くるくる金髪の日記

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Translation Stuff

Jess’s DR Spin-Off Novel Summaries/Translations

Jess’s Dangan Ronpa Translation Masterlist

Jess’s Other Translations

Other Relevant Links

Jess’s DR Opinions Masterlist

Jess's Hundred Line-related Posts

Jess Plays/Watches Liveblogging

Rarepair Power Hour

YamiNabe Through the Years

Twitch Channel

PETRINE!

Girl? I know Ike's got some sugar in the tank, but he's hardly effeminate.

OH she means Elincia.

This is reminding me of when Nate and I streamed Valkyria Chronicles 4 when it came out in Japan, and it wasn't until the end of the game that we realized that the one recurring enemy was calling the male main character "femme fatale" the whole time and not the female lead.

I'm not confident I fully understand how allying with Daein is supposed to further the Corvid Kingdom, honestly. Like you get all this money and then what? Daein is on a quest to take over the whole of Tellius, so is your plan to backstab them or something? But how would you do that if there's no one to ally with? I dunno, I just feel like Naesala hasn't thought this through fully.

Petrine, I love you, but I don't think you can just call people that.

WHAT THE FUCK YOU REALLY WERE A HOMOASA THE WHOLE TIME?!

Nominative determinism is stored in the bright green mullet, I guess.

Dude, Petrine seems extremely fixated on Elincia.

...I can work with this.

Nooooo, come back, Petrine!

Time to do some BASE CONVERSATIONS, BABY!

This train-wreck of a conversation with Ulki is very funny in how utterly awkward it is. Ulki's just out here like "No, our society actually kinda fucking rules? Not sure what your problem is."

Oh, it's best to choose leaders by strength and not by birth, is it, Ike? Remind us again, what's your relationship to the former head of the Greil Mercenaries?

Ike's so easy to like because he's so fully aware of his own weaknesses.

That's right, Ike. You're like the symbolic mascot. You're there to inspire everyone and make top-level decisions.

Do you think Soren would text Ike telling him not to worry about finances or admin for the mercenary company and Ike just writes back "okay! yay!"?

I don't think the issue is that he's a beorc, Janaff.

Ike just doesn't fully get social cues.

New reaction image unlocked.

Why is Janaff complaining about Kids These Days? He looks like he's a teen.

This conversation is a fucking disaster.

Jill's journey to being a better person is in full swing!

I mean, is there a reason you aren't defecting, Haar?

Welcome to today's episode of FIGHT! YOUR! DAD! (to the tune of this) Fight your daddy! Fight fight your daddy! Go make out with your laguz lady! Daein had its day and you'll get pussay, so fight your daddy, fight fight your daddy now!

The fuck you talking about, Ike? "Leave Jill at base camp." Fuck off, dude. I'm not benching my single wyvern knight because she has to face her former friends and family. I live for that shit. I will orchestrate this next map so that Jill lands the killing blow on her father. Don't test me.

Let's do a quick Support convo as well. Let's check in on Mist and Big Titty.

Mist, you're just like your mom, Elena, whose name is totally not similar to the name of our princess.

Okay, anyway, let's get to the fight!

That is...quite a few ballistae.

Oh fuck, I can't just send Reyson to talk to Naesala, I have to bring one of the stupid hawk guys again? This cost me potentially good loot on the last map, man. Marcia needs to catch up on levels.

Here's what we're gonna do. Since I assume I'll be able to convince Naesala to retreat and take the rest of the counting crows with him, I am going to send Soren to Gay Baby Jail for this battle. Sorry, bud, but the game is forcing my hand here.

Battle is going okay, though the fact that they designed the map so that I have to send flying units up to take out each ballista was very clever.

Tanith is winning the coveted UILF award for this game so far, and you'd have to pull a strong competitor out there to give her any serious competition. (Petrine is the EILF.)

Guy Who's Totally Over His Ex:

He's being my dancer, Naesala, what about it?

