Some of you might have noticed this from the Japan Nintendo Direct.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyxEsjvyQ2k
I should start off by saying I played the localized version, not the original. So the experience could be slightly different.
A lot of people were saying this will never get an western release and yeah, they're right. The only way to make an western release would be to completely remake the game, and even then, it wouldn't work very well. This is because in Chinese (and Japanese kanji that is based off Chinese, making this localization possible) is capable of expressing so many things with a single character. And all the visuals created in this game are basically made with the concept of using pixel art, but characters are used instead of pixels. Here's an example.
顔=face
目=eye
鼻=nose
口=mouth
…….顔顔顔顔顔
…..顔顔顔顔顔顔
顔顔目顔顔目顔顔
顔顔顔顔顔顔顔顔
顔顔顔鼻鼻顔顔顔
顔口顔顔顔顔口顔
顔顔口口口口顔顔
…..顔顔顔顔顔顔
…….顔顔顔顔顔
See how that works? Try to do something like that in English?
………….facefaceface
….facefacefacefaceface
faceeyefaceeyefaceface
facefacefacefacefaceface
facefacenosefacefaceface
facefacefacefacefaceface
facefamofacefacthfacefa
facefaceuthmoufaceface
…..facefacefacefaceface
…………facefaceface
It just doesn't work. Take something even simpler. 家 means house.
……….家………家
……….家……家家家
……….家家家家家家家
……….家家家家家家家家
……..家家家家家家家家家
………….家家家家家家
………….家家家家家家
……….h…………ho
……….o………house
……….u…..househou
……….househousehou
…….househousehousehou
…………….househouse
…………….househouse
Just not the same.
(After having posted this, I see that reddit doesn't leave the spaces I entered at the start of some lines, so the pictures don't come out right. Sorry about that.
Edit: fixed it up a bit by adding some periods you can pretend aren't there)
Then there's issues with the actually gameplay, but I'll get to that.
So this game is marketed as an RPG, but it's essentially a puzzle game. The RPG elements involved are pretty much just there to give the game a semblance of a story (a fairly shallow one. Don't expect anything too deep) and a reason to solve the puzzles that you're solving. I will say that the music in the game is quite good. Maybe since there isn't anything particularly overwhelming in terms of visuals, it just makes the music stand out more, but I think the music is done very nicely.
So basically, you are told that you are a Hero with a special ability, and you need to save a princess that is being held captive by Dark Bahamut. In order to do this, you seek out three pieces of equipment, a sword, gloves, and helmet.
The entire story is told in prose and you get both narration and lines. The sword allows you to erase certain characters. For the most part, it works on prefixes. For example, if there's a sentence that says, "This monster is undefeatable." You can delete the "un" to make it "This monster is defeatable." and then you can beat the monster. More seldomly, you can use it to delete a character and change the entire meaning. Say you're looking for a group of elves.
"Where could those elves be? We looked everywhere in the forest. No rock was left unturned, and no cave went unchecked. After all that searching, we found ourselves in a rut."
You then delete the "s" in "ourselves".
"Where could those elves be? We looked everywhere in the forest. No rock was left unturned, and no cave went unchecked. After all that searching, we found our elves in a rut."
There you have it. Found your elves.
The glove allows you to push or pull characters. At the top the screen it might say, "I really need a weapon but can I trust you?"
And then at the bottom, the other guy replies with, "I give you my word."
You can then grab the "s" from "trust" and push it in front of "word".
"I give you my sword."
Now you got a sword. And since there are no spaces in Chinese/Japanese, you don't have to worry about stuff like "I give you mysword" happening.
The last item is where things really get interesting, and where it makes the gameplay in English impossible. Chinese/Japanese characters aren't just individual characters. The vast majority of them are made up of a combination of characters called "radicals". The helmet lets you split certain characters into their radicals. You can then recombine them to make new words, or add some of the radicals to other characters to make new words. There was this one fight against a giant where it was pretty free-style, and you can make your own sentence using the glove and the helmet and the few random characters available (the giant crushes the original sentence and you are only left with fragments) I managed to make a sentence saying "I threw a rock at it". Game told me the giant barely noticed. I then managed to make a character for "car" and changed it to "I threw a car at it". Game told me I picked up the car and then was crushed under its weight and I got a game over. Got a good laugh out of that one.
You can't split up a single alphabet into anything though. At the most, you would have to make it so that you split a single word into all of its alphabets, but that would just create way too many possibilities.
There were a few other puzzles where you don't use any of the equipment but do other things like lining up sentences differently, or inserting yourself (the character you control means "I" or "me" but can be read differently and give different meaning to other characters when combined with them) between characters to make different words/phrases.
All in all, I didn't find the puzzles too difficult. There's an option in-game to get hints if you get stuck, but I only had to resort to using that like around three times. I did spend a lot of time thinking for some of them though. The thing is, (and this is why I included the caveat that I didn't play in the original language) a lot of time, you can see that they use a word that sounds a bit unnatural or fairly esoteric and not something you would usually use for the situation. When you see something like that, it's a fairly good sign that that's the part of the sentence you should be tweaking. However, I didn't play in the original language, so I don't know if it's the same in Chinese, or if everything flows smoother in Chinese and those were just compromises they had to make in order to do the localization.
Game took me about 15 hours to complete. It was an okay game I guess. But not worth the price they're asking for imo. Not sure how much it is on Steam, but the Switch version was like 3600 yen. One thing I'll say, is if you manage to get the true ending, it…just seriously comes out of nowhere. I mean, not just what happens in the ending itself but…without giving any spoilers, literally everything changes. It kind of made me wonder if that last part is the story they really wanted to tell, and the rest of this game was just something to get the players' attention. Also made me wonder how much of that last part was actually fiction or true…
by Sairedd