Listen to the Rain

So over the past few years, I played through every mainline Legend of Zelda game, in order of release, in Japanese, and wrote a review of every one after I beat it. Here they are:

1. ゼルダの伝説: the Hyrule Fantasy / The Legend of Zelda


2. ゼルダの伝説：リンクの冒険 / Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link


3. ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース / The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past


4. ゼルダの伝説：夢をみる島 DX / The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX


5. ゼルダの伝説：時のオカリナGC裏 / The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time Master Quest


6. ゼルダの伝説：ムジュラの仮面 / The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask


7. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -大地の章- / The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons


8. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -時空の章- / The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages


9. ゼルダの伝説：風のタクト / The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker


10. ゼルダの伝説：４つの剣+ / The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures


11. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎのぼうし / The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap


12. ゼルダの伝説：トワイライトプリンセス / The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess


13. ゼルダの伝説：夢幻の砂時計 / The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass


14. ゼルダの伝説：大地の汽笛 / The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks


15. ゼルダの伝説：スカイウォードソード / The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword


16. ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース 2 / The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds


17. ゼルダの伝説：トライフォース３銃士 / The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes


18. ゼルダの伝説：ブレス オブ ザ ワイルド / The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Remakes:

• ゼルダの伝説：夢を見る島 Switch版 / Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Switch Version

Non-canon entries:

• Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition
• ケイデンス・オブ・ハイラル: クリプト・オブ・ネクロダンサー feat. ゼルダの伝説 / Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda

More later as I get to them.

I wasn't a huge Zelda fan before I started this, but I certainly am now. What a great series.

Japanese has a pair of words, 名探偵 and 迷探偵, that mean respectively "Amazing detective" and "bungling detective."

They are both pronounced meitantei.

Brütal.

A few months ago sashagee got really into Babymetal. She was playing their songs all the time in the house, having little dance parties with Laila, and then she learned that they were coming to Chicago along with Dethklok. I bought her tickets as a Mothers' Day present and last night was the concert.

The opening act was Jason Richardson, who I had never heard of before (I'm out of the loop) but is apparently a famous metal guitarist? And his guitar work was extremely good! He came out with no introduction, playing guitar over some recorded backing drums and bass, and it was fantastic--the kind of thing that once would have been a hard mode Guitar Hero track. Sparrow was sashagee's favorite song--that's Richardson in the red coat there playing guitar--and is a good summary of how his music sounded. He was wearing the same red coat on stage last night.

Unfortunately, his stage presence was terrible. At a metal concert, you expect the performers to have an attitude and get in your face (metaphorically), but Richardson was more like a new act at a comedy club. He made some self-deprecating jokes, trailed off a couple times, and then launched into more excellent guitar work. Well, there's a reason he's a guitarist and not a singer.

Also, Dethklok was there.

When Dethklok was done, the stagehands took almost thirty minutes to set up the stage, all while the temperature got warmer and warmer and the crowd got dense and denser. At the end, the logo flashed on screen, the announcer said the pitch, and Babymetal appeared:


I absolutely was not expecting a heavy metal cover of "Sōran Bushi," the traditional Japanese folk song. I even found a comment on a reddit people where people were like "Dokkoisho? What are they saying? Is that like Ganbare?" ( "Dokkoisho" means basically "heave-ho!"--"Sōran Bushi" is a sea shanty).

I knew very little about Babymetal going in, other than the memes and that one picture of them with Rob Zombie. Being metal lyrics, even when sashagee played them repeatedly I couldn't understand anything they were saying. That wasn't any different this time, but a lot of the metal I listen to is symphonic metal so I was used to the lone female voice floating above a sea of electric guitars and drums. But I was not expecting all the movement--I only listened to the songs that sashagee played, I didn't look up any Youtube info, I didn't read about their performances, nothing, so I had no idea that they had routines to fit the songs.