Everyone have a round of applause for Jill this map. While she will not get MVP because she did not get the most kills, she flew up to the leftmost ballista, took an arrow to the face, took some cheap shots from the other wyvern knights while giving back as good as she took it, to the point that she was hanging on with 2 hp having taken both of them and the ballista guy AND a crow out.

It's actually very funny that after the conversation with Janaff, Naesala made a beeline for Reyson, but the latter was being Rescued at the time to keep him from taking a bunch of damage from said ballista, so it looked like Naesala just really wanted to talk to Big Titty.

When your ex is a fuckboy and tried to temporarily sell you into slavery to finance his kingdom or whatever Naesala's trying to do.

You know, this is the second time Reyson has not really needed his arm twisted in order to forgive someone. He really likes to turn the other beak, if ya know what I mean. *dodges tomatoes thrown at me on stage*

Something about this just struck me as extremely funny.

Also very funny: the ballista bolt pinging harmlessly off Big Titty's ride's face.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about Mullet Man.

Uh, no it is not. It's very obviously wind-aspected, idiot.

In my game, if there's a boss saying weird shit that don't make sense, Mia is on the scene.

Ike, are you going to let this guy talk to you like that?

I know you take a lot of smack talk from people, but come on. He's got a bright green mullet, dude.

Is there like, extra lore about these rando bosses I should be getting from somewhere? Homoasa talking about learning to fight from his dad seems to hint that there might be, but I haven't found anything so far. Then again, apparently there was a recruitable unit on the escape to the port map I completely missed, so what do I know?

Ike could not kill the mullet boss, btw. Tanith had to come in and skewer him on a lance.

I do genuinely feel bad that I have to make Petrine's life harder as I continue the game. She's going to be so upset--

i think i hauve Covid

I was really excited to be getting 50k in gold for the last couple battles, but alas, I forgot about the deal we had with Volke.

"Lol thanks for the gold. I lied about having a report for your dad. Well, not really, because I'm now going to share a lot of loadbearing exposition. Strap in, baby blue."

Ike is wonderful, because he often says what I'm thinking.

I am glad we're finally addressing The Emblem in the room.

In Tellius, there are many genders, but only two humors: balance and chaos.

Me, whispering to Mist from the shadows: Are you tired of being nice? Don't you want to go apeshit?

Fire Emblem is marginally better about this than many series out of Japan, but I'm still kinda :/ that we aren't getting a woman going absolutely berserk from the power of The Emblem.

Okay, fine. I guess the Black Knight isn't Ike and Mist's mom.

Greil out here like

Oh wait, is that Mist's scarf? Is that another keepsake from her mom?

So the four riders, right? We have: Gawain/Greil; Big Titty, presumably; whoever the Black Knight is; and...??? (I'm crossing my fingers that at least one of those last two is a badass lady.)

I mean, since you offered so nicely to kill me if I go off the rails, I suppose I will hire you, Volke.

You know, it's funny. In real life, someone saying "I'm not actually a thief, I'm an assassin," would actually be a pretty crazy reveal, but this is Fire Emblem, so it's more like "Uh yeah, I kinda figured."

I think he's legit promoting from like level 1 or 2, because I have not used Volke to do anything but open doors and evade tank for literally two maps a third of the game ago.

There's a lot of discussion in gaming spaces these days about "friction" and how it adds texture to the experience; if playing a game is entirely smooth with zero jank, it becomes extremely forgettable and homogeneous with every other experience.

I believe that this is linked to the worship of realism as the gold standard in graphics (and other elements, like voice acting in Pokémon). Part of what made games such a fun medium in the earlier days was the way hardware limitations required everything to be filtered through layers of abstraction, which encouraged the player to more actively participate by filling in the gaps with their own imagination. This led to a more personalized experience in which the player engaged on more than just the mechanical level.

