/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5843131]

Should I learn Japanese to play Final Fantasy games in their original language? I feel like the stories would be better in the original language since they didn't make sense in English.

[Anonymous No.5843137]

>>5843131
They aren't. Japanese just don't get storytelling.

[Anonymous No.5843138]

With all due respect and no trolling intended, you're not smart enough for that.

[Anonymous No.5843142]

>>5843131
They make sense in english if you just study mythologies of the world. Or at least, as much sense as they have to offer, this isn't some classical lit it's a fucking video game.

[Anonymous No.5843148]

the stories are shit no matter what language you read them in

[Anonymous No.5843157]

can't look at selphie the same way after 2019's kyoanus arson attack

[Anonymous No.5843158]

I'll take "colossal wastes of time" for $400, Alex
just play them in English

[Anonymous No.5843163]

>>5843158
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXpQJkUj9-w

[Anonymous No.5843167]

>>5843131
You have internet connection in your village ?

[Anonymous No.5843168]

アイラブユゥ ドドンパチィィィィ

[Anonymous No.5843174]

>>5843131
Just do it or don't.

[Anonymous No.5843204]

>>5843131
Japanese is pretty much the hardest language for an english speaker to learn, its even slightly harder to learn than Mandarin. You are in for an uphill battle that probably isn't really worth it.

[Anonymous No.5843462]

It would be more personally enriching to hammer nails into your skull than to learn japanese so you can play Final Fantasy "as it was meant to be experienced". Why make THAT your objective when there's a lifetime's worth of untranslated gems right around the corner

[Anonymous No.5843465]

>>5843131
I learned Hiragana and Katakana in 1 month. I am a slav so pronunciation is easy as fuck for me. Also Kaji is fucking hell and to actually learn reading in this language takes years.
>>5843174
>picrel
lel

[Anonymous No.5843471]

Just fucking do it. It's not just FF, everything is better in its original language.

[Anonymous No.5843473]

>>5843465
>I learned Hiragana and Katakana in 1 month
wtf, getting your syllabaries down shouldn't take more than a we-
>I am a slav
nevermind

[Anonymous No.5843496]

>>5843471
lmao, wrong

[Anonymous No.5843502]

>>5843473
Not everyone here is a 105 IQ juggernaut like yourself

[Anonymous No.5843503]

>>5843137
Dazai did alright.

[Anonymous No.5843518]

>>5843496
Ehh he's not wrong though, there's no translation that's not a re-write.

[Anonymous No.5843526]

>>5843204
What do you mean "probably", it's the most dumb fuck stupidest idea ever. Because the translation is supposedly better? Maybe you're better off if videogames are slightly less "good", then you're less hooked on them. What is being good except a bunch of endorphins in the brain say "yay"? They're bloody stories. I'll let you in on a secret - stories are all bullshit. Anyone can write them, including the dialogue. They rarely come up with something truly original - even good ideas are ones that have often been rehashed from somewhere else - especially in a jrpg game. You're just romanticizing the idea, it's a grass is always greener thing. Forget it OP.

[Anonymous No.5843531]

>>5843518
yeah but japanese dragon ball Z is awful

[Anonymous No.5843541]

>>5843473
nigger I was taking one lesson daily, I wasn't trying to be the fastest autist to learn kana

[Anonymous No.5843559]

>>5843131
Jap stories are the same 5 anime plots for teenagers repeated ad nauseum no matter which language they're in. This would be the equivalent of learning English to read Twilight and Harry Potter

[Anonymous No.5843823]

FF7 and 8 are better in Japanese, especially 7. Xenogears too. This is when scripts and menus/names/other peripheral text got really cumbersome and companies weren't prepared to properly equip staff to do a full, careful translation.

Are they better to the degree that these things alone make learning an entire foreign language worth it? No, but learning a foreign language in and of itself is still good

[Anonymous No.5843861]

>>5843823
For what it's worth though, you can learn some cool shit. There is some shit that can't really be reasonably translated. For example, Yuffie's ultimate weapon. In English this is translated as "Conformer." In Japanese it's "不倶戴天" (fugutaiten) which is an idiomatic expression. It's a literary item that's often used to paint an enemy as being like a sworn adversary. So a better translation might be like, "Nemesis," although you can see how that doesn't exactly hit the nail on the head either.

