/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>21058958
>Which masadaverse game should I jump into first? Cheers.
Uuuh, I'll just say that I don't think you should be playing Masada games so early. Like, I am 100% a proponent of both reading early, and not being intimidated by hard games. I am also a proponent of of Masada games not being as hard as they are said to be.

But uh, regardless, you do NOT want to read a Masada game early on into your studies with no reading practice/grammar study/whatever. Like, Dies irae for example is a very abstract game. Fights are almost never "He punches but I block with elbow and explicitly punch him in his weakpoint which is his lower stomach." They're usually back and forth debates/yelling matches and whoever has the most GUTS wins. Like that is literally true. The battles in Dies irae are largely dialogue-based, and if you have a weak grasp of what's being said, none of them will be cool at all. Not only will you not appreciate the cool things Masada's doing with his prose, you won't understand what's going on. To say nothing of the broader plot! I have a friend who finished Dies irae and straight-up did not understand the plot. He didn't understand what had happened. Reason being, the plot is abstract. It's metaphorical. A good chunk of it's next to impossible to understand without intimate knowledge of the Masadaverse already, or otherwise an extremely good eye for subtle foreshadowing. All this culminates in the fact that in a game where you need to be very aware of the metaphors, allegories, and so on the author is pushing, a weak grasp on Japanese will SLAUGHTER you. I mean just RUIN the game. Like I said, my friend legitimately, 100% did not understand the plot. The simplest aspect of the game! He didn't get it, because it was too abstract and his Japanese too bad. There's no chart that appears on-screen explaining the true plot of the game. You have to pay attention and understand subtle things that bad Japanese will take a massive dump on. And even if you don't care about the plot, and don't mind finishing the game having no idea what happened, it remains that the bulk of the game itself (once you finish the SOL-heavy common route) are these extremely vague conversations that rely on subtext, and fights that are clashes of ideas not fists. In both cases, weak Japanese will just ruin the game. Maybe you've got such a boner for Masada that you won't be miserable skipping through conversations understanding nothing, but I really don't think it's a good idea overall.

tl;dr going anywhere near Masada games with weak Japanese is a death sentence, they're not as hard as people may think but they're still abstract, allegorical, and challenging texts that someone with weak Japanese simply will not be able to understand properly. And unlike say moege where not understanding things don't matter, there's a good chance you finish the game having not even understood the basic plot.