The average current day gamer seems to be slavishly devoted to optimizing the fun out of any game they play, and I wonder if this isn't a desperate attempt to try to engage with games on a deeper level than just passively letting it wash over them. If there's no interpretation to be done with the narrative or the visuals or the auditory elements, then all that's left is trying to squeeze as much efficiency as you can out of the mechanics. (I hesitate to say this is necessarily the fault of a game's design, because ultimately the devs can only lead a player to water, and cannot force them to drink. Personally, I still find plenty to iterate on regardless of how sophisticated a game's presentation is, but I recognize that not everyone is as naturally inclined to transformatively interacting with text as I am.)

Some people do genuinely enjoy optimization, such as speedrunners and the like, and that isn't what I'm talking about here. What I'm referring to here are people who complain about the lack of weapon/class restrictions in the last two Fire Emblem games because they can't help themselves from just making everyone a wyvern lord because that's what online guides tell them the "best" class is, rather than utilizing the freedom the game gives them to experiment on their own and create bizarre, interesting builds. Both games have bigger issues with them than too much freedom to design your own units.

The children yearn for limitations.

Fuck yeah, brother!! I'm excited to hear your thoughts about the hunks in this game. Normally I'm kinda Eh about the boys in FE, but there's some good ones here!

I started Schrodingers Call on Switch last weekend, and, speaking of weird 6th gen rpgs, the vibes are reminding me a lot of Fragile Dreams. Not gameplay-wise, of course, but in terms of narrative and tone. Have only done the first caller so far, and looking forward to more.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book was also quite fun, though I have a lot of "post game" content to go back to at some point. I started off trying to 100% each entry but then it became clear you need to advance the story to unlock the ability to do some of the data points, and I finished what I guess you'd call the main campaign with a pretty hefty amount of work done only to immediately have four new areas dropped on me, so yeah, will circle back later.

I had assumed that since it was an older game, it'd be less forgiving, since Normal was a perfectly fine first-run difficulty when I played Sacred Stones on an emulator back during study abroad. Admittedly, my Japanese was worse then, so that likely contributed a bit to the challenge, but I had played a couple other SRPGs by that point (my intro to the genre was this no-name DS game I bought second-hand at a Gamestop for like $6) so the concepts weren't entirely foreign.

Anyway, I mentioned this to @miss-prince this morning and she immediately went "do not play the next game on Hard."

me: Oh?

her: You could easily do it, it's just got a lot of tedious elements like calcing out enemy ranges yourself. Hard in English RD is Maniac in Japanese.

Hi, Sanaki. Please pay me for the extremely long mission I just did.

Oh my god, I was just mentally whining about when I'd get Tanith and Sigrun. Is it happening?

OHMIGOD IT'S HAPPENING.

Oh, I see Ike doesn't need to hit the level cap since he promotes as a story thing.

It's not like I don't have Master Seals, I just love to hoard things in games. What if I recruit somebody in a map soon and they're really weak but I like them a lot and I need them to catch up?

Goddamn, Ike.

Promotions usually give fairly decent stats, but like I've seem some garbo level ups this game so far, so this is a nice feeling.

I know it's not a diegetic sequence, but it is funny to imagine being knighted by your liege-in-exile and then be granted a sweet new fit.

Confession, after re-watching the opening cutscene with more context, I noticed that Ike had a blue thing around his neck and I was kind of hoping there was an emotionally devastating scene where Mist sacrifices herself or something and Ike starts wearing her little scarf/kerchief thing. But no, his promoted form just has a cape that's blue on the outside and red on the inside.

I do like that Tanith is taller than Ike. Cute detail.

Also, a breaching a stronghold style map will be fun. Kinda makes me want to play Valkyria Chronicles, honestly.

HaHA! Our catgirl was NOT robbed!

I know the MVP doesn't really mean anything mechanically, but I really enjoy seeing who it was, you know?

Also I realized several maps ago that I could have 100% played this on Hard with no problem.

Time for more Support convos!

Yeah, keep going, Jill. You're killing it.

You two will be close. I can feel it.

Base conversations are so fun. They really add a lot of flavor to the characters and show interactions that I'd never waste precious support resources on. Bring this back, please. No, I don't care that Fortune's Weave is basically finished. Go back and add in base conversations!

