Collective Otaku

When I was a kid, I had a Sega Master System. But that’s kinda irrelevant because I can’t actually remember almost any of the games that were on it. So yeah, let’s just skip that generation. When I was a (slightly older) kid, I had a Sega Mega Drive (Or I guess a ‘Genesis’ for like 95% of people that are going to read this). The Sega consoles were the first that I ever owned and I have many memories of games I used to play.

For some reason, I guess from some yard sale or somewhere, I actually owned a Japanese copy of a game on the Mega Drive that I’ve come to learn was called “Shining in the Darkness” (Or “Shining and the Darkness” in Japanese). It was a hassle to get the game to work to begin with, since Japanese Mega Drive cartridges were differently shaped and the console actually did have a built-in software region lock, but I eventually managed to play the game and, well, there I was playing a game entirely in Japanese. That was my first encounter with the Japanese language, actually. Quite fitting that my first encounter with Japanese would be related to gaming, actually. Perhaps this is subconciously fuelling my desire to be a Games Programmer at a Japanese company. Who knows.

But yeah, I didn’t understand a word of it. But it was still an awesome game that I was really enjoying; the story itself was very minimal, basic dungeon roaming kind of experience. As far as gameplay elements went, it was easy to see my health and level. I think the main stumbling point of that game came when I had to figure out the shops, since enemies were just smashing through my armor. That’s probably the point at which I gave up. Since I got the English version a few months later, it wasn’t a big deal for me at the time. I gotta say as well, younger me had a lot more patience than I did, considering the opening cutscenes are kinda long to not understand any of it.

Shining and the Darkness, my first ever Japanese gaming experience.

So yeah, it’s kind of fitting that my first experience with Japanese at all came from a gaming point of view considering the topic of this post. But the point I’ve tried to make, in a kind of roundabout tangential kind of way, is that I am a gamer. I’ve been a gamer since first turning on my Mega Drive, and I’ll be a gamer until… well, probably until some big company ruins everything about gaming in their hunt for profit (I give it about 3-4 years at an outside guess). Even then I’ll probably still be gaming, dusting off the hard drive with all my emulators and playing through all the classics again.

Back in February of last year, I started a Youtube channel. Well, technically not STARTED a Youtube channel, since I’ve had the channel for about 5 years now. But I started posting to it. Attempting to follow in the wake of big star Youtubers like Chuggaaconroy, SSoHPKC, NintendoCapriSun, ProtonJon, etc. as a Let’s Player; someone who essentially just played games, recorded it, and talked. A simple formula, but one that tends to result in amazingly entertaining videos, particularly from the aforementioned people. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but hey.

In the last month or so of my LPing career so to speak, I’ve been a bit too busy to work on actual LP series’ for having to do lots of intense revision for some exams that are coming up, so to avoid major prolonged downtime I decided to start another series. A quick series, a series that I could basically just open an emulator, hit record, blabble on, then post it. Lemme just tell you… that didn’t work out.

For some reason I’d decided to play through a Japanese game; Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute. I.. can’t remember why I started this project when I knew I’d basically have next to no time to do anything, but I did it anyway. The idea was that I could pick up some Japanese while translating every line, it’d be super quick and it’d be a pretty awesome idea for a series. It may have been an awesome idea for a series, but it sure wasn’t quick. Oh well, who really cares about revision anyway. Right? Guys? …Right?

Ah well. So this is going to be my little niche in Collective Otaku – I’ll be posting occasional 15-or-so minute videos on my Youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/mindez, and I’ll be mirroring them right here on Collective Otaku. They probably won’t be THAT regular, but they’ll exist at least.

So now, I present to you, Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute, the fourth game in the Layton series, set before all of the other English released ones so far, FULLY translated, line by line, painstakingly, including puzzles. The first three episodes are below! (Although the audio quality sucks on the first two because I was using my laptop. NEVER AGAIN!)