On the Metali Youtube video, there's a comment that reads:

日本の祭りの息を揃える掛け声や踊り、独特な歌舞伎の発声、言い回しなどの日化を取り入れて、ここまでのメタルエンターテイメントに仕上げるのはBABYMETALだけであり、唯一無二のオリジナリティーだと言える。最高傑作と言っても良いのではと思う。
"Babymetal is the only one in the world of metal music who includes these expressions so characteristic of Japanese culture, the sounds of encouragement and common calls at festivals and the uniqueness of kabuki. You could definitely say that they're totally original and their work is a masterpiece."

They're right. I never would have thought "You know what heavy metal needs? Jpop dance routines!" but Babymetal did and that's why people love them so much.

They performed for about an hour and then left the stage, and there was no encore. sashagee wasn't feeling that well with the heat and the standing, so we went straight home and she went straight to bed. But she got her Babymetal t-shirt with the fox masks on it--the same masks that the guitarists and drummer were wearing--which is what she really wanted.

According to wikipedia, "Before the formation of this club, none of the three members [of Babymetal] knew what heavy metal was." Well, they figured it out.

Last Sunday the Anime Club had a book discussion for ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 (yokohama kaidashi kikō, "Travelogue of a Yokohama Shopping Trip") volumes 1 and 2, and I read them in Japanese and took a bunch of notes. Here they are for posterity:

( notes here )

Excellent manga, by the way, and now finally available in English. Highly recommended.

I was very conflicted over which icon to pick for this post but eventually went with Hiroshima.

ed.mcnamara13 recently went on a two-week trip to Japan, and I got a text from him a couple weeks ago asking me my address. After I told him, I got a picture of a book he had found while on his trip, and a few days ago I got a package in the mail!:


The only thing I knew was coming in advance was the children's book, which is called カービィのひとり時間 kābi no hitori jikan, "Kirby's Time Alone." I haven't read that much of it, because the time when I tried to read it to Laila she really wasn't into it, but the beginning is about how Kirby likes to go off by himself to practice drawing. Maybe I can draw Laila in by emphasizing that he's drawing an apple, since she's currently super obsessed with apples. As long as I have an extra apple to give to her after since otherwise she'll be extremely angry. She's getting to the stage where she'll throw tantrums if she doesn't get her way, but wanting to eat an apple is a habit we want to encourage.

Everything else was a happy bonus! Hiroshima Prefecture was, in the long ago--昔昔 mukashi mukashi, as they say in Japanese, "once upon a time"--known as 安芸国 Aki no Kuni, "Aki Province." It's not written the same as 秋 aki, "autumn," but it is pronounced the same as it and the maple leaf to this day is the symbol of Hiroshima. If you look up Hiroshima specialties the top result will be okinomiyaki--so much better than the barbarous Kansai style --but also in the top result are もみじ饅頭 momiji manjū, the famous maple-leaf-shaped sweets. That's what's front-and-center there, below the Spy x Family branded chocolate-chip cookie. I ate them by the dozen when I lived there and while you can get manjū in America, you can't get momiji manjū, so this is the most welcome part of the package.

To the left is one of Japan's famous flavored kitkats, also momiji manjū flavored. Front right is a French-style financier cookie made by kaedenoki, a dessert company from Hiroshima. You can see one of their gift boxes here for the same cookie, and they even have Hiroshima-style momiji versions too. Sadly, their website doesnn't have any information about shipping overseas, which means they won't do it, and a reshipping service would be too expensive.

Ha, poking around I found this page about the three Setouchi presents, riffing off the 日本三景 nihon sankei, "The Three Scenic Views" of which the shrine gate in Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima is one. There's some controversy about this because Hayashi Gahō was clearly biased in favor of coastlines, but the places he picked are legitimately amazing. Maple butter sando cookies and momiji manjū are both delicious, but I don't think I've had Gaba ramen before. It says it has a rich flavor of spicy miso and homemade aromatic oils mixed into flavorful tonkotsu broth, which is just marketing copy for ramen to my mind. Every place in Japan has its own style of ramen--I'm partial to Onomichi ramen, which literally had oil visibly floating on top of the broth--and Gaba Ramen looks local to Hiroshima. I should have tried it while I lived there.

