Today I learned there's a Getter Robo mahjong manga.

Maybe I should learn mahjong.

Bandai Namco will hold a new Super Robot Wars livestream on April 20 that includes a segment for SRW Y, which also raises speculations of a new Expansion Pass coming for the console game:
www.rpgsite.net/news/20126-new-super-rob...

It's always a good year to become a Sakura Wars guy!

1, 2, and 3 are some of my favorite games of all time. They're genuinely charming, and there's something about the way you interact with different characters that's just fun.

Found on the bird site.

This one really depends, right? Like, did the unofficial TL also use 必殺技 for Papyrus's attack? Would Papyrus have used 必殺技 to describe a special attack that has no actual 殺 involved? The important thing there is to match the phrasing between characters.

It says LIKE a walker machine, to be fair...

Absolutely, yes. This game will treat you like you know nothing about Touhou going in, and you'll get gradually eased into the story and cast much like you would with an SRW game.

Save 20% on Fantasy Maiden Wars - DREAM OF THE STRAY DREAMER - on Steam Command a legion of more than 70 beloved Touhou Project heroines on an expansive quest to uncover the cause of mysterious incidents blossoming throughout Gensokyo. Deploy units on grid-based maps to b...

Fantasy Maiden Wars is currently 20% off on Steam, and I assure you this is a LOT of game for $28 bux. Like three and a half Fire Emblems' worth of SRPG gameplay, all with a single contiguous story.

store.steampowered.com/app/3575980/...

Sakura Wars Lost Media Found for the First Time!!

I was recently able to obtain and scan 30 NEVER BEFORE SEEN Character Design Sheets of the Shanghai Revue and its supporting cast from the cancelled Sakura Wars MMO! I hope you'll enjoy them!
archive.org/details/saku...

I find this one in particular fascinating, because my first instinct would have been "I will fight you", or even "I will fight you IRL".

I went ahead and replied in a quote here. The simple version is: JP writers have tools EN writers don't, but EN writers also have tools JP writers don't. Languages are complicated like that.

Thanks for asking!
bsky.app/profile/dram...

Languages are complicated, culture-suffused devices that use different tools to express ideas. I get why a director would stick with the instances that come up most frequently in his work, but there's a more nuanced discussion to be had. There's no "better" or "worse" when it comes to languages. ✂️

There's also terms that used broadly in JP but require narrower words in EN.

鰐 can be crocodile or alligator.
栗鼠 can be squirrel or chipmunk.
鼠 can be mouse or rat.

Not that EN's much better - the word "set" can be a noun or verb or adjective, each with its own separate words in other languages.

But I do envy East Asian languages' ability to construct entire sentences referencing a person without ever once using a third-person gendered pronoun. That's way harder to do in EN, which makes it a challenge to translate properly when someone's gender is being obfuscated on purpose.

EN gets its own fun expressive tools, like how we can turn most nouns into verbs and still have the result sound coherent. We can capitalize words to denote proper nouns without relying on special brackets like JP media often does. We also have definite and indefinite articles.

JP also has places where the language oversimplifies in ways that EN doesn't. East Asian languages often leave plurals vague—葡萄があります could mean "There is a grape" or "There are grapes", and you have to just kind of infer which one it is when there aren't any visuals provided.

Even sticking with the 1st/2nd-person pronouns point, the inverse also applies when translating EN to JP. Imagine how challenging it is assigning those to every single speaking character in a major work of English-language media, and keeping it consistent across multiple iterations and publishers.

I have many thoughts about it, but I believe his statement was oversimplifying. EN and JP both have tools in their linguistic toolkits that the other language doesn't. East Asian languages' plethora of 1st and 2nd-person pronouns is just one example of this among many. But... 🧵

Is "pinku bento box" too old??

I've also been playing this on the Switch Online service lately, and it's been a fun time! The party experience is a nice mechanic that I wish more strategy RPGs used.

Comp copy day! \o/

Dragon Quest: The Mark of Erdrick volume 3 is out in stores on March 24!

In which there's a surprise appearance by BOB (not the most inspired acronym...), Arus does his best Ultraman impression, and we get an impromptu geography lesson about Loran and Carmen.

I don't disagree! A particularly passionate translator won't let other people's interest or lack thereof deter them from doing something they personally want to do.

But the likelihood of a proper TL still drops like a rock when a bad precedent is set—that passion doesn't come easy.

It's a lose-lose situation for official publishers when a series already has accepted fan spellings for character names, even if they're flat-out wrong. Those are the names the target audience knows and accepts. If you change them, fans will get mad. If you don't, they stay wrong. It's lose-lose.

Imagine showing modern fans "trendy" fansubs from those days, with designer typesetting and god-awful highlighted karaoke song lyric subtitles done by people who were so hung up on whether they could, they didn't stop to consider whether they should.

I guess that one Otaking video would cover it...

I still think his name should have been Wright. It was an extremely on-the-nose name given the themes of the story. I assume "Light" was also standardized from fan translations.

THAT is the problem with "better than nothing". MTPE fan TL is worse than nothing. It's actively detrimental to the games supposedly being translated and the community at large.

It makes players associate the game with slop.

It forestalls good-faith translations.

It wastes everyone's time.

The point of a fan TL is to give others access to media they wouldn't otherwise be able to appreciate. If it won't reach people, your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

The existence of this MTPE slop translation is actively disincentivizing all potential serious translation efforts in the future.

After this, if someone wants to do a legitimate translation of Segagaga, they'll only reach a fraction of the initial TL's audience. Obviously most people who've played one TL aren't going to come back for a second TL, no matter how much better written and more reliable it is. They've moved on.

But even that point is just beating a dead horse. The real problem is that this slop is being pushed out for a game that has no prior translation, so this will be the version that any interested people play and draw their impressions from. Being first makes it WORSE, for reasons outlined below.

Generative algorithms don't understand language. They see text and generate corresponding text based on a dataset we don't know. They have no memory, no grasp of context, no database of names/terms for basic consistency. Their "reasoning" is a black box. You can't understand a black box's choices.