Listen to the Rain

​Last night, schoolpsychnerd and I went to Shabbat dinner at a stranger's house. It was organized by Mishkan Chicago, which I've heard good things about from multiple people before, but I've never signed up to one of their events or attended their services. I keep an eye on their schedule, though, and when I saw the dinner, and that it was within walking distance, I thought it might be nice.

And it was! It was organized by Mishkan, but they didn't really take part in the actual working of the event. We signed up through One Table, which gives out free gift cards for people to host Shabbat dinners in another of those "rich benefactors endow an organization to encourage more Judaism" plans, schoolpsychnerd made a carrot and chickpea salad with tahini apple cider vinegar dressing, and then we walked down to Andersonville for the dinner. We (all 13 of us) sat around in the hosts' living room for a bit, then moved into the dining room, lit the Shabbat candles and said the blessings, and ate and talked. I was a little surprised at the informality--at schoolpsychnerd and my Shabbat dinners, we always read the week's parashah and talk about it after we finish eating--but it was nice to meet new people and talk about environmental sustainability and how terrible Chicago's recycling programs are. schoolpsychnerd picked up on another guest referencing about Sailor Moon and ended up talking to him about RPGs for most of the night. It definitely makes me want to go to future Mishkan events if these are the kind of people who attend.

We got several invitations to attend Mishkan services as we left. We might.

Today is crowded, with Call of Cthulhu taking up most of the afternoon, and then we have tickets to Symphony of the Goddesses in the evening. This tour is supposed to include music from Breath of the Wild, and I'm really curious to hear how they're going to do that because while I still haven't played the game, I've listened to the soundtrack that came with our copy and most of it is merely okay. There's nothing like Ocarina of Time's Gerudo Valley or Majora's Mask's Deku Palace. Maybe even the subdued ambient pieces will sound better in an orchestra hall, especially when I'm closing my eyes to avoid spoilers from the video accompaniment.

Originally I wasn't even going to play this on my chrono-gaming march toward Breath of the Wild. It's not a mainline Zelda game, after all. Then I happened to be reading an old interview with Aonuma Eiji that mentioned that there used to be a lot more story in the game about the Imprisoning War before Miyamoto came in, pulled a ちゃぶ台返し and most of the story was thrown out. I saw elsewhere that Four Sword Adventures featured Gufū (Eng: Vaati) as the villain, making it a good lead-in to The Minish Cap. And when I posted about it on Facebook, several people said they had a great time with it, so on the list it went.

I remember reading about it when Four Swords Adventures came out, but while I did have my sister's GameCube, I didn't have a Game Boy Advance, and I certainly didn't have four of them. Of my friends at the time, I think only sephimb had one. Four Swords Adventures sounded like a great game, but even at the time I remember people complaining about the high investment cost, and I lost interest and never actually realized that it doesn't require multiplayer. Dolphin does allow for multiplayer with Four Swords Adventures, but from the minimal research I did, it's a giant headache and anyway I don't have three other people to play with. The game is still plenty of fun by oneself.

The Japanese name just means "four swords" (yottsu no tsurugi +), though it's a little odd. Japanese uses counters for specific objects, like 人 for people, 冊 for printed or bound books, and so on. Long, thin objects, including swords, usually take 本, so I would expect the title to be yonhon no tsurugi. There may be some subtlety in the title that escapes me.


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I was originally planning to play both Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages together and then write a joint review because I wasn't sure there was enough difference between them to warrant separate treatments. Obviously, now I know that's wrong. They have the same premise, where Link is tested by the Triforce and dumped into a land that may or may not really exist, but beyond that and the basic gameplay conceits of the Legend of Zelda series nearly everything is different. Oracle of Seasons focused on combat and the end result was mostly a disappointment for me, but Oracle of Ages focused on puzzles and that was a much better choice for the format. If I had played this game first and then played Seasons, I might have been happier overall. This is definitely my favorite of the two.

The Japanese title is fushigi no kinomi -jikū no shō-, "The Mysterious Seed -Time-Space Chapter-".



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Majora's Mask almost completely passed me by. I think the first time I even saw any of it was at the first Symphony of the Goddesses concert I went to, where the gameplay footage of a moon with an evil face, Link turning into some kind of plant monster and flying around using flower umbrellas, and mysterious giants assembling to defend the city completely confused me. What was this? What was even happening here? And what is it about Majora's Mask that leads Zelda Dungeon to have a huge philosophical exegesis on the game?

(The answer to that is "When there's only one Zelda game every 3-5 years, they've got to publish something")

When my sister bought a Nintendo 64, I played Super Mario 64 and I played Ocarina of Time, and sometimes I played Blast Corps, and then I played Quest 64 and that was basically it for me. The N64 was not the system for an RPG-lover like myself, so I went back to my PC games and that's why I didn't know anything about this game until I played it.

I feel like I'm still missing a lot, honestly.

