this has got to be the best news all year ^_^

http://www.rpgamer.com/games/chrono/ctds.../ctds1.jpg

http://www.chronotrigger.jp/

I completely agree! I have been waiting for a handheld version of this for ages! I played the heck out of this game when I was a kid. I'll play through the Japanese version this time though.

I wonder if there are any English scripts to the game out there? It would definitely be helpful since I'm still really bad at reading "real" Japanese.

I think this will be a difficult game to play in Japanese. There were a lot of weird dialects because of the time-traveling. They had the cavemen speech, the futuristic robot speech, etc...

That said, I can't wait for this!

well guys just keep on studying hard because it doesn't come out until winter 2008 ^_^ put your time-traveling vocabulary in anki now ^_^ i really want to play through Mother 3 (Earthbound) too someday but i am going to save that until my vocabulary gets better ^_^

私食べる！
私眠り！
Caveman speech is fun.

If anyone's interested in scripts, I humbly offer you my findings:

http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Retranslation.html
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/snes/file/563538/30466

The first link offers spreadsheets that contain every last bit of text from the Chrono Trigger ROM, presented in the original translation, the original Japanese, and a literal retranslation that stays true to the original Japanese script and mirrors the Japanese sentence structure fairly heavily.

The second link is less comprehensive, but has the added benefit of providing a romaji transliteration of all the text, which is useful for making flashcards. Provided, of course, you aren't the type of person that finds romaji so repugnant that you can't even stand to convert it to kana.

awesome links!! thanks a million Mcjon01 ^_^

I played through Japanese CT, it's not that bad at all. Caveman speak is extremely simple and intuitive, 12000BC/600AD speech is fine if you know just a handful of classical Japanese, the only thing that really annoyed me was the way robots changed all their hiragana to katakana.

Some vocabulary that is useful...
祭り、発明、時代、王国、王妃、女王、蛙、騎士、鐘、橋、伝説、勇者、魔法、魔王、魔族、城、剣、魔神器（まじんき＝mammon machine）、神殿、海底、恐竜、民、武器、防具、賢者、預言者、裁判

Vocabulary for optional subquests...
虹色、貝殻、廃墟、砂漠、森

That's all I can think of, but just having those vocabulary known in advance should make it much faster to play than when I struggled through it.

cool man i'll be sure to drop them in my anki deck thanks ^_^

Thanks for the links. Another script to add to my favorites.

If anyone needs scripts for FFT, FF7, or Xenogears PM me.

Awesome, this was my fav as a kid too.

sutebun Wrote:Xenogears

I love this one..but wow it would be a tough one to crack in Japanese.

i'm really not all that computer savvy... so i'm wondering where people are getting the japanese versions of computer games online?

i'd love to find some of the old FF games. what do i need to download? does it work that same as movie torrents?

yeh you can get game torrents pretty much the same as movie torrents ^_^ but i would recommend buying an R4 cart for the NDS and using this website in particular: http://ndash.eu/en/?lnk=rnw

I play a lot of videogames, so have just been buying Japanese DS games for awhile now, but putting them aside until I've finished RtK, at which point I'll start playing them, probably ordering them by reading level (ie, starting with the simplest ones to read). I'll def. pick this one up in Japanese, it just may be awhile til I actually play it if it has that much text/weirdness.

I figure I'll use the games/packaging/manuals for a lot of my sentence-mining too.

just an FYI i think most people know about the touch and read kanji in Zelda: Phantom Hourglass but i think someone told me before too that Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii is written entirely in furigana ^_^

sadly the gc and wii are not region-free (afaik). the gba/ds are dream machines for japanese students.

Don't forget the PSP. Because it's hackable there are many emulators for past consoles, and none of the games are region-locked. I've been playing through a JPN copy of Disgaea since I've been in Japan. It's a lot of fun.

Oh, awesome. This is definitely something to look forward to. Hopefully I'll be able to understand it a lot more by winter, too! I was expecting it to be for the PSP when I first clicked, but luckily for me it's the DS (I don't have a PSP but I do have a DS).

Hashiriya Wrote:just an FYI i think most people know about the touch and read kanji in Zelda: Phantom Hourglass but i think someone told me before too that Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii is written entirely in furigana ^_^

Well yes, and no. It's got all the kanji there (in fact, it uses a few outside the general use list), but it uses furigana for all of them. However, it isn't all hiragana with spaces like Pokemon is (thank god!).

So make sure you have a big TV, because the writing is quite small

Ok, so now that chrono trigger, my favorite rpg of all time has been released on the DS, I've snapped it up and am ready to play completely through my first Japanese rpg. I even bought an eeepc so I could look up translations and stuff while I play.

So I load up the chrono trigger re-translation script, and BAM!
I'm stuck on the very first line!

旅立ち！夢みる千年祭

Ok... WTF?? I understand this perfectly, but... rikaichan gives me 2 different readings for 千年. It can be せんねん or ちとせ. So I'm sitting here trying to read the title of the first chapter of the game, and thinking I might be in way over my head here. Now, I could just skip over this, but this is a key phrase of the game, so I absolutely have to know how to say this, or I simply can't let myself move on! How can I know which reading to use?

It's really not that big of a deal if you know exactly which one is more common or not. You'll actually hear people say them eventually. But, when you want to know, you can check dictionaries. the wwwjdic tends to tell you. In this case, ちとせ is more common for 千歳 and せんねん is more common for 千年. (which makes sense given their kanji readings)
Er, I should note that when I say 'more common' I mean 'vastly more common' in this case. But in general, there are often multiple ways to read things that are equally acceptable, for instance 寂しい

I've actually been playing this game the past week, in japanese. I really like it, and I understand basically everything...except spell names or weapon names. I "get" it after I see the hiragana readings it gives you if you select it but still...Though to be fair I don't know what weapons are in English either. For example Rapier, Broadsword, Cutlass, Falchion, etc. I know they are weapons but not really WHAT they are in english. Or spanish probably. they're just words.

Oh well

I assume you're using EDICT... You should really get something better if you're going to start consuming native materials, or at least use online dictionaries like Goo, Yahoo, ALC, etc.

ちとせ only appears as 千年 in one of my dictionaries (and it's not even a very good/authoritative one - 小学館国語大辞典), in all of my other bilingual and kokugo dictionaries it appears only as 千歳. In other words, you'd read it as せんねん.

Don't worry about having to understand every little detail.

On the topic of dictionaries... is there any good Japanese dictionary that I can download and use, instead of having to be online constantly?

Zarxrax Wrote:On the topic of dictionaries... is there any good Japanese dictionary that I can download and use, instead of having to be online constantly?

Not for free. All of the major/good dictionaries have EPWING versions that you can buy to use offline though.