The problem with Rolfee and Yuna, and a few other PC-FX games that I think are very interesting, too, is that it's hard for Joe and Dave to say much about them. What the hell are they supposed to talk about if they don't speak Japanese, and to an audience of non-Japanese speakers, no less? Rolfee and Yuna just don't fit the formula. You might not like the formula itself, but you can hardly blame them for making the choices they did.
I go for enthusiasm. It's important. Flashing the official, and unofficial mascots would have been exciting, to me.
I don't mind their choices, and get what they did really. I just would've added a bit.
All in all, I actually did think this was one of the better episodes, to me. I personally am not really a big fan of ANY gaming videos. I almost always find them boring. Or I don't like the persons voice and then just get annoyed. Or there's forced humor/wit that irks me. I can't even watch like, a tutorial video on something. Just give me a paragraph instead.
I had to force myself to even sit and finish the PCFX one here.
I also don't fault the commentary they did for the games. They did what I would have expected. It's just unfortunate that there ends up being almost diddly dick to talk about with the games because most of them require reading.
What sucks even more is, even if the few of us who are homebrew-spazzes get our shit together and make some PCFX games, who are we going to share it with?
The entire PC-FX owning community could probably fit in my living room. It's an uphill battle to even get the system going. We COULD kickstart the thing (not Kickstarter, just, literally, kick it in the nuts and get some new games on it that are what Round Eye wants).
We'd just have to be SUPER ENTHUSIASTIC TO GET PEOPLE AMPED AND PAYING ATTENTION.
Basically.
BTW, Arkhan, how much Japanese do you read? I get the impression that you can handle a few hundred words only. Is that right? You know, I love your enthusiasm, and everything is cool as long as you are enjoying yourself, but I don't get why anyone who doesn't read Japanese at a fairly high level would play those text-heavy games. It seems like you'd have to be more in love with the idea of the games than the games themselves. You certainly can't expect most other non-readers to get the same kind of enjoyment as you. You also can't expect people to take your game reviews too seriously when you don't understand the story of a story-centric game. Sorry if that's harsh...
Enthusiasm is the theme of the PC-FX, I think.
The PC-FX is actually what finally pushed me pretty hard into "I should actually learn how to read Japanese" territory. The machine is weird and has a weird library of intriguing nonsense.
I can read the text in the games, but man is it slowly. We are talking like, a minute or two per box if I can read the kanji. If not, add however long it takes to go look that up. This is where enthusiasm is important. You have to be really amped to go "ah shit, I don't know what that says, hold on a second."
It's sort of like work. Most people don't want to do that while playing a game, since it's supposed to be relaxing and fun.
Playing text heavy games is great practice. It's a bit like how it was for me when I was like 5, playing RPGs.
What f*cks me up is the spoken stuff. I just catch bits and pieces and hope I comprehended enough of it to get by. Fortunately, the voice over crap isn't vital most of the time.
Though, I already said myself I don't see the point in playing a story-centric game like an RPG or digital comic if you have no clue what the hell is going on. It might be fun to pretend and make up a story as you fumble from town to town, but I see it as a waste of time.
since my Japanese is always improving, I will probably go revisit some of these games at a later time and see if I misread something, misunderstood something, or anything like that. I will also probably *finish* more of the games. Since it takes 90000 years to read the text, I don't exactly make record times, and have other stuff to do also.
but again, the enthusiasm is important. That's how I always approached dating sims. I get pretty into that crap. It ends up making up for shortcomings in the stories, by filling in gaps due to my rampant imagination.
Honestly, if you're not a bit hyper/enthusiastic/imaginative, given the current library, I think even if you are a 100% Japanese human, you won't find much to get you going, either because there needs to be more of X, or because Y never showed up at all, or Z needed a bit more work.
You have to be enthusiastic as shit to excuse any shortcomings/derpery going on, and accept the fact that you're playing a machine that has less action games than buttons on the controller.
Kinda like SuperGrafx, only worse.
and if you're talking about the PCFXTOO reviews, I don't think I ever intended for those brief commentary/reviews to ever be taken seriously. Most are hastily slapped together placeholders and were meant to be gone by now, because I thought I would have that stuff filled out and such way faster than I did.
But then, the tedious-ness set in.
and the "I am working on Atlantean" also set in.