The Japanese title is mujura no kamen, "Mujura's Mask."


"You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"
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Not at the same time, obviously.

Yesterday, my parents came into town and schoolpsychnerd and I went down to meet them at the Shedd Aquarium. They're members and go a few times a year. They're much better about it than we are--while we were members of the Field Museum for the last year, I'm not sure we went once--and often we only end up going when they come in to visit. This time, it was pretty fortunate that we were meeting them. The line was out the door, down the stairs, and stretching out into the park in front of the aquarium when we arrived, but we were able to skip all that and just walk in the member's entrance.

Maybe everyone was trying to forget the election. There was a large protest downtown yesterday which my parents walked by. My father mentioned that he wasn't sure what good it would do, since Trump was a terrible person but he had won the election, so I pointed out that it's more to demonstrate that Trump doesn't have a mandate despite any claims to the contrary. Though I admit, in some ways I share his cynicism. I remember the Iraq War protests and how much effect those had.

We had tickets for the cetacean show at 5 p.m. so we didn't have a lot of time to look around, but we did hit some highlights. The otters for schoolpsychnerd, the special frog exhibit for me--that's a special exhibit of frogs, not an exhibit of special frogs --and the penguins for my mother:



The cetacean show was a lot more focused than I remember it being. I think the last time I saw it was twenty years ago, and then it was much more about simple entertainment. This time there was a conservation message heavily woven through the show, including a rescue dog that the aquarium keeps. There were no dolphins somersaulting through hoops, but I think I appreciated the show more.

After a dinner at Chicago Curry House, where even my spice-averse parents found something they could eat--though since they have the appetites of birds, they were pretty much full after the samosas we ordered as appetizers--we said goodbye since we had to make our performance:



We first went to Symphony of the Goddesses in 2013 and this is the third time we've been. It's slightly different each time--the first time we went was the "Second Quest" arrangement that featured a medley of the music from Ocarina of Time, and the second time we went was the "Master Quest" and had a feature of music from Link's Awakening. This time was more similar to the first concert, though with the addition of some music from Triforce Heroes and A Link Between Worlds, both of which came out since the last time we went to Symphony of the Goddesses. There was also a piece I remembered from Phantom Hourglass, though I say "remembered" in the loosest terms since I can barely remember anything about that game. That didn't stop it from being a great performance!

I think the loudest crowd cheer was when the conductor reached into her coat, pulled out a perfect replica of the Wind Waker baton, and then started conducting the theme from Outset Island.

There was a little girl, maybe four or five, cosplaying Princess Zelda sitting in the seat in front of us. She fell asleep during the intermission and schoolpsychnerd exploded from cute overload.

This is my favorite Legend of Zelda game.

I think.

I know everyone thinks that Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda game and that it keeps winning polls as the best game of all time--with the notably infamous exception of last year at GameFAQs--but A Link to the Past has always been the game I went back to. My doubt is because of Wind Waker, but I won't be getting to that game for a while, so Link to the Past stands for the moment.

I never played it except briefly at friends' houses before emulation revealed the wonders of everything I missed by being a PC gamer, but I still got Nintendo Power through most of the Super Nintendo and part of the N64 era, and what I remember are the comics. Nintendo power serialized a comic based on A Link to the Past. Very loosely based--the constant vision, wings to fly into the desert, and balloon to get into Hyrule Castle had nothing to do with the game--but the game I imagined based on them was amazing. I still remember the story the tree tells Link about Ganondorf and the corruption of the Golden Land.

"Until then, I remain a fool in the shape of a tree."

Fortunately, though the game I eventually played was different, it was still excellent.

The Japanese title is kamigami no toraifōsu, "Triforce of the Gods." Or the goddesses, I suppose, but that hadn't been established at this point.


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Kind of like when I played Super Metroid, playing this makes me wonder if I'm really a "Zelda fan," whatever that means. I've played even fewer Zelda games than Metroid games, but in part, this is an attempt to remedy that. Since Sunday was the 30th anniversary of the original Legend of Zelda coming out, I wanted to go back and play some of the earlier Zelda games I missed as well as the good ones that I loved, so I thought why not start at the beginning? And, since I've never played it, why not start with the Japanese version like I did with 悪魔城伝説 and see what the differences are?

And that answer is...not that much, really. Other than being in Japanese--and that's not even entirely true, since the intro is in English--everything is pretty much the same. Most of the quotes are translated pretty literally, and the minor nuances in meaning don't affect what story there is. For example, "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this," in Japanese is, "ヒトリデハキケンジャ コレヲ サズケヨウ," which is, "It's dangerous by yourself. I'll bestow this [to you]," though with a bit of an old man nuance that doesn't really translate into English and with some implied status differences--授ける is generally used from a higher-ranking person to a lower one, though here I think it's just that it's an old man giving the sword to a whippersnapper.

And yes, the katakana and spaces are in the game. I think it's the first time I've ever seen a ヲ in the wild.



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