[Anonymous No.5844072]

If you're gonna learn Japanese for gaming purposes, you're better off doing it for Japanese-exclusive games that either don't have an English translation, or have terrible/incomplete English translations.

[Anonymous No.5844149]

>>5843131

[Anonymous No.5844186]

>>5843131
Don't. The Japs suck at story telling which is why they use oversexualized loli characters to compensate for the plot's lack of substance.

[Anonymous No.5844194]

>>5843559
There are tons of people that did just that. Nothing wrong with investing time into things you enjoy.

[Anonymous No.5844219]

>Start learning Japanese because you're interested in retro games
>Get through RTK1 and RTK3 with Anki
>Get through Genki I and II
>Get through Core 10k with Anki
>Start a mining deck
>Review the Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar

Then you realize you don't feel like playing Japanese retro games as much as reading esoteric works of philosophy and religion. This will happen, OP.

[Anonymous No.5844240]

>>5843158
And then I'll take "Potent Potables" for $800.

[Anonymous No.5844241]

>>5844219
Based and Heisig pilled.

[Anonymous No.5844246]

>>5844219
I think retro games are better learning material for beginners than esoteric philosophical works.

[Anonymous No.5844536]

>>5843462
Because said ((untranslated gems)) are untranslated for a reason and that reason is that they're just not that good.

[Anonymous No.5844560]

>>5844219
I mostly use my Japanese nowadays to read novels and make money. Rarely I play games in Japanese, although I usually opt for Japanese when paired with original/translation.

[Anonymous No.5844564]

>>5844219
This. I had to get beyond my 20s to see that Japan offers so much more than just shallow pop culture.

[Anonymous No.5844664]

>>5843531
Dragon Ball is shit in general.

[Anonymous No.5844735]

You know, years of studying a foreign language so you can perfectly understand the shitty plot of a video game is pretty hilarious.

Now, if learning Japanese can help you professional or socially, go for it, OP.

[Anonymous No.5844742]

>>5844735
I started with FF in Japanese after a few months of cramming vocabulary.

[Anonymous No.5844783]

>>5844560
What do you use your Engrish for?

[Anonymous No.5844905]

FF1 - Literally the AD&D "Temple of Elemental Evil" adventure, but with a time loop twist.

FF2 - literally just Fantasy Star Wars, but you go to Hell to kill Palpatine's ghost once and for all.

FF3 - Harry Potter and friends are given a bunch of superpowers to stop Voldemort from unleashing a sexy cloud because Slytherin didn't win the house cup when he was a kid.

FF4 - You were Luke Skywalker the whole time, Darth Vader was your brother, most of your friends die, and you go to the moon to kill a guy mad that the Earth has life on it,

FF5 - Some idiot traps every evil soul in a tree, the tree comes to life and wants to genocide reality because its THAT EVIL.

FF6 - Literally just read the Emperor Joker comic book story; its the same thing.

FF7 - The most generic protagonist alive and his one-note friends stop the most generic pretty-boi villain in a plot ripped from Captian Planet.

FF8 - A bunch of orphans have to kill a witch from the future by letting her win first, and then killing her so that her plan never happens.

FF9 - Smash the plots of all the other games together, but ALIENS DID IT.

[Anonymous No.5845116]

>>5843465
>takes years.
fuck you look up ajatt. I was reading murakami within the first year

[Anonymous No.5845126]

>>5844905
Have sex

[Anonymous No.5845141]

>>5845126
>believing that you can't both have sex and have stupid opinions on an overhyped series.

[Anonymous No.5845236]

>>5843131
that's one black nigga

[Anonymous No.5845256]

>>5845126
But he's not wrong.

[Anonymous No.5845283]

>>5843138
Are you a leftie by any chance?

[Anonymous No.5845894]

>>5844735
Not only that but if you're planning on learning a foreign language at least learn a more useful one like Russian or Mandarin.

[Anonymous No.5845903]

>>5845894
What good is Russian

[Anonymous No.5846068]

>>5844905
>Rowling ripped off FF3
wow epic

[Anonymous No.5846274]

>>5845903
It's one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and one of the UN's 6 official languages.
Besides it sounds badass when spoken.

