天下制覇

Calm your tits, girl.

Impressions:

The end of this vacuous chapter featuring yet more of nothing at all happening. It was probably meant as the last gasp of the "see how nice the regular normal world is" right before the heroic call to adventure yada yada monomyth etc etc, except it's a little late for that this far into the game. Instead, since I've been half-heartedly playing through Disgaea 5 for the past week or two and suffering through its rather… barely adequate translation, I'll ramble some thoughts about that. First and foremost, it's 2015. You've been localizing for over a decade. It's time to sit down and decide on goddamned formatting rules for linebreaking. Actually, ten years ago was. It's not hard. Hell, I wrote Python scripts to automatically handle that a lot of the time. Just goddamn decide whether you're going to fill text boxes horiontally, or you'd prefer all the text in a neat little rectangle, because you can't seem to make up your mind. The neat little rectangle approach is not the preferred one. It just reminds me of GBA games where a translated line of text could be no longer than the original Japanese line despite half-width characters because the developers bloody hard-coded line size without a thought towards localizations, so you'd have giant text boxes where the text would only ever go halfway and would often break with two thirds of the box empty.

Second, and something I've been noticing more and more with official translations lately (not like I touch many fan ones though), get your damn English in order. Even if it's not accurate, it should at least look right. I was never a huge fan of the process Nintendo Treehouse or Square uses; which is to say get someone to translate it, then hand that off to someone else and tell them basically "Rewrite this as wacky/flowery as possible," but that did work relatively well when the common practice was the Japanese companies themselves providing translations by Japanese natives, which is a bad idea at its core. Nowadays, it really feels like the onus of translation has moved to the west (a good thing), but at the same time, actually cleaning up and editing the text has either gone by the wayside or been taken over by the marketing department and every line needs to be oozing with cloying crap or 'wacky' references. I thought we got over that once Working Designs collapsed.

One thing in particular, one I associate with unsure/newer translators who have the mistaken belief that every single word in a Japanese line needs to be accounted for in some way in the English line, are a ton of awkwardly crafted sentences, full of needless redundancies or things that are generally implicit by context in English being made obtrusively explicit. This kind of stuff is like the uncanny valley of language. It's just off enough to make you antsy, and if you're actually familiar with the language, it's vaguely upsetting to be able to reverse engineer the original Japanese from seeing nothing but the English. That is not the transpency of a translation that they should be striving for. A translation that's close enough in this way can almost be worse than one that's clearly broken. Things that sort of look okay get shooed out the door. Things that are obviously broken get fixed. Or don't, in the case of a certain godawful piece of crap.

Our Story Thus Far:

Before leaving Ichigo unattended to teach us crap, Ringo warns us not to try anything. Apparently, Ichigo was carrying an entire set of cooking supplies and food in her sleeves. Karen is disappointed by the lack of donuts. Wet Towel barges in to brag about the supermarket sales she took advantage of. Everyone says how crappy her half-priced stuff was, but we say we'll gladly use it. She denies us and takes it for herself. Ichigo's sleeve food turns out to be super high quality, apparently. Which we hear about. At length.

Ichigo divides everyone up to their tasks. I feel compelled to note that Karen's is "turn on the oven." We get a choice about which of the four to help, and since we've already decided on Blondie, we go help her with the puff dough. Mixing the dough is too tough for a frail girl like her apparently, so we take over while she screams at us as a form of cheering. We then check up on Wet Towel who's working on the cream. The recipe calls for yolks only, so she bogarts the whites because she's too poor to let anything go to waste. She makes us use it to make merengue for no reason. The hamster headbutts us, and we spill partially mixed merengue all over Wet Towel. We get a boner from looking at her covered in sticky liquid, licking herself clean.

Later, everyone is struggling, but gonna TRY THEIR BEST. Even more later, the first batch is done. Karen starts chanting choux. Wet Towel is fascinated by us making French style cream puffs, apparently. Blondie starts drooling. We insist we should wait for Ringo before trying them, and known a surefire way to make her reappear. We attempt to molest Ichigo. Ringo immediately appears and icicles us in the face.

The cream puffs taste fine. This is of course, told over about 50 lines of the entire cast flipping out over them. Blondie suggests a special prize hidden in one of them, to be marked by putting in wasabi. For some reason, everyone is okay with this. Elsewhere, Lillian is having a personal crisis over what making sure that she fulfills her responsibilities as teacher.

Come night, everyone's fallen asleep in the club room but us and Ringo. We thank her for helping out and whatnot. We reminisce about how we used to play together and whatnot as kids. Yawn. We flirt a little about sewing and loose buttons on our shirt. Just when we're about to kiss, Blondie mumbles our name and ruins the moment. Ringo pushes us away and I guess we all just sleep in the club room for some reason.

In the morning, Ringo and Ichigo wander off to do morning things. Blondie inquires about our dick because we seem tired. We tell her to share some of her energy with us via a kiss (this is a choice). So she facebutts us. Really. Then Wet Towel and Lillian come in. We feed Lillian a creampuff and she has some kind of fit and runs out. She got the wasabi one. Ringo and Ichigo come back, and Ichigo starts talking in nasal harmony with Lillian.

The girls go off to get changed. Sidekick and us start freaking out about naked girls being JUST A FEW FEET AWAY because we're idiots. Festival starts. Booth is popular. Etc etc. Once our puffs are sold out and we close up shop, we thank Ichigo, and offer to go with her and Ringo to the train. After dropping her off, we get all blushy and awkward with Ringo because it's just the two of us. She says it's her fault for being insecure, mostly about us being embarrassing about always ranting about being a hero until recently, but lately, it feels like we've actually become one. She wants to know if she can still be our heroine. We say she definitely can and she tells us to kiss her.

We ain't going down boring muggle route though, so we apologize and say no. She says that was the right answer and she would've beaten us up if we had. Liar. We're only supposed to kiss our TRUE heroine, not play around with other girls, and if we were with her, we wouldn't realize our dream. She'll support and cheer us on though. No more drunken hummers for us from her. We flip out regardless and start ranting about becoming a hero and a legend.

After we run off in excitement, she calls us an idiot and starts crying. Cut to her going back to her room where she breaks out sobbing to her roommate. Elsewhere, Blondie's on patrol. No majimon or Lillian out tonight, but the gate is… DRAMATIC PAUSE. And then SOMETHING happens. The gate was fixed or whatever. Her magic's returned, and the time's come where she needs everyone's help. She has to go back to her world. No next chapter preview. Final chapter (and final peppy chapter OP) in muggle world next time.