Topic: Anyone good with Japanese?

[Tropicon]

Posted this request all around the net and still no definitive answers. I'm stuck as far as the requests go at my site because I just can't play the Japanese games people want maps for. None of my help wanted ads have gotten anything so far. Does anybody wanna help? You get to join vgmapper if it means anything. Anybody like doing collabs?

[FlyingArmor]

I know a bit of Japanese, nowhere near fluency (still working on that), but I can navigate my way through a Japanese game and more or less get the gist of what's going on. I think I would be interested, but right now I'm rather busy with preparing for art shows and making sure I pass my summer course, so something like this would pushed off to the side for the moment.

[Will]

I know only tiniest bits of Japanese like this:



Senshi - Soldier

Sensei - Teacher

Senbei - King

Yoshi - Love



Unfortunately I cannot read Japanese symbols. I myself had trouble in playing the SNES game Arabian Nights, because I had to make do with the Japanese in it. If you're lucky you might find the roms dubbed by fans. For instance there is a translated rom of the SNES game "Dragon Ball Z: Super Gokuuden Kakusei Hen (J)". I wish I could assist you more, but the langauge is beyond my knowledge. I cannot read any runes apart from Hieroglyphics (just a hobby to read them, nothing special or useful). Good luck.

[DarkWolf]

I don't know any Japanese other than a few vocabulary words and once again that's verbal, not in kanji/kana form.  Thus my Japanese gaming experiences have been limited to games that aren't heavy on text.

[JonLeung]

...anime, bo, dojo, ecchi, gi, Gojira, Hadoken, hara-kiri, hentai, karate, katana, kawaii, konninchiwa, manga, ninja, ninjustu, nunchaku, otaku, ramen, sai, samurai, sashimi, sensei, seppuku, Shoryuken, sushi, tsunami, wasabi...

[Revned]

We actually had Japanese class in my suburban Colorado elementary school, strangely. We never learned much past numbers and greetings.

[Tropicon]

Some of the projects are massive.  Others not so much.  Some of the requests are full blown world maps, these things take a lot of in-depth research and cataloging.  Another person just wants passwords for a mahjong game.  I could do most of the heavy lifting map wise, I just need someone to break through the language barrier.



FlyingArmor, you wanna give it a shot?  You can take it real easy, there's no rush.

[FlyingArmor]

Yeah, might as well. This would be a great way to practicing my reading skills, if for no other reason.

[Tropicon]

GREAT!!  I'll start us out with something real easy.  An old request for instructions on how to get through the sixth level of this game:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/snes/home/944697.html



I can't get off the first level.  I think it has something to do with a trading game.

The first step is just to get to level 6.  Give it a look, tell me what you think.

[snesmaster]

Back in the day I fell in love with Final Fantasy II (IV) on the SNES.  I wanted more, but there were no more Final Fantasy games on the SNES at that time.  I was so desperate, I bought the Japanese Final Fantasy V.  I did not know any Japanese, but I was able to make it all the way through the game.  It took around 200 hours.

[JonLeung]

Back in the NES days my dad borrowed four Famicom games from a friend who lived in Vancouver or something.  These included a Japanese version of Blaster Master (with a vastly different title and opening sequence), a game me and my brother somehow jokingly referred to as "Yummy II" (don't ask - but I'm pretty sure it was a Goemon game), and a couple others.  As there wasn't much to read, we got about as far as we would in other games at the time, English or otherwise.  (EDIT: Come to think of it, I think one of the remaining two was Faxanadu.  I certainly didn't get far in that without understanding Japanese!)



Later, some mall that was very kid-centric opened up in town, but it didn't last very long and has long been a bowling alley.  But at the time it had a store called "Super NTD", which featured a bunch of video games, many of which were Japanese.  Me and my brother played through all of the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 3 when we rented it from there.  When we were having trouble with Bowser for whatever reason, one of the store employees gave us some baloney tactic of jumping on Bowser's fireballs to somehow snuff them out to turn them into Bob-Ombs and throw them back at him.  Whatever.  You don't need to know any Japanese to get through SMB3, though.



In the late Super NES days I discovered an import store near West Edmonton Mall called AV Power Square(d).  It was here that I rented games like Kirby Super Star (and finished it a couple times, before renting the American version, before actually buying it and doing it again), Super Bomberman 3-5, some Dragon Ball Z games (before it got stupidly popular in North America), and played a bit of Super Mario 64 long before the N64's North American debut.  I avoided renting Japanese RPGs for the Super Famicom, because of the language barrier, though a friend tried to stumble through Bahamut Lagoon.



I guess I never really needed to know much Japanese, so I guess I'm off-topic...  I guess the game that I played longest in Japanese was two-three weeks' worth of the Japanese Animal Forest (the precursor to Animal Crossing) on the N64.  Who knows what those villagers were saying to me.



EDIT: I don't know how I forgot that I actually got through Pok?mon: Red Version once through Japanese.  That took a bit of work.  I don't think I made a serious effort to "catch them all" until I got the North American version in English, though, especially considering that at the time each Pok?mon didn't have their own unique sprite outside of battle or the Pok?dex.

[Tropicon]

Don't get me wrong I've played tons of Jap only games, Bushi Seiryuuden: what Game Freak was doing before Pokemon.  And I've played the Jap versions of all my favorite games.  But now I have to collect real information and I'm not going to just make stuff up.  I need to the real names to towns, items, or people for an accurate map.

[snesmaster]

I was lucky when I was writing a FAQ for Seiken Densetsu 3 I was in college and I had a Japanese housemate who was able to give me the actual names of towns and items.  You just need to find a friend from Japan and rent him a room in exchange for translating the games

[FlyingArmor]

Wally wo Sagase is actually not that bad of a game, once you get into it. As I'm playing it, I'm constantly opening and closing my DS when I'm not sure of a word, heheh. But if the stone age area is the first level, it's taking quite some time to get through it. Right now I'm searching for the last ingredient for Nana's stew so Uga, her husband, doesn't go and eat the Wally Watchers he's holding captive for dinner... or that's what I think is going on, haha.

[Tropicon]

I knew it was a trading game.  I still don't get the select screen.  There's the two top boxes and the middle one with the rotating present.  Is the small box on the left the equipped item?