Month: August 2024

Why Is Anime So Bad At Translating Titles?

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I’ve been watching Delicious in Dungeon lately. Ten out of ten, no notes, except that name. It doesn’t roll off the tongue very well in English. The anime is generally very well translated overall (I’m watching on Netflix, and if it has a subs option, I couldn’t find it at a glance, and I don’t care enough about subs vs. dubs to spend more than five seconds looking, so fuck it, dubbed it is), and even does a good job of using current English slang and idioms in a way that feels fairly natural, though I worry that as early as the 2030s people saying “cringe” is going to make this feel like a period piece.

But for some reason they went with “Delicious in Dungeon” instead of something nearly identical but with better flow, like “Delicious Dungeon” or “Dungeon Delicious.” “Delicious in Dungeon” doesn’t come up directly in the story except that the narrator will sometimes say the title at the end of an episode as a bookend, which works with any title that has the word “dungeon” and “delicious” in it (and if you called it “Dungeon Cooking” instead, all you’d have to do is slightly rework the narration to fix the segues). I wonder if it’s supposed to have the same cadence as “Dungeons and Dragons?” But if so, it doesn’t, the syllables are wrong and using the “in” instead of the “and” throws off the usual “it’s like D&D but” title where you do two alliterative nouns separated by an “and.” Starships and Sorcerers doesn’t have the cadence, but the [noun] and [noun] format makes it recognizable and the nouns used signal some kind of space fantasy setting. If you really want the D&D reference, go with Dumplings and Dragons.

And it reminds me of K-On! The title itself is untranslated (I don’t know if K-On! even means anything in Japanese? It doesn’t sound like a full Japanese word), but the name of the rock band that the main characters are in is named “After School Tea Time,” after the fact that they meet as a club after school and spent a lot of the early episodes using their club as basically an excuse to fuck around having tea and snacks after school. But whereas “After School Tea Time” sounds like an anime with an overly literal translation, “Tea After School” is a good name for a band.

Both of these shows have perfectly good English translations but for some reason they fall apart on proper nouns.

Also this blog updates on Fridays now because my Patreon updates on Wednesdays and I want a Discord bot to be able to post both of them to the same channel without doubling up on two posts the same day. And also if you want to read my thoughts on TTRPGs and game design, those are on Patreon these days. I am now a professional game designer, so I don’t mind charging roughly $0.25 per post for my thoughts on that subject, whereas this blog is mostly my dumping ground for video games and anime and other stuff where I am just a guy.

Citizen Sleeper

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In Citizen Sleeper, you are a “sleeper,” an emulated human consciousness uploaded to a robot body that mimics the regular human body in various ways to prevent the copy/pasted brain from going insane. So, you have to breathe because if you don’t your emulated subconcious thinks you’re drowning, and you have to eat or else the hunger will drive you mad even though the amount of energy provided to your bio-mechanical body by the food is puny (and it’s not clear how diegetic the hunger mechanics are, but you certainly don’t seem to have to eat very often). Unfortunately, the only point of making emulated humans like this is to exploit some kind of legal loophole regarding AI – as long as the artificial intelligence is created by copy/pasting a human brain wholesale, then the resulting being doesn’t legally count as human and doesn’t have rights, but also doesn’t count as enough of an AI for nebulous other laws to apply. Some kind of AI safety laws, I think? It’s not clear, but the game’s not a legal drama, so that’s fine. Making emulated consciousnesses allows the corporations to circumvent some kind of legal problem, and that’s why you are a robot with a wifi connection in your brain and robot legal status and yet you think, feel, and act exactly like a human.

The inciting incident of the game is that you are pulled out of a freighter that you’d stowed away on after escaping your corporate masters on some pit of despair floating out in space, and you’ve arrived on a decaying ring station taken over by the workers in a string of riots after corporate control fell apart. Now your goal is to make good your escape, which you can do in one of three ways: Upload into the cloud, hop on a ship to a distant planet (you have two different ships to choose from, but the details don’t matter to the broad objective of escape), or break the corporation’s ability to track you down and decline either of the other two options so you can just hang out on the station forever.

It’s not clear why the corporation’s grip on the station was slipping to begin with, but the Collapse was triggered by large chunks of the station being physically destroyed, so the corporation bailed out and left their station-level executives to fend for themselves. A few decades later, the Havenage is a ruling body that evolved out of a union, vaguely social democratic although it’s not clear how many residents are in the union. Certainly you are not in the union, and the political details mostly don’t matter. The Havenage is in charge of the main sections of the station, but they don’t really tell you what to do or provide for your needs. They are doing an okay job of running things but you’re pretty much on your own for getting food and shelter, and they don’t have total control of the station.

The Yatagans are a street gang that controls some of the more dense residential areas, and the Hypha Commune are a bunch of botanist hippies living under communism out in the biosphere sections of the station, which have grown completely wild since the Collapse. The Havenage are the ones that outside polities contact to do business with the station and the Yatagans in particular seem to exist like a regular (if firmly established) gang, in the cracks between the limits of the Havenage’s resources rather than acting openly as a rival state. It’s hard to tell exactly what the relation is between the three because all three of them are pretty chill with each other during the plot – the Havenage will not help you with your Yatagan problems and the Yatagans will not help you with your Havenage problems, so whatever the exact situation between them is, there is a stable balance of power and you aren’t upsetting it.