The tea bag I'm not sure about, since it has no text at all.

A lovely care package that I was super happy to receive!

So sashagee has pulled me back into Genshin Impact more because she needs help beating bosses, and I've moved on to Liyue, the China-themed region of the world. I'm playing with English text and Japanese speech, and one thing I immediately noticed was that all the names were different--the English text uses pinyin to render the Chinese names, but the Japanese speech doesn't--it transliterates them by character, not by sound, so many of the names sound very different.

Some examples:

• 北斗, Ch: Beidou, Jp: Hokuto, "Big Dipper."


• 甘雨, Ch: Ganyu, Jp: Kan'u, "Sweet Rain."


• 刻晴, Ch: Keqing, Jp: Kokusei, "Clear sky carver(?)"


• 凝光, Ch: Ningguang, Jp: Gyōkō, "Concentrated light" (though 凝 shikori in modern Japanese means "lump" or "muscle stiffness")


• 七七, Ch: Qiqi, Jp: Nana, "Seven-Seven"


• 云堇, Ch: Yun Jin, Jp: Unkin, "Violet [flower] Clouds"


• 行秋, Ch: Xingqiu, Jp: Yukuaki, "Into Autumn."


• 烟绯, Ch: Yanfei, Jp: Enhi, "Scarlet Smoke."


• 申鹤, Ch: Shenhe, Jp: Shinkaku, probably "Divine Crane" based on 申 being a homonym for 神.

I should have known this would be how it works, since I'm familiar with the Chinese classics and the same thing happens there--the monkey king is "Sun Wukong" in Chinese and "Son Gokū" in Japanese, Water Margin is "Shui Hu Zhuan" in Chinese, and "Suikoden" in Japanese (hence the games)--but for some reason I didn't expect to see it happen in recent titles!

Also because of this, none of those characters names sound like names to me. Maybe the posthumous Buddhist names of monks.

The funny part is that while looking these, up, I checked into a character I know exists but haven't met yet, 胡桃. This is "Hu Tao" in Chinese and the two characters taken together is a real modern Japanese word--it means walnut and is pronounced "Kurumi," which is also a real modern Japanese name. And maybe because of that, apparently in the Japanese dialogue it's pronounced "Fū Tao."

Spoilers for Shadowbringers through 5.0

( An interesting dialogue difference )

Because 14 + 8 is 22, see?

I haven't gotten super far in FFVIII because I've been playing FFXIV--I'm just after Edea shows up and takes Seifer away--but some people mentioned being curious about further differences between the Japanese and English and there were some points that stood out with me. I'm pleased to report that both Rinoa's introduction and Selphie's train song are the same in both languages:

リノア「君が一番カッコいいね。ね、踊ってくれない？もしかして、好きな子としか踊らないってやつ？ふ～ん……私のことが……好きにな～る、好きにな～る。ダメ？」
スコール「……踊れないんだ」
リノア「だいじょうぶ、だいじょうぶ。知り合いを探してるの。１人じゃダンスの輪に入れないからね」
Rinoa: "Oh, you're the best-looking one here. Won't you dance with me? Or maybe, you only dance with girls that you like? Well... you're...going to like me... you're...going to like me... No good?"
Squall: "...I can't dance."
Rinoa: "It's fine, it's fine! There's someone I'm looking for and I can't go dancing alone."

-------------------------
セルフィ「あたし、乗り物好きなんだ～。きしゃ～♪きしゃ～♪はっし～れ～♪ぼっくらをのせて～♪とおっくへ～♪ぼっくらをつれて～♪みら～いへ～♪　気持ちいいよね～。あ、先に部屋はいってて。あたし、もうちょっとここにいるから」
Selphie: "I love trains. Traaain, traaain, go go, take us away, to a far away place, carry us to the future. Isn't it wonderful? Oh, go on ahead, I'll be here for a bit longer."