Ike knows his place.

Ike: Have you seen the pegasus knight I have on my team? Those people are a mystery to me.

Love this totally not-at-all suspicious disease that wiped out the entire Daein royal family and let a violent distant cousin secure succession to the throne.

Not since the flood? What the fuck are you talking about, "not since the great flood"?!

Tanith, you can't just drop lore like this out of nowhere. You literally were talking about how Ashnard unleased Covid-19 on Tellius like a sentence ago!

Am I super surprised that Reyson is the dancer of this game? No. I am a bit disappointed I don't get Leanne, but since no one but Reyson can communicate with her, I guess she can stay back and play cards with Elincia at base camp or whatever.

So I watched the tutorial here for chanting just in case there was some other element at play here, and excuse me, who the fuck is this?

I see Rhys, I see Kieran, but who is this blue guy? He looks like one of the jobber sword enemies.

I'm kind of pissed and a part of me wants to redo this map. I brought one of the hawk boys, leaving Marcia on the bench again, because I thought that they might be necessary to this map somehow (like how Soren and Illyana and Rolf are necessary the first time you fight the ravens). So I didn't bring Sothe because there just wasn't room in the party. Surely enemy thieves will show up and loot the chests and then I'll just kill them for it, I thought. The ravens show up and I'm like yeah! Here we go! But then the ravens just went and bothered Tanith for a few turns. What. The. Fuck. No enemies had keys. You just have have to bring Sothe (or Volke I guess) to this stupid fucking map.

This was more funny than annoying: I have Jill drag slowass-motherfuckin' Mist across the wall to have her talk to Shinon because she's the only one who can do it, and then she still can't convince him to join us. Why did Ike and Lethe have to just stand there and get shot for like two turns while Mist was ferried over by wyvern if you can't convince him to rejoin the group?

That said, it wasn't that annoying because I don't like Shinon that much and then Nephenee got to murder him and promote.

She also got really good stat increases upon ascending.

Anyway, rest in piss, Shinon.

I really could've put the one hawk guy I brought in the PC and taken Sothe, man. I'm so bummed about those chests.

Huzzah, Gallia is joining the war on everyone else on the side of everyone else!

I dunno, Nasir. It certainly seems like that's what you're doing.

At this rate I'm never going to get a dragon, dude.

I enjoyed his little tête-à-tête with Soren, too. Is Nasir the mole? Who knows? Feels like this is a misdirect to me potentially, but then again this is Intelligent Systems, so.

YES. YES YES YES.

This old crow man is so bad at his job. Great work not spilling the beans, geezer!

Literally no one in Tellius likes Oliver lol.

"I'm always up this early." Hell yeah, Soren, you tell him!

"I feel like it's going to be a very long day." I don't like the sound of that.

Three sections of the forest, huh. Maybe more. Long day, indeed.

Now what the fuck would that do?

Noooo not the mud slowing my party down!

So we're going up against mages and mounted riders, okay. *slips Mia a long sword* Go nuts, kiddo.

Awww, glad to see Jill grappling with her propagandized upbringing.

Man, I was going to leave Pegasus Knight baby behind this time to bring someone else, but it seems like I need flying units.

Never mind. Pegasus Knight baby is warming the bench for this one.

Forest map 1 was fine, the only thing of note was the very last guy with a venin sword, who no one could hit when they were right next to him, but Jill could skewer with a javelin.

Ah yes the Thunderbirds subplot.

Oh so Mist has laguz-level hearing, huh? I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that you were born in Gallia. Does make me wonder if she's got jigokumimi though.

Ah, so herons can grant people buffs using song? Kind of like...a...dancer...?

(Just saying, I would absolutely love a dancer.)

Two reinforcements, huh? If I were smart, I'd probably bring Rhys, but I'm not smart, so I'm going to bring Muarim and Marcia.

Welcome back, Pegasus Knight baby!