So that’s where you are. What do you do? Every day you roll some number of six-sided dice based on the condition of your body. At full health, you roll five dice. At the minimum, you roll just one. You can assign the dice to various tasks, and each task results in another die roll for a negative, neutral, or positive result, with the odds based on the face of the die assigned to it. The “neutral” results are actually marginal successes while the “positive” results are more like critical hits, i.e. if you assign a die to work a shift at a dangerous job, a “neutral” result gives you money and avoids harm, a “positive” result gives you extra money, and only a “negative” result damages you. Once you’ve used all your dice, you can sleep to get them back.

Continue reading “Citizen Sleeper” →

Far Cry 6: Appointingly Armored

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I’m not thrilled with Far Cry 6 overall. I’m mainly only playing it because I want closure on various Ubisoft open-world sandbox series that I was too broke to play when they got big, forcing me to watch from the sidelines as people loved them, then got bored with them, then eventually started rolling their eyes at the very mention of them. Assassin’s Creed and Watch_Dogs I played through until fairly obvious stopping points. For Assassin’s Creed, it was after Syndicate, before Origins, an intentional break that Ubisoft took to try and retool the series. For Watch_Dogs, it was after the second one, before Legion, because Legion’s “play as anyone” gameplay gimmick was such a radical departure as to feel like a different series altogether.

Far Cry lacks any particular breaks like that (well, except the break between 1 and 2), so I’m trying to play up to the current installment in the series and then I can say that I have completed the series, I have experienced the games that I had initially missed. And I’m trying to do that soon-ish because Far Cry 7 is supposedly coming out in 2025 and this series has gotten really shaky. Obviously I can just decide “fuck it, the series is over for me because it is bad,” and if I end up playing Far Cry 6 so little that I can’t even finish a main story blitz before 2025, then that’s probably a good sign that the series has become unplayably bad and I should not try to play it anymore. But I’d like to at least try to get through Far Cry 6, especially since the only outright bad game the series has had so far is Far Cry 5, and even that was fun to play, it just had a miserable and stupid main plot.

Far Cry 6 is better about this so far, but this wouldn’t be the first time Ubisoft has put crowd-pleasing fanfare up front where the early reviewers working to deadline will see it and hidden all of the terminally stupid shit near the end, where only dedicated fans or people with a neurotic obsession with completing things will find it, so we’ll see if Far Cry 6 is actually better.

But one thing I can say for the game already is that it finally has tanks. The absence of tanks made sense in Far Cry 3 and 5, and it was mostly sensible and forgivable in Far Cry 2, since that game was breaking new ground in enough other ways that I didn’t mind if they ran out of time and money before getting to specific features like tanks and IFVs. It really stuck out in Far Cry 4, though. The tinpot dictatorships you fight in Far Cry games might not have state-of-the-art weaponry, but at this point the T-62 is over 60 years old and was specifically intended to be a cheap tank for mass export to anyone on the red side of the Cold War. Stir in half a century of regime change, equipment capture, and imitation models, and these things (or tanks like them) can show up absolutely anywhere. And indeed, they are in Yara! These tanks are some fictional model from 1944, but whatever, what’s important is that I can drive around in a tank and fire the cannon and run over things.

Humble Choice August 2024

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It’s the first Tuesday of August as I write this. What’s in the box?

Sifu is a kung fu game where you seek revenge for your dead family by decking a very large number of people in the schnozz. The three selling points I can identify are 1) You can pick a male or female character (they don’t spend a lot of time on this one, but it is the first thing they tell you about the game for some reason), 2) you have a magic amulet that brings you back to life every time you die, but ages you each time, and 3) the combat system doesn’t have any HUD indicators when something’s about to go wrong nor do enemies take turns attacking. Presumably, then, you have to pay attention to tells in their animations and crowd management is very important, although it doesn’t actually say that. The Humble Choice description definitely leans into the last part the most, with several paragraphs dedicated to how challenging the kung fu gameplay is. How Long To Beat says 8 hours, which is 3 hours longer than I’m willing to give this one, the risk that it’s not good enough to sustain its gameplay is too high.

High On Life is that one game written by one of the Rick and Morty guys where your gun talks to you. I’ve never thought Rick and Morty was particularly funny, and while I do like its exploration of sci-fi concepts, I like that because each individual episode is very short and often explores different concepts in its A-plot and its B-plot. High On Life is probably not staying glued to its single sci-fi concept of aliens trying to get high on humans somehow for its entire nine and a half hour run, but video games still tend to dwell on concepts much longer than TV shows do, and even concepts I like are going to get boring if they spend even 45 minutes on them. The fear hole was a pretty good episode, but it would be much worse if it were ninety minutes instead of twenty, even if two-thirds of those ninety minutes were combat.

