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| This doesn't address my concerns. At all. |
Like anyone, I was interested to see what Sony had in store with the PlayStation 4 when they announced it last week. For me, though, there were two glaring omissions that were even more important than the whole will-it-or-won’t-it-play-used-games thing (which doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, honestly; I’m not an impulsive game shopper: I wait for sales): the console itself, which I not only hope looks cool, but won’t take up an immense amount of my precious floor space, and will-it-or-won’t-it be region free.
For example, before it came out only about a month ago in the US, I
played about 15 hours of the Japanese version of Ni No Kuni (fantastic game,
btw). I am good enough at Japanese that I can read the two basic alphabets at lightning speed, but my understanding of Japanese vocabulary and grammar is more than a little suspect. As is my general
familiarity with the casual spoken language. The character Drippy, named Shizuku in Japan, is nearly indecipherable in the English version of the game with his wacky
Cockney-like tongue and ridiculous speed of speech, but it’s a perfect
adaptation of the Japanese Shizuku, who uses un-dictionary-able slang and a
speaking voice that makes you wish you had digital hands that could wring his neck
through the screen. It was a very slow and difficult 15 hours and it turns out, as I
discovered only a few days after receiving my American Ni No Kuni, only about five hours of actual gameplay. I’d spent around ten hours just
listening to the cutscenes and reading the subtitles on pause, looking up what
I could in the dictionary, and, in many cases, giving it up for slang or idiom
I simply had no knowledge of and moving on. Needless to say, that was not an
especially fun way to spend my time.
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| This whole scene was a particularly frustrating hour of attempted translation. |