[Anonymous No.5846289]

>>5846068
If anything she probably tiped of Troll. It was a film back in 1986 where a boy named Harry Potter Jr. learns magic to defeat an evil troll.

Even the wardrobe selection is eerily similar.

[Anonymous No.5846324]

>>5846274
>"spulea sporch nyeh" ad infinitum

[Anonymous No.5846621]

>>5845903
Literature.
No, really, Russia is about 15-20 years ahead on the popular literary trends.
For instance massive "isekai" (called "пoпaдaнцы" there) boom happened there ~25 years ago, with dozens of such books released monthly, and started winding down in the last years. A beter version of SAO was written in '98 (virtual tourism goes awry, suddenly rules of real world apply to virtual tourists, they have to beat the fantasy universe's bad guy to escape, the deaths are now final, tons of people die. In the second book, MC is going back into "real" virtuality)

[Anonymous No.5846625]

>>5844536
How do you explain the shit games that actually make it over here though? A lot of good games are left untranslated because publishers are insanely out of touch with what gamers actually want

[Anonymous No.5846649]

>>5844536

You highly over-estimate the amount of the people that are bilingual, know how to romhack for old consoles, and are willing to work for free. It's very much not a "everything of value has been done" situation. Even major devs like the guys who made the Mario and Luigi games have stuff left untranslated.
If you're only talking official games, then you might as well have pulled names out of a hat, it's so random what got translated (many of which would get butcherd anyway). Seariously translations will start in the middle of series, then end before the series does.

[Anonymous No.5846663]

ROFL at the suggestion of Russian as a useful language. Only this board.

[Anonymous No.5846673]

Sorry, buddy. It's not the language, it's the stories.

[Anonymous No.5846683]

>>5844905
Except only one person dies in ff4. Everyone else just comes back, negating the emotional impact of their sacrifice. It's my fave ff, but that's really annoying. Especially when you never get to pick your party anyway.

[Anonymous No.5846695]

>>5843131
Sadly they are already better in English, if you didn't enjoy them, I doubt playing a blander version of them will do much to change your opinion.

[Anonymous No.5846710]

>>5846663
It's one of the only cultures with worthwile lit

[Anonymous No.5846824]

>>5845894
>Mandarin
but that'd force him to associate with ch*nkoid insects

[Anonymous No.5847473]

>>5846289
"Deh!"

[Anonymous No.5848041]

>>5846068
No, she ripped of Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic, which features a glasses-wearing orphan who lives under a staircase, has a pet owl, and is taught about a secret magical world

[Anonymous No.5848054]

Unless you're aware of every Japanese cultural reference the same as you are of your own country's, then learning Japanese tomplay video games is incredibly stupid. Because the Japanese fill their pop culture with more memes than we do.

[Anonymous No.5848113]

>>5846710
>2000 rubles have been deposited into your account

[Anonymous No.5848173]

>>5843131
No they don't. You shouldn't assume that Japanese writers are better than American ones. It's an individual thing.

[Anonymous No.5848381]

>>5843131
>OP:Should I learn Japanese?
>tardanon:No they don't
derp

[Anonymous No.5848679]

>>5848054
While this is partially true - there are a lot of cultural references in Japanese games you won't catch - it's not really important. Putting aside that you aren't guaranteed to understand references even in your own language/culture in the first place, the number of lines that will meet this criteria in a given text-heavy game* range from 0.1% to a hard 0%. It's really not something to worry about, and when the references do pop up, you can just shrug them off or google them to learn more, just like you would a reference you didn't get in your own language. It's really not a big deal.

*exception for Quiz games. Mainly talking about JRPGs and the like. I think the most relevant thing for people will be like playing jidaimono games without knowing the names of historical figures/etc like a Japanese teen might, but this is more of a learning opportunity than a reason to avoid learning a whole language.

[Anonymous No.5848865]

>>5844219
thanks for the resources, been hitting core2k for a year now, I hope i'll be able to read japanese novels too one day. I would love to read akutagawa's works somedays

[Anonymous No.5848874]

>>5848865
>been hitting core2k for a year now,
Do you only add 10 cards per day?
Try something from Akutagawa to see how much you understand.
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/index_pages/person879.html

[Anonymous No.5848897]

>>5843137
This is true as far as I know. A lot of the nuances that you hear in the translated versions aren't really there in the original japanese. Like if it's a Shakespearean influenced RPG, they won't really have the same way of demonstrating the 16th century dialogue much like the way it's done in english. Like for example "Wouldst thou be so kind as to tell me thy name?" (名前は言うをください)I probably messed that up, but basically it's just not the same

[Anonymous No.5848950]

>>5848874
n-no, only 5 a day...
Should I do more?

