End of a busy gaming week, start of a new week.

I ran into some frustration yesterday while trying to play The Legend of the Heroes: Trails in the Skies in Japanese. It’s really text-heavy and just shows how little I know when it comes to translating games, especially without pointers or directions for the quest objectives, the closest I can figure out is “Ok I need to go 西口 to マクドナルド病院 and look for a モンスター?” If you don’t understand what I just wrote, then you can get the idea how I feel when I encounter 95% of everything in this game.

It’s not to say it’s a bad game, in fact it’s one of the best JRPGs to come out in the past decade. I’m more frustrated in the fact that this is a game that came out in 2006, was just translated to English a little over a year ago, and there has been 5 sequels for the game already. So when you’re playing something that looks like this:

Fast forward 5 games later, we have something that looks like this:

And the only announcement from the publisher, Xseed is that they will release the second game in the series sometime in Mid-2014 and there’s no guarantee that they will even localize the third game. With the time it will take to play the latter game in English, it’ll be already 2024 (which by then they will already be on the 10th sequel…get where I am going?). It really makes you wish there was some sort of magical ability to learn Japanese faster. In the meantime I’ll stick with the English translation for now while I continue to build up my Japanese skills…since that’s pretty much the only thing I can do until I’m confident enough to be able to read a bit more than “Go North and Kill Monster”.

But what can I say, I’m spoiled. Even so I still have a bunch of quality translated JRPGs in my backlog, such as Tales of Graces f and Xillia (and Xillia 2 coming soon), Neptunia, Final Fantasy XIII, Persona 4, and now Bravely Default which is coming very soon. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I suppose what I am trying to say is I need to stick with the basics with language learning before tackling a sprawling, epic JRPG this early on. It’s like trying to tackle Tolstoy’s War and Peace after you have just learned to read Curious George.

Can…ok there’s a paint can…I think this means “George is HOLDING a CAN of Paint!” Yes I am a genius! Where’s my copy of War and Peace?