I really expected more from the Rinoa scene but the original translation was spot on.

In about ten hours of play (ignoring the three hours or so I spent grinding fish on the beach to get No Encounter and various Refines), I've only seen a single instance of Squall actually saying "...whatever." It's on the train to Timber just before the first Laguna temporal flashback, when Zell is getting hyped about the train room and Timber and asks Squall if he knows about the history of Timber. The two choices are どうでもいい and いや、別にいいよ, both of which could be translated as "...whatever" or "I don't care," though the first is more dismissive than the second.

Squall is still a huge jerk, though. He blows off Quistis when she's trying to confide in him:

キスティス「何か言ってもらおうなんて思ってないわ。話を聞いてくれるだけでいいのよ」
スコール「だったら壁にでも話してろよ」
Quistis: "I didn't want you to say anything! Just listening to me would be enough."
Squall: "Then go talk to a wall."

and he tells Rinoa after the failure of her capture President-for-life Deling mission that it's better not to care about anything because then you'll never be disappointed. He's still unlikeable and I'm curious to see at what point the redemption occurs.

More news as I discover it.

---

In Final Fantasy XIV, I beat the Stormblood main scenario through 4.0 three weeks ago--it's not as good as Heavensward because the split between the Othard storyline and the Ala Mhigo storyline harmed the narrative, I think, and the main villain was far less compelling--but I've just been leveling jobs and doing side content since then. I did the Return to Ivalice raids together with sashagee, and by our powers combined we understood all the references--she's played FFXII but not FFT, I've played FFT but not FFXII--and just last weekend we finished the Omega raids. I've unlocked all the non-Shadowbringers jobs and delved into Eureka, the Stormblood area that's designed to replicate the experience of older grind-heavy MMOs. And I did grind--I fought a bunch of monsters, I opened a ton of lockboxes, and just last night I pulled out this sleek boi:


Now I can move on from Eureka Anemos to Eureka Pagos, which is apparently much more annoying (though far less now that it's been nerfed into the ground as old content!). I guess I'll find out.

The cicadas are out, the trees are screaming. Summer has arrived.

Slowly working my way through Chrono Trigger. I've played it over a dozen times, so I know it like the back of my hand, but playing it in Japanese means that it's a new experience. I have to stop and work through what people are saying, and I make sure to take to every townsperson because for the first time in twenty years, it's a new experience for me. Chrono Trigger is one of the games I really wish I could go through and play with fresh eyes, and while that's not possible, this comes close. There are old quotes that have new meanings in the original language that really can't be translated without a lot of difficulty. My favorite example in what I've played so far is talking to Spekkio, the Master of War, when he described the Kingdom of Zeal with the words:

おめーらの生まれるずっと昔……魔法でさかえた王国、あった。その世界、みんな魔法使った。けどその王国、魔力におぼれほろびた……。それから人は魔法を使えなくなった。魔族以外はな。
"Long before you were born, there was a kingdom that flourished through sorcery. There, everyone could use magic. But that kingdom grew proud and magic was its ruin... Since then, no one has been able to use magic. Except the Fiends, anyway."

The word I translated as "grew proud and [...] ruin" is おぼれほろびた, from two verbs. The second is 滅びる (horobiru, "To be destroyed, to come to ruin, to fall"), but the first is interesting. It's 溺れる (oboreru), which can mean both "to grow proud, to indulge in, to go wild over" or also..."to drown, to sink beneath the waves."

"Gone is the magical kingdom of Zeal, and all the dreams and ambitions of its people."