It's so cool there's multiple maps in this chapter. This game is so fun and varied. I'm enjoying it a ton!

Oh a wyvern knight! Astrid, your time to shine has arrived!

FUCK YEAH IT IS, IKE!

You may be disappointed, but I am very much not.

I assume this is Reyson's sister?

Uh oh. Pincer attack while Ike is carrying Leanne? This is going to be a challenge.

Dude, look at this ridiculous formation the game automatically put everyone in.

Mist, Illyana, and Soren on the outside, Big Tiddy in the middle. What a mess. The fact that I can't change this is cracking me up.

Okay, okay. I'll be smart this time and bring Rhys as a second healer in my reinforcements. And you know what? Let's bring our boy Boyd back. He's great on a defend map.

We beat them back soundly. And then there was a big thing about how Leanne weighs less than Mist and Boyd got his ass kicked.

These birds are going to become a problem down the line, huh.

Tell me more about your elder sisters, Reyson...

Guess we're in the "or more" stage of this mutli-map battle.

Brought Mordecai and Rolf as reinforcements because I needed someone who didn't use a lance and who had been somewhat recently outfitted with gear (or didn't need any, hence Mordecai). Figured Rolf would get a last hurrah since there were two pegasus knights on this map, but Astrid murdered one and the other kamikaze'd into Lethe, so really his only contribution to this battle was almost getting flattened by Meteor. (Dorothea, this opposing mage is not. He whiffed two before nailing Rolf down to 3 hp.)

True MVP of this entire gauntlet was Lethe. She murdered so. many. enemies. If she doesn't get the MVP shout out at the start of the next chapter, know she's been robbed.

Dammit, Tibarn! I wanted the exp from killing the boss! Greedy hawk.

Oh waow, heron to heron communication.

Sanaki, appreciate the effort, but I don't know that doing dougeza will-- wait a second. Do Sigrun and Tanith have alicorns?!

I can't really blame Reyson for not wanting to forgive. It's convenient for us that Leanne convinced him, but honestly he doesn't owe Begnion or humanity anything.

Oh, so the song of the herons sounds like your mom's song, Ike and Mist? Is that so?

Hahahahahaha god, another voiced cutscene. Ike sounds like Owen Wilson on valium. Mist sounds like she's got plans right after this and only has time for one take.

Shine on, you awkward little beorc(?) babies.

You know, I like that Big Titty and Soren have a nice relationship. It's nice that someone is looking out for Soren. He should confide in Big Sis Titty about his being a dragon or whatever.

Sigrun, get it together, girl.

As the video goes on, outlining what happens in the various different sections of game, it becomes increasingly clear that the devs did, in fact, make it pretty obvious and easy to understand the story using several clear metaphors that are not difficult to interpret.

Thankfully the youtuber's interpretation in the end was one that I think is probably the most supported read by the text, but he kept talking about it as if it was some huge task that required "piecing together" several other community theories.

I just felt this chill go through me at the idea that several adults were struggling this hard with imagery and metaphor that is not particularly subtle. The internet complains about literacy crisis, but I had usually just attributed that to people looking for reasons to argue for the dopamine hit, or quickly misreading because they were skimming and not fully engaged.

Not like, genuinely incapable of understanding symbolism.

Hey game? I'd like to stop seeing Oliver if it's cool with you.

Reyson, you should totally kick your ex bf's ass.

Lol, Ike telling Sanaki he's figured out that she's intentionally trying to use them to expose the laguz abuse happening in the Begnion court, and then following up the compliment on being smarter than he looks with "I have companions I trust with my life who helped me figure it out." Yeah, we know it was Soren and Big Titty, dude.

There's a poetic element to the fact that I find Muarim's human self so hot but in battle he's literally never in that form.

I was not expecting Tormod to be a mage. Maybe I'm a bad person.

Did a couple more support convos, like Ike and Soren, and Mist and Jill... wait a minute. What?

What do you mean Jill is around Mist's age?! Either she's way younger than I thought, or Mist is way older than I thought.

