Unsolicited Advice

Hi, I'm Arabella, and I'm still an Ace Attorney  addict. I've given up on ever having enough money to throw it at people like Nintendo or Capcom, so I broke down and spent a bunch of my mindless-repetitive-activity-TV-watching time on running a letsplay of Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies . (I have a lot of this. You don't really need your eyeballs for a lot of hoop drills, and I've knit entire bedspreads in moss stitch without bothering to look down.) This one is a commentary-free but not blind playthrough, so there's no one talking over the soundtrack, and you don't have to watch the LPer flop around for ten minutes at a time, brute-forcing a cross examination that they can't figure out. [This strikes me as being a little like an alcoholic drinking mouthwash because it's all they can afford. But on the other hand, at least mouthwash isn't toxic, and Scope is like 75% of the way to being cheap peppermint schnapps anyway. I try not to think about...

Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path has eaten my brains. No, you didn't miss an English-language release of Gyakuten Kenji 2 -- Capcom inexplicably decided not to do one. A fantranslation group put out a patch in Xdelta and BEAT formats a few months ago, and I finally got around to trying it. I'm not giving you any of the files, on the grounds that if you can spell at least 50% of the relevant search terms correctly, it'll come up in about 20 milliseconds on Google. It works flawlessly on an early revision Japanese DS Lite with an R4 flashcard running Wood 1.27. (Not that I would know anything about any of these questionable third-party products, nosireebob. I don't have any family history of clever media conversion , and I certainly did not just convince someone to buy a DS emulator for her droidphone so she could play the original Ace Attorney games that Capcom inexplicably only released for iOS. And I would never dream of spending several of my ...

Finally figured out what the hell that kanji was meant to be. Ryuuichi's using the construct 父親,  chichioya , which literally says "father parent". I've never run into it before. He's also using it without the formal o-  or any honorific suffixes, when talking to Mitsurugi about Mitsurugi père . No dictionary will tell me definitively what that one means, but he is definitely doing it on purpose -- when explaining to Mayoi in the office, he drops back and uses otousan , as she has been. The oya  part is also used in other constructs for people who are seen as parental figures, like oyakata  (親方), a "coach" in martial arts, or oyabun  (親分), "Boss" of a gang, or the don of a crime family, in a very tightly-knit sense. The implication is that this is someone you look to for guidance. The character is also used with a different pronunciation in a collection of adjectives and expressions that describe intimate relationships, with overtones of gre...

Finally gotten to Case 1-4 in Gyakuten Saiban . You know, the interesting  case. Lotta's name in Japanese is Natsumi, mercifully in katakana. She has one of the heaviest Kansai-ben accents I've ever tripped across. If you've ever seen Meitantei Conan  in Japanese -- she's worse than Hattori, who is hamming it up at least half the time. It's not incomprehensible, but I'm guessing at a lot of slang based on context and vague impressions. Manfred von Karma is Karuma Goh. He is equally creepy. His speech is distinctive. It's common in Japanese to double up on imitative noises and non-word sorts of descriptions; a heartbeat, for instance, is dokidoki , and zuruzuru, zuruzuru  is the equivalent of "dilly-dally". Karuma uses a lot of them, especially with -o endings, which in Japanese tend to be considered evocative of rolling or booming noises. (The "Goron" in Zelda games is from gorogoro , the noise of an avalanche or rock fall.) A lot of ...

Still happily playing through GyakuSai games in Japanese. I only get to do these things in fits and starts, and can't play games and fix my lingerie at the same time, sadly. I only have so many hands. Two, to be precise. Although I do tend to cache pins and needles in my mouth when those are insufficient -- you clamp the pin in place using the bottom edge of your top incisors, pushing up with the tip of your tongue and letting the part outside your mouth push against your bottom lip, but apparently if you don't sew you don't know this. The cringing the first time David saw me do it was rather funny. The middle two cases in the first game, the ones that are Ryuuichi vs Mitsurugi, are enlightening. There's a noticeable sliding scale in the way Edgeworth speaks in English, going from "delivering opening statement to the Judge" to "hammering on the desk demanding that the witness give their name and profession for the third time", but the difference i...

One of the many things I love about Takumi Shuu, the guy responsible for the Ace Attorney games is that he is a devout worshipper at the First Universal Church of Chekov's Gun. Nothing  ever goes away in these games. If the dialogue draws your attention to it, it'll be important. Maybe not now, but later, and then again  when you least expect it. And he has a knack for making it impossible to distinguish between a running joke -- there are several, one of which involves an argument over ladders vs stepladders that Maya and Phoenix have been having for three games now -- and a truly vital piece of evidence until the moment you need it. Some things are both. Pearl's chronic inability to spell is a critical point in not just two separate cases, but two separate games . One of the iconic moments in the games, which has risen to "spoony bard" status among fans, is when Phoenix cracks open a murder case by demanding to cross examine a parrot. For example, in Case 1-1...

Following on the previous post about bludgeoning my way through Gyakuten Saiban  in not-English, it occurs to me that most of my audience probably doesn't speak any Japanese. Give it a shot. It's fun, for a certain highly-contrived, lunatic value of fun . I learned it because I wanted to read manga. I also learned French because I have a thing for Dumas ( père  and fis ) and for Victorian policiers , of which Maurice Leblanc wrote about a billion, and German because I like math and Michael Ende. It's not so much a matter of whether  I can pick up a language, as it is a matter of if I've run into anything I care to read in it, and how far down I am on the list. I touched before on the complexity of formality and respect in the Japanese language. It's worse than you think. There are entirely different sets of pronouns and verbs for different degrees of respectfulness. There are some sets that elevate the person you're speaking to, and some that humble the speak...