[Anonymous No.5849005]

>>5848950
Depends on whether you are happy with moving at a glacial pace. Otherwise you should try to gradually increase it until you reach a level you feel comfortable holding up.
Personally I did 50 new cards which took about an hour together with the old reviews.
Nowadays I rarely encounter new words unless I read some specialized stuff.

[Anonymous No.5849301]

>>5848950
Steady 5 is better than doing 20 a day for a week and then burning yourself out, but you know yourself best.

[Anonymous No.5849512]

Fuck it, I already spent like 5 years getting decent at English. Fuck learning another language.

[Anonymous No.5850267]

>>5843131
No, you definitely shouldn't spend 1000+ hours learning the most difficult language for an English speaker to learn, which is only spoken on a single island nation that's most likely on the other side of the planet from you, purely so that you can appreciate a series of JRPGs slightly better. But if you were to embark on such a quest, the only one that I think you'd really gain a new perspective on would be FF7. The translation for that game was a bit of a rush job, and certain characters and events come across noticeably different in the Japanese script.

[Anonymous No.5850448]

>>5850267
>which is only spoken on a single island nation that's most likely on the other side of the planet from you,
People frame Japan/Japanese like this often but it's pretty silly. Japan is an economic and cultural powerhouse (3rd highest GDP in the world, exports more books/games than any other country, etc). Learning Japanese is more relevant for a given English speaker than any other language just about, excluding boring ass shit like learning Chinese for business (enjoy your politically censored as fuck media lmao) or Spanish to talk to the illegal immigrants next door. Yeah, no thanks, I'll take my JRPGs and such instead.

[Anonymous No.5850451]

>>5850448
Learning Jap is about 100x more useless than English. If you already know the best language then why learn anything else?

[Anonymous No.5850457]

>>5850448
You could just say that it's also spoken in Palau.
this thread is full of people who clearly didn't learn Japanese and obviously didn't play Japanese FF yet chime in regurgitating shit they picked up elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.5850461]

>>5850451
While true, that speaks more to English's merits than Japanese's demerits. It's about as good as you can ask for when it comes to second languages if you already know English. More good media to consume than in any other language, economically culturally and politically relevant, etc. Mainly the first one. I know people who learn Chinese, Spanish, French, etc, and just give up because there's nothing for them to use it with. Nothing that keeps their interest. Meanwhile people learning Japanese have it on easy street. Tons of games and books and movies and all sorts of stuff.

[ !Codeine.pA No.5850513]

>>5845116
>showing off about being able to read prose that is acclaimed for its simplicity

lol

[Anonymous No.5850859]

>>5850267
>thinks no one speaks japanese outside of japan
>thinks japanese books, tv, files, internet, games, aren't used outside of japan
>doesn't really think this but pretends it's true because he's very selfconscious about being too retarded to learn a second language

[Anonymous No.5850919]

>>5843137
Japanese do get story telling it's just that final fantasy has shit stories

[Anonymous No.5852793]

>>5850513
grammatical simplicity maybe but can you read 樵女 with no furigana or 睥睨? those words and a lot more like them are in norwegian wood and you have obviously never read it

[Anonymous No.5854289]

>>5852793
>樵女
Tell me more about your mother

[Anonymous No.5854336]

god weeaboos are fucking cringey.

[Anonymous No.5854750]

>>5854336
>god weeaboos
There are no other gods but allah

[Anonymous No.5855649]

>>5850461
loli porn is the best motivator there is

[Anonymous No.5856651]

You don't learn Japanese. You think Japanese. The best way to do that is to be born in Japan.

[Anonymous No.5857032]

>>5856651
>you don't learn stupid. you think stupid

[Anonymous No.5857067]

>>5850451
spoken like a true monolingual

[Anonymous No.5857117]

>>5857067
>monolingualoid
Just touched that up a bit for you bro