Niahak's Place

I think it should be fairly obvious from my previous posts, I have an irrational love for Three Kingdoms.

This love extended to, while I was in Japan, picking up various Three Kingdoms manga. I found no less than three different takes on Three Kingdoms (four if you count the “split” in the Scholar Bunko series) and one where, while Three Kingdoms is the setting it is not really the focus. I have heard enough of Ikkitousen to know it shouldn’t be considered among these (though I may check it out from sheer curiousity). So I figured I’d write up a bit about each. Read on if this sounds vaguely interesting.

I’m usually not a huge fan of lists and rankings.  When I try to rank games myself, I always go back and change the scores up later – like back when I thought WA:ACF was the awesomest thing ever, or when I thought the first Suikoden was better than Suikoden III.  Of course, I could always use the “I was young and stupid” approach, but this was within the past year or so.

However, this post at GAF caught my eye: a top 100 list as voted by readers of Japan’s biggest videogame magazine Famitsu.

Granted, it’s not a great list; I could name a half-dozen games offhand that I think belong on there, but then I’m not Tanaka Six-pack.  I actually doubt such a list voted by, say, readers of Electronic Gaming Monthly would be better.

So instead, I thought it was more interesting to look at what was on there that I didn’t expect.

Labor Day weekend, I got a lot of stuff done I’d been meaning to.  Among those things was a translation of the script of the NES game Akira, which I’d been gradually working on for nearly 3 months.

My Japanese has been getting rusty for a while, and I didn’t know if I had the willpower to start anything new for a while.

Then, one of my fellow writers, hearing I had finished a translation project, mentioned a game to me.  Curious, I looked it over… and it captured my soul.  The game is 1999: Hore, Mitakotoka! Seikimatsu, for the NES.  Basically, it’s a Japanese game of Life with an eventual goal of stopping aliens from taking over the world.

By coincidence, danke, the guy who is working on the hacking side of Akira, had looked at the game before and was more than willing to help out with the hacking of 1999.  Tyson, the writer who asked me about it, is more familiar with spoken Japanese than I, and will probably be better with the casual stuff in 1999 than me.  So it looks like it’s in good shape, I just need to find a good part of it to work on…

I also started another game of the Mount&Blade mod The Last Days, based on (the books of course) Tolkien’s LOTR.  Mount&Blade is an excellent engine – no single action/RPG/strategy can surpass it.  TLD is an incredible mod, bringing the minor skirmishes of “vanilla” M&B up a few notches to the grand warfare of Middle-Earth.  My only complaint is that it’s hard as hell, but that’s sort of the idea.

Also, I’m 40 hours into Persona 3.  I wasn’t really into the plot – it’s a little too grandiose to break it down into manageable chunks.  The atmosphere has been great since the beginning, but the plot seems a little… well, distant.

That changed on Friday.  Man, did it change.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more well-done set of scenes in a game before.

このポストで、辞書を使わないで、日本語だけで　書くつもりです。

だから、これはみじかいでしょ。　私は漢字を覚えないんですし、まだ日本語が下手なんです。

でも、　まだ書いてみてたいんだ。　どうしてですか？　自分も分からない。

コンピュター科学がせんこうだったけど、まだほかのもの（語とか）が知りたいです。時々、練習をするために日本語だけで考えるけど、

このような考えを書くことは三年間でぜんぜんしなかったんです。

まだ下手なんですね。。。

I’ve still got some of it, but it’s like running molasses through a colander.  I need to practice far more often.  I could’ve done most of this better three years ago 🙁

This doesn’t really fit anywhere (in fact it could fit in all three of my major categories – books, games, and japan stuff) but here it is anyway.

(I’m too lazy to edit the image again – the strip is titled “Take and Run” and it’s by (probably – name renderings are odd) Chikusa Hiroko.

It took me about half an hour to do this, because I’m not very good with image editors. The fact that I only took a half an hour shows, and I apologize.  If anyone else knos how better to do all the image modification stuff, I’d love to translate.  I just don’t have the expertise.

To extrapolate more on the source; this is from a 4-koma manga (4-koma being a style- Azumanga Daioh is probably the most famous one in the US – similar to a standard throwaway comic strip). More specifically, if you can’t tell, this is from a 4-koma manga about Wild Arms: Alter Code F. I’ve had 5 full strips (and a few very blurry others) on my hard drive since I took a few minutes with a scanner to grab them about 5 or 6 months ago.

I’m actually really happy with the manga itself, as it pokes fun at dozens of RPG cliches as well as at the ACF plot itself from time to time. It has a variety of artists/authors, some of which I really like too.  And it wasn’t too expensive either.

If anyone wants to see the originals, let me know. I’ve been meaning to talk about these for a while.