Two or three times a year, Humble Choice includes a game that gives the whole bundle the flavor of one of those diabolic bargains or “would you rather” games. This bundle’s hidden poison is Gotham Knights, and neither of the two headliners are even pick-ups, let alone overshadowing the threat that I might accidentally install Gotham Knights on my computer. I’m assuming that Sifu is supposed to be a headliner since normally those are listed first, but it’s more obscure than usual, so my headcanon here is that the Humble Choice headliners are set up as far in advance as release day, like, Gotham Knights locked in their position in the August 2024 Choice clear back in September or October of 2022 when it was coming out, and by the time August 2024 was rolling around, Humble was having second thoughts about Gotham Knights being a headliner so they promoted Sifu to the #1 spot instead.

In Blacktail, you play as Yaga, a Slavic archer-witch who gets exiled from your village and can choose to either become a guardian of the wilderness or to go the route that name implies and become a nightmare horror. I’m not sure why they went with the relatively generic “Blacktail” over just calling the game “Baba Yaga,” especially since, while looking up some of her legends to see if maybe the phrase “black tail” comes up in them (nothing after a quick Google search, but bear in mind my background research for these posts tends to be pretty sloppy), I found that Wikipedia claims that Baba Yaga is an ambiguous figure who is sometimes helpful, so the guardian-of-woods route in this game is actually also following the legends, not defying them. Gameplay wise, this game is promising to be a witch game with an emphasis on archery, and so far witch games have capped out at some survival-crafting games being decent witch games by accident, but at less than 10 hours, I’m willing to give Blacktail a chance to break the curse.

Astral Ascent is a Roguelite game and even kind of leans into the slow pace at which the story unfolds. They are attempting to be more deliberate with their Roguelite mechanics, so my outside guess is that Astral Ascent is probably one of the better B-tier Roguelites for people who really like that genre. I don’t really like that genre, though (I don’t dislike it, but I don’t like it so much that I want to play its middlingly-high entries), so for me, this game is going to be 20-30 hours of being a worse version of Hades.

Diluvian Ultra has managed the first half of a miracle: I am going to add a Doom-style shooter to the backlog. How Long To Beat has exactly one record of how long this game is, and that record says 5 hours, so if that’s even close to accurate then I will give this game a chance based purely on its cool aesthetic and ideas: You are a grimdark space fantasy prince, not a 40k rip-off but a guy who’d fit in in that universe, and you have been awakened from your slumber on your tombship by unknown attackers. It remains to be seen if Diluvian Ultra can manage the second half of this miracle, getting me to actually like a Doom-style shooter. This is episode 1 with promises of more as paid DLC, and I’m not committing to any of the DLCs even though the story is apparently incomplete without them, but honestly, if it can even get me through the first episode then that should be considered a win, given I very nearly rejected this game on its genre alone and only read the ad out of a sense of obligation towards being reasonably open-minded.

Universe For Sale is about a woman living in a colony in the clouds of Jupiter who can create universes in the palm of her hand. No sign of gameplay or what kind of actual conflict this leads to, since the images and video heavily emphasize the woman and the people she talks to, not the universes themselves. As near as I can tell, this is an adventure game that heavily emphasizes its strange, novel worldbuilding. Fair enough, but if I wanted a story told to me, I’d read a book or watch a movie. If you expect me to go to the hassle of clicking to advance the conversation every thirty seconds, I expect there to be a game to play.

This Means Warp is a sci-fi game where you fly a spaceship around to different asteroids and, uh, interact with them somehow. The game’s advertisement is focused relentlessly on how it’s playable with 1-4 players which, I get why that’s a primary selling point, but do you, uh, have other selling points? Well, okay, it also says it randomizes your adventures each time. There’s good reasons to do that, it means you have to master broad systems rather than memorizing specific maps in a more deterministic way, but it also means that the maps lack the handcrafted human touch and you can really tell the difference. This tradeoff alone is definitely not sinking the game, but it’s not a major selling point the way the devs seem to think it is, and the other major selling point is that I, the solo player, am kind of an afterthought to this multiplayer focused game. When the game lists its features as bulletpoints, it does have a third, and the third is “deep, strategic combat,” but it doesn’t say, like, how. Just that it has combat, which is hard. Optimistically, this might be a somewhat FTL-esque game, perhaps with more emphasis on crew combat over ship combat, and with a more light-hearted tone. How Long To Beat says it’s 12 hours long and also has only one rating, so I’m going to pass it by because that’s already longer than the 10 hours I might be willing to chance on this game plus there’s a possibility that the one rating left was an outlier and the real average time is 15 or even 20 hours.

These two pickups put me up to 156, which is still slightly disappointing since I was recently below 150 and then I decided I should play Deep Rock Galactic for three months. Still, the new pickups are short and I still have a few short games in the backlog (I’m playing Hi-Fi Rush right now and it’s not especially long). Plus, I like the look of both of the new pickups, even if Diluvian Ultra makes me nervous with its genre. Not sure if either of them deliver on their promises, but I like what they’re promising.