As a native English speaker, the pun is so obvious that I was just kind of ignoring it. But it probably wouldn’t be any more obvious to a Japanese kid than Japanese puns are to us! Obviously the English version couldn’t translate that, so they had to replace it with a (bad) attempt at a joke instead…

There was a brief piece of battle-text when fighting Everdred/トンチキ which exposed a mistake in the English translation, since at one point he was referred to as ‘it’. Whoops.

The mouse in Apple Kid’s house was thoroughly robbed of character in the English translation. :frowning: There was absolutely no attempt to mimic the ‘わがはい’…‘である’ speech pattern, which is a shame.

In terms of language but not translation, one of Apple Kid’s lines was “そこいらへんでごろごろしててください” Is that いらへん Kansai-ben? Also, one of the two musicians kept ending his sentences with や, instead of だ. Again, Kansai-ben? Or am I reading too much into those things?

In other notes, how is it that the entire town was talking about Ayumi/Paula getting kidnapped, but her parents apparently had absolutely no idea? Seriously…

And finally, those mushrooms… It’s been too long since I’ve played this game. Does anyone know if we will eventually get a spell or item that can heal that effect without having to get to a hospital? Please?

I’m out of time playing for the weekend, but hopefully I’ll be able to get to the Week 3 content mid-week, so I’m caught up in time to play with everyone for Week 4!

23

Oh this is another reference to Earthbound in Undertale. Spoilers for one of the game’s climactic battles in the genocide route: Sans has a line of dialogue in the fight with him that is along the lines of “on days like these, kids like you should be burning in hell” which is a reference to the cop’s line here

24

Uhhhhh yes and no, thanks for the well wishes. I hope things get better on your side too :heart: . I’m kinda sinking into a depression I’m worried is the direct consequence of a messed up gut microbiome but we’ll see… it has waned compared to how severe the last two days were so that’s something. Don’t think I’d be here posting if I felt like that again but I really wanted to answer your question –

Language Q answer

Good instinct in that いらへん would be a Kansai いらない, but the way you want to parse this is actually そこいらへん

そこいら takes the そこ for “there” into more of an “around there” with some vagueness. It’s the same thing as if you ever see そこら (one of my JP dictionaries calls it a more spoken language form of そこら). The へん here is 辺. It’s a big way of just gesturing to “that area over there.”

I wouldn’t want to say for sure without lines in front of me but if the や is in place of where you’d expect だ, yeah, that’s Kansai-ben! You’re probably right because these musicians feel like the sort of people who’d get that kind of speech.

Also spoiler response

I’m not sure if you mean a more tangible immediate thing or if you missed that we got the first of the 8 melodies, the main macguffin for the adventure.

This game is playing with RPG conventions for sure and kinda surreal and irreverent and goofy so I wouldn’t exactly disagree about the flow of it being weird. I think the purposeful way that happens makes it totally work for me but it had actually occurred to me already that one could pretty much feel the same way I do when I complain about FF3 plot about what happens here. But for me when things are random, sudden, sometimes anticlimactic, sometimes even dreamlike, the game is doing that intentionally rather than fumbling writing.

I like fighting the cops though. They don’t take you away to make sure you don’t get ambushed right out of a tough boss, which is a little silly in the narrative but this whole game is about being silly so I’m ok with it heh. But I find it funny how they have been repeatedly the literal roadblock stopping us from the exploring the world so to finally break out of the opening areas, rather than just waiting and advancing something else the way you would elsewhere, you beat up the police. Just had to bait them with trespassing.

25

Hospital healer, only. (You wouldn’t want to put him out of a job, would you?)

This is where playing on the Switch and using Joy-Cons comes in handy. It’s easy to rotate the whole left controller as needed.

26
Language Q response

Ahh, I see. Thanks for the explanation about the そこいらへん phrase. That does make more sense. I talked to the musicians first and noted the repeated use of や from one of them, so my mind was just tuned in to the possibility of seeing Kansai-ben, I guess. :slight_smile: