Archive

Japanese Splatoon 2 Ad

Splatoon 2 released worldwide recently. I’ve been digging through new Japanese gaming magazines for an upcoming project, and I found this cool ad for the game. It also highlights a 320-page art book.

Site Design & Funky Fantasy IV Book Progress

I’ve been working on a lot of stuff this week even though it barely feels like it.

One good piece of news is that a Fangamer pal helped make the HTML of the new site design for the main LoL site. I’ve still got a lot of internal work to do to make it work with my custom WordPress coding so I don’t think the design will be up for a few months, but it’s good to see it coming together finally. The best thing is that it’s mobile-friendly and can resize automatically to fit different screen types / dimensions. Besides being super helpful for mobile readers, it’ll help with search engine ranking too, since mobile friendly plays a part in those crazy algorithms too.

The last few days Tony and I have been working on the base layout for the upcoming Funky Fantasy IV book. It’s coming along well but it’s still very early and will change a lot I’m sure. At the moment it looks like it’ll be in the area of 250-300 pages long. Here are some example layouts we experimented with earlier this week that are now outdated.

We’re already working on something different from those two samples. We’ve decided what kind of info we’ll continue to use, what kind of info we’ll drop (mostly the uninformative ones that sound like they’re from a bad TruTV show), and how we’ll arrange things. In the end it looks like it’s going to be a mix between our This be book bad translations, video games! book and our main Legends of Localization books.

It doesn’t look like much now but I can tell this is gonna be one of my favorite books I ever work on!

Famitsu’s Reader-Ranked Top 20 RPGs of All Time

I’ve been reading a lot of current Japanese gaming magazines for research purposes and I’ll probably share things here and there from them, but for today I wanted to share this new list of the top 20 RPGs of all time as ranked by Famitsu’s readers.

20. Witcher 3
19. Final Fantasy VIII
18. Final Fantasy IX
17. MOTHER 2
16. Final Fantasy VI
15. Dragon Quest IV
14. Persona 4 Golden
13. Xenogears
12. Final Fantasy X
11. Xenoblade
10. Final Fantasy XV
9. Persona 3
8. NieR Replicant
7. Suikoden II
6. Dragon Quest V
5. Final Fantasy VII
4. NieR: Automata
3. Chrono Trigger
2. Dragon Quest III
1. Persona 5

With “all time ever” polls I’ve always wondered if the recentness of a popular game has some sort of sway on its ranking. It looks like I’m terrible at keeping up though, I still got 12 of these to play someday 😯

Sage Advice from Funky Fantasy IV

I’ve been going over the version 2 script of Funky Fantasy IV this week in preparation for our latest book project. I can’t believe it, but I’ve run across a couple of lines that give really good life advice. Learn well from the friends of Gorube, Skull Million, and eagles:

  • While I am aware of my fault, my life is just right.
  • Do not mess up with the people you love.
  • Take it easy!
  • Do not be afraid of the dangerous part.
  • Educational guidance will be helpful.
  • Do not try hard to think that the eagle is an eagle!

Treat Yo’self to a Victory Dinner!

It’s an LoL tradition to have a victory dinner after the release of our latest book. After Zelda, we went to an amazing Irish pub. EarthBound took us to both a great pizza place AND a southwestern themed place (yeah, we celebrated twice).

Now it’s time to celebrate This be book bad translation, video games! Where should we go?!

Final Fantasy IV: The Save File Maintenance Years

This week I’ve been doing some organization-related work for my upcoming book about Funky Fantasy IV. I’ve got an early chapter already mostly done but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything good/funny so I’ve been scouring through text files and jumping around in the game to get things I missed before.

It’s a bit of a hassle since FFIV/FFII don’t really have debug menus, so I’ve been relying on an old save file archive I put together for my FF4 comparison site. The problem is that I never really documented where each save file is so it’s always taken me 10+ minutes just to find a save file where I need it to be. So now I’m finally going through and documenting that stuff for future time savings.

Unfortunately it looks like one of my saves is missing entirely so I’ll have to play a good chunk of the game to re-create it. It’s also a bit of a hassle when using different save files on different versions of the game, as it means the characters’ names get messed up each time. But it’s a small hassle when I stop to realize I’m playing Final Fantasy IV for a career – kid me would be so shocked hear about this 😛

Play is Work

It’s no secret that I work on a million things at all times, so lately I’ve been trying to slow down a bit so my old bones can catch up to my brain. In particular I started playing the new Zelda game in Japanese… but even then I wound up taking screenshots of every piece of text I came across. I probably wouldn’t have bothered with taking screenshots, but boy is that screenshot button on the Switch controller the handiest thing I’ve ever come across. I do wish it saved in png format though…

Anyway, I’ve been playing the game super weirdly and spent about 200 hours before I finally went and continued the story/talked to Impa after leaving the plateau. During that time I explored everywhere, usually by taking the totally wrong way on accident, and talking to everyone/fighting everything. It’s been a ton of fun, and I made it a personal rule right from the start to NOT use the Shrine Sensor thingy. I think that alone made it twice as fun for me.

Poe’s been playing the English version as well, taking screenshots here and there. I don’t have any specific projects for this game in mind, but screenshots are the lifeblood of Legends of Localization. I’m sure they’ll come in handy at some point!