This morning was a department meeting that I was told I'd have to speak briefly for, on the adjustment process for working from home, and I mentioned the biggest challenge for me had been ergonomics. My home is designed for a floor-based lifestyle, to the point that I'll sometimes just sit on the floor with my back against the couch if I'm watching something, and I have my mouse arm and mouse propped up on some pillows as I sit on the couch with my laptop on my lap (despite the name, this is actually inadvisable). When I said that, I got messages from two senior managers offering to get me a lap desk. My setup now works for me, but I certainly won't complain about a lap desk.

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

At meditation tonight, the new rabbi brought up Tisha B'Av, occurring next week, and the weird liminal space we're all in now. One of the people brought up how strange it is to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem when it's the current capital of Israel, and the rabbi mentioned how when she was a chaplain, one of her patients with dementia barely spoke at all except the occasional seemingly-nonsensical statement or fragment of memory, but once the rabbi started actually listening and engaging with her, she started talking more and more, eventually revealing some coherent memories of her past, and the rabbi tied it in to how it's important to acknowledge and remember the past even if your current circumstances are very different now. As someone whose current circumstances are very different than in the past, well. I can understand that. And this year isn't going to be anything like last year's Tisha B'Av event was. But this year, I feel that it's a lot easier to mourn.

It's okay to be sad.

I was pretty excited to play the game. I preordered it months in advance, and the weekend it came out, I sat down and played it for hours, getting quickly through the opening and the first two dungeons. And then I didn't play it at all until this month, a casuality of my attempt to play Suikoden in Japanese to follow along with the Square Roots Podcast--a task I do intend to get back to eventually--and then my increasingly-prominent social life. When I was out doing something with people five or six nights a week, I didn't have time to play games at all!

Well, thank you for coronavirus for getting me back into gaming.

You might ask why I'm reviewing this if I already reviewed Link's Awakening, and what's more, if my review there was of the DX version and I never played the original. I've never made a distinction between the Zelda games before--I played the GameCube Zelda Collection version of Majora's Mask that allows saving at owl statues, I played the Master Quest version of Ocarina of Time, and I haven't played the HD versions of Wind Waker or Twilight Princess at all. And the simple answer is that I'm the one writing these posts and I can do what I want, but taking it more seriously, the Link's Awakening Remake makes greater gameplay changes than any of the previous enhanced versions. Master Quest changes the dungeons around a bit, Twilight Princess HD has prettier graphics and the map on the WiiU GamePad, but Link's Awakening Remake changes the presentation of the entire game. That's worth some words.


( Read more... )

I'm back online now, but at 8:30 a.m. the power went out, and it came back and everything was fine for about ten minutes, and then the internet went out for two-and-a-half hours. I got on the line to the ISP, and they said it was a hub outage and all I could do was wait, so that's what I did. It's not even noon and all my chores for today are already done--I vacuumed and mopped the whole house, I did my laundry, and I cleaned the kitchen. Lunch is waiting for me when I'm ready for it, and now my entire evening is open because everything I had to do then, I've already done. It feels amazing, honestly. I hope that I learn from this and realize that sometimes it's better to accomplish pressing tasks earlier rather than putting them off until later while I play video games or whatever, and by writing down how I feel about it now, I'm doing a bit to bring forth that change in myself.

Will it actually happen? Who knows. But I'll try.

After I finally get onto the work network, there was a message saying that the current work-from-home order is being extended until the end of May. That's fine with me, since I've gotten used to my extremely short commute--and thanks to writing this, I remembered to go cancel my commuter pass for June. I've got two passes saved up that I haven't used, and I have $98 in Ventra credit because apparently Ventra refunded almost my entire March pass instead of just the unused portion, so I'm set for months of riding the L once I actually start doing it again. That'll save me hundreds of dollars, so I won't complain, but I do worry a bit about the health of the L what with all the lost ridership. Just another financial aspect we'll need to worry about as we try to sort through the fallout of the coronavirus.