I am nothing if not a masochist when it comes to hammering Japanese into my brain, and lately I've needed things to think about that are not related to insurance and paperwork, so I have re-started poking at the Ace Attorney  games -- or, more properly, the Gyakuten Saiban  games. The DS games are remakes of the GBA games and conveniently also contain an English script if I get too fed up with things, although you can't switch back and forth in the same save file, and the English text in the Japanese release has enough typos to rival some of Taito's classic 'quarity tlansration' efforts, from back in the day. Still. It's interesting. The localizations were done astonishingly well, considering Capcom basically released the first one in the US on a whim. As expressive as the English is, though, there are a lot of things in Japanese that just don't come across, because there simply do not exist any equivalents. One of the most basic ones, and usually very r...

Random cultural note of the day: I'm told that in the Marvel vs Capcom games, one of Phoenix Wright's support characters is the police dog Missile, who figures in a couple different cases of the original trilogy. Americans might not immediately recognize the breed, but Missile is a shiba inu . His alternate "costumes" correspond to the various combinations of coat markings and color officially recognized for the breed. The Japanese find it hilarious whenever Missile comes up, as if Gumshoe had promised Phoenix and Maya a working K9 unit, and then shown up with a yappy, derpy little Maltese stuffed into a tote bag. Centuries ago, shiba inu were mountainside hunting dogs, used in a terrier-like fashion to chase small game out from behind rocks and under bushes. Modern Japanese consider them to be prissy, expensive house pets. Like other Asian spitzes, they're clever, but also prone to snapping at things and very slow to warm to strangers and other dogs -- althou...

Though I am a screaming Ace Attorney  fan -- you may have noticed -- I was not really keen on Apollo Justice . Story-wise, I think it was trying entirely too hard to be weird. AA games are notorious for containing not a single completely sane and ordinary person, anywhere, ever. Phoenix likes to think of himself as normal, Edgeworth likes to think of himself as rational, and Franziska likes to think of herself as prepared for anything, which is why all of them spend a good 50% of their time in court going, "wait, what? " Everything starts out fairly ordinary, and then at some point abruptly rockets off at right angles to reality. It takes a bit before you figure out that, say, Edgeworth is a closet Steel Samurai fanboy, and then Phoenix is as mystified as the player. With Apollo Justice, all the weird is right there, smashed into your face, before anyone can even say anything. Phoenix is a card-playing hobo! His assistant is a teenage magician with magic panties! The prosecut...

I've been looking into fanmade Ace Attorney  casemakers, because God knows I think writing these things is, if possible, even more fun than playing them. The AA wikia has a decent list of the computer-based ones -- I was about to say "PC-based", but at least two of them seem properly mutli-platform: The Ace Attorney Online casemaker professes to work on any platform that supports a full Firefox installation, and PyWright should work on any platform that supports a Python interpreter. (They also miss one that's specifically for use on DS flashcards that support homebrew software, Ace Attorney DS . I have an R4 -- never you mind what they're  usually  used for, they are fantastically handy if you are easily bored on public transit and need to play Day Of The Tentacle  on your way to Quincy -- and while the program is an obviously amateur work and can be a skosh touchy about things like 'being the first app run after bootup', it does do what it claims to...

Promo art for Gyakuten Saiban 5 -- Is it just me, or does the older Phoenix look like he's been taking fashion advice from someone else ? A pocket watch and chain is not really something I am seeing Phoenix come up with all on his own. I'm thinking he's more the kind of guy who needed someone else to diplomatically broach the subject of ironing, frankly. Particularly given that even Maya chides him about the state of his office. I would not be surprised if it turns out to be true, either. There is much snarkery afoot in the Ace Attorney  fandom about Big Gay Lawyers; it happens with pretty much any work that runs with the dual themes of competition and friendship, as a lot of Ace Attorney  stuff does. It doesn't hurt that Phoenix and Edgeworth are pretty much attached at the childhood, either -- it's a significant part of the setup for the last case of the original game that they were classmates in grade school, and that something Edgeworth did way back when w...

Man, Pinterest just ticked me off. It won't accept non-alphanumeric characters for board names. I wanted to call the 'random pretty drawings' one 色々のイロ and it wouldn't let me. The literal meaning of [色],  iro , is "color"; the second whatzit in [色々] is a "repeat last kanji" mark, and iroiro  means "various and sundry"; and the katakana [イロ], also iro , is short for irosutoreeshon , or "illustration", used often when talking about artbooks. I could transliterate it to "iroiro no IRO", but then it just looks stupid, and it loses a couple layers of pun. Spoilsports. Continuing on the theme of horrendous puns, and my obsession with puzzle games, I'd like to take a moment to note how much glee Ace Attorney  things give me every time I play them, and I realize the translation doesn't blow. It's almost like they hired someone competent to do this. There are other good localization groups out there -- Working Desig...

This has been a hell of a week, so I'm trying to think of other, less important things, to keep myself from going completely gonzo. Right now, I'm having an enormous, but ultimately inconsequential, sad over the fact that Gyakuten Kenji 2  is not going to be released in English, pretty much ever. Gyakuten Kenji  translates as Turnabout Prosecutor  -- the series English speakers would know as Ace Attorney Investigations , the semi-spinoff line to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney  games for the Nintendo DS. (The main series is known in Japan as Gyakuten Saiban , or Turnabout Trial Court . The reference is to Phoenix's habit of letting the prosecution get thiiiiiiiiiiis  close to grinding his metaphorical face into the dirt before he remembers something horribly important and snatches victory, and usually some amount of insanity, from the jaws of defeat.) I love these things like you would not believe. They are tremendously clever, and the entire writing staff ar...