The spirit of exploration has been stirred

I finally got round to playing more of Tales of Zestiria! It’s a game I’ve been really excited about since its announcement a year ago. The character designs and settings are beautiful, the animation is, of course, flawless (if we ignore Slay’s fat feet in that one cutscene), and the story looks like it’ll rip my heart into tiny pieces (I still haven’t recovered from the damage inflicted by Tales of the Abyss). I finally gave in and bought a Japanese copy a couple of months ago but I haven’t had much time to play it since it arrived! My playtime is around 4-5 hours now, there isn’t much furigana so its a little hard but I found a subbed walkthrough on youtube! 

luckily my desk set up is perfect for playing Japanese games, I can basically do duel screens, one side the game and the other a subbed walkthrough. I’m trying to see how much I can understand so I’ve been playing the walkthrough a little delayed. I keet my notebook near so that I can write down kanji I want to look up and words to translate. Of course my textbooks are on the shelf just above my desk so any grammar I don’t know I can google

Some useful resources for playing rpgs in Japanese if you’re not fluent!

• A laptop close to your tv – god, you need this. I don’t know how you’re going to do it otherwise, unless you’re fluent in Japanese.
• hand written kanji search – I’m assuming anyone playing a game in Japanese will actually know some kanji, and will know basically how to draw kanji (stroke order rules, y’know start from the top left in general etc).
• Denshi Jisho – the best Japanese dictionary I’ve ever used, even with sentence examples! you can type in English, hiragana and even romaji! its perfect!
• A subbed walkthrough if you can get find have one, rpg’s usually use made up words or kanji that are pronounced differently (for example hyoma in Zestiria) it can be confusing and having someone else’s for reference helps so much!
• A dictionary of Japanese grammar – it’s expensive but its so worth it, I only have basic but it’s just… ten times better than a textbook because you can search by grammar.
• Maggi-sensei – this is turning into an all round how to Japanese, but Maggi-sensei is the best for searching grammar and getting a clear explanation if you don’t recognise anything!

The game itself, as I’ve mentioned is beautiful. I really like some of the new aspects introduced like using artes on the world map, party members walking with you (not disappearing into nothingness when you travel) and of course the battles playing out on the world map! That last one was especially useful the second time I fought lunaru (Lunarre?) I managed to back him into the wall!! It looks like they didn’t carry dash over from Xillia 2 which is a shame (sob) that was so useful but I can live without. it

So far I’m really enjoying the story I’m a sucker for bright eyed protagonists ready to go into the real world. Slay’s story kinda reminds me of Luke’s and the world building too, Slay’s Shepards costume looks a little like the order of lorelei’s! I remember when it was first announced everyone translated 導師 as fon master and I got really excited ;;; but oh well. I think adding anything more to Abyss would ruin how