On Sunday, I had my first class with my Japanese tutor in a month. Over FaceTime, obviously, and I did a bunch of reading in 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ / Socrates in Love, and then since it had been so long since we met, we just talked the whole time (but in Japanese!). We talked a lot about coronavirus, obviously, and I had to look up some vocab and talk a bit circuitously to explain that current infection rates reflect public behavior as of two weeks ago due to the incubation period, and that while the number of cases in Illinois was still climbing, it wasn't climbing as fast--that the rate of increase (増加率 zōkaritsu) was lowering, but not the absolute numbers. We talked about how we're both lucky to be able to work from home, and how we have a lot of friends who are out of work, and how I've reverted back to the me in the past. A few months ago, I was going out all the time, maybe five nights a week, and had almost stopped playing video games. Now, I'm back to watching anime, playing video games, and reading, with the very occasional video chat or in-person seeing of someone else. At least I have a solid foundation I can fall back on, but it's still not great. She's an introvert and lives with her boyfriend, so she's doing pretty well, but living alone is pretty lonely.

Speaking of which, thosesocks invited me out on a walk on Saturday, when the weather turned back to warm, so after lunch I left my home for the first time in a couple days and met her outside. She walked on the sidewalk and I walked on the street, close enough to have a conversation but far enough (and both masked) to keep each other safe. We went to Lickity Split for frozen custard and ate it sitting in the library parking lot while we talked about how we're dealing with things. The answer is "mostly well, but", and I feel like that's a pretty universal experience. I should see if anyone else would like to do something similar.

With my government stimulus money, I ordered a bunch of clothes I've been eyeing for a while. It's always difficult for me to buy clothes, becusae I'm 6'5" and very thin, so anything with the right waist size has legs that are too short, and similar for shirts with sleeves. But I asked the people at MDNT45--the ones behind this post about the cloak-coat I own--about whether they could make these pants with a small waist but a much longer inseam, and they said they'd do it for no extra cost! So I ordered that, I ordered some fitted dress pants and fitted t-shirts from Amazon, and all of them actually fit! I was especially surprised by the pants, since slim-fit 31/36 pants (in inches, waist/inseam American sizing) had the potential to fit terribly, but they were exactly what I was looking for, so I immediately ordered another pair. It's so rare that I find store-bought pants that fit well that I have to seize the chance as soon as I can.

The t-shirts had prominent logos on them, so I took a seam-ripper to them and removed them. Like Cayce Pollard, I am sensitive to #Brands.

That was about the extent of my stimulus usage. I dumped a bunch of it into savings, since I have a mortgage to pay, and invested some of it since the market is down and now is the time, or at least a more advantageous time than a couple months ago. I also ordered takeout after Passover ended, since I wanted to eat bread to celebrate but obviously didn't have any in the house. Tomato bisque and a grilled cheese sandwich, with dark chocolate chip cookies for desert. Delicious.

Alright, now that I can work, I probably should get back to it. I hope everyone had a good weekend!

We've been wondering what it was that Japan did right during the plague, and it turns out the answer might be "Nothing, they just got lucky and also weren't looking very hard." So now that measures are getting more serious, the prime minister's plan is to give two cloth masks to each family and not declare an emergency and one of my friends is incandescently angry about it:

MAD MAYUKO: FURY ROAD
OUR GOVERNMENT IS GONNA THANKFULLY PROVIDE US WITH 2 FACE MASKS PER FAMILY, AND THAT'S ALL WE ARE GONNA GET FOR NOW!!!

一世帯にマスク2枚とか舐めとんのかまじで。
思うところある人はご意見箱送りましょう。
https://ssl.jimin.jp/m/contacts?_ga=2.218572767.718434029.1585740608-137330075.1584788552

The Japanese part reads:

"Just tossing us two masks per family and thinking that's enough? Are you kidding me?
If you think the same, let's write in and let them know."

And then a link to the Liberal Democratic Party's site for sharing opinions.

I've never seen her post about politics ever, so this definitely caught me by surprise. Especially the leader at the top of her post.