The equipment/item/shop/menu side can be brutal if you don't know any Japanese. There are no icons or markers to tell you what variety of thing any particular item is. You just have to know that the item is a kind of traditional footwear, or whatever. Not to mention, it doesn't tell you whether a piece of equipment is better than what you already have. You basically need an equipment chart, or tremendous patience.
That was normal for RPGs bitd, whether or not they are in English or Japanese. All you really needed was to spend a minute or two every couple hours or so, when you'd find a shop with new gear. After saving you just walk next door, buy the gear that you're curious about and after figuring out what's worth buying or not, you just reload your game.
But Kabukiden
isn't like that. When you place the cursor on a piece of equipment in a shop, it shows you whether it is an item (with description), weapon, armor or shoes, the ATK/DEF/SPD points they provide... and who can equip it. The only potential mystery is which of the two new pieces or armor is for your primary or secondary slot. But it's always clear: the more expensive one is the primary and the cheap one is secondary. The rate at which you can acquire new gear and perfectly paced, so it's always easy to figure out. I haven't fired up TMII in a while, but I believe that it's the same deal. And I believe that both games show alternate Romanji titles for every item when you highlight them.
But even if they didn't tell you any of that, the RPGs that don't (most 16-bit RPGs) still require less patience that some of the more popular/well known English language games that
do show the +/- over your current gear. You'll lose many hours in games like FFIII/FFVI just navigating menus, micro-managing gear across 14 characters, juggling magicite between current party members, so that player level ups (
and basically the whole "SYSTEM") aren't wasted, all the while tracking each of the 14 characters' individual current leveling progress for each of the 27 magicites, as you are thrown into different closed pockets of gameplay with random assortments of available characters and limited shop access.
Manjimaru and Kabukiden are much more straightforward, while still giving you lots of abilities to utilize and more importantly, a greater variety of people/places to encounter (
Kabukiden uses unique zone, dungeon, enemy and battle bg art for every section of the game) and reward your progress with in-game and cut scene cinematics.
I guess if you read *zero* Japanese than the difference between 斧 and アクス is meaningless, but for me when I started getting into import RPGs it was night and day.
When I started playing Japanese games with no resources, the difference was priceless. Katakana was very easy to recognize and memorize and "P-7-7'with a kickstand" was easy to read and quickly write down compared to Kanji characters depicted with a handful of pixels.
Topic: Tengai Makyou (Read 518 times)