I also like that Mia is basically just the Fire Emblem version of Nemona from Pokemon SV.

Illyana looks so done with her shit, too.

Indoor map! Indoor map!

I left Rhys behind this time to bring Muarim, which was a bad decision, as Mist got put all the way over to talk to Devdan. No one died, we just had to yolo a lot more than usual.

Just gonna say, referring to one's self in third person is not that weird in Japanese. It's not the most common thing, but it's not as weird as hearing it in English.

We handily took care of Oliver's goons though and freed a not-so-thankful Reyson.

Love this reaction image this chapter gifted us too:

They had to go through the burned forest to get to the villa, and Reyson the heron was like "Remember the genocide!" What do you think happened, Ike?

Damn, Nasir. What a catty comment.

It's fine cause it's fiction I suppose but I love the idea of like the general populace being the unruly, bigoted mob that the poor ruler has to try to direct toward being better.

Meanwhile, in Crow Country...

These two really are arguing like bitter exes, man.

Reyson's with the hawk guy now, Naesala, get over it.

Holy shit, absolutely NO ONE in this game is straight, are they?

Like clearly IntSys understood the assignment when it comes to "evil Catholics" but woof, Oliver is NOT helping the queer community image.

I did a few Support conversations this time because I keep forgetting to do them while I'm fretting over keeping everyone outfitted. (And because the Information chats kind of fill a similar role.) My favorite one so far is the Lethe and Jill C support, where the latter asks a bunch of uncomfortable but sincere questions and Lethe hits her microaggression limit for the day. It's always a good low-rank FE support convo when both parties finish the conversation pissed off at one-another.

Sigrun over here giving all this helpful info that Ike would rather be getting from Soren, but Soren's being too depressed and a drag to be useful right now. Ike, your boy toy's clearly got connections to this place. Read the roo-- I forgot who I was talking to.

Man, I can't say why, but I'm getting the feeling we might be heading to a desert...

Very funny how the game lampshades that thieves and laguz being fine on sand makes sense, but magic users not being impeded by sand is just kinda...a thing. It's very amusing that they're joking about it here.

I do like that Sigrun is empathetic to the laguz plight, and seems to be pretty level-headed for nobility, but I don't love that she's following up her affirmation of human rights with religious talk. I half expected some permutation of "hate the sin, love the sinner" to come up. Thankfully it seems she's too cool for that, though.

Makalov will never see battle and therefore never earn money, and so he will be stuck with us forever, I guess.

Ike, you're great.

You can wear a disguise all you want, little kid, but you can't fool me: you have the eyes of a named character under there.

Working around the sand and the staggered transformation timers on the enemy laguz was a fun gimmick. There hasn't been any map I haven't liked so far! The design in this game is so good.

Sadly one of the rebels did get away because he was wedged down in the corner of the map, but eh, that's okay. You got lucky today, tiger man.

The leader of this band of refugees is kinda hot. I could take or leave the animal ears, but otherwise? Mmm. (Meow, one might say?)

Everyone give a big round of applause to Nephenee, who defeated the boss by throwing a javelin at him!

This post-battle conversation is so funny. Mist is all like "what? they can't enslave you! that's illegal!!!" Greil, your kids are so charming.

Like look at this reaction to finding out these refugees are raising an stray beorc kid:

Classic.

I do love that this child is the head of the laguz emancipation army. We've got two kids more or less running nations, this one is heading a resistance cell... The youth of Tellius are such natural leaders! Well, most of them. Not Mist and Rolf so much. At least Mist has The Emblem. What's Rolf got? A secret attack that no player has ever used?

Reyson, dude. This is such an obvious set up. You were beefing with this guy not that long ago.

And what exactly is Naesala doing now to win your trust? Showing you your fucked up forest, which you already knew was fucked up?

This is why they read as exes to me. There's no other explanation for why Reyson would do something this idiotic, unless he still holds a candle for this corvid.

Ah! New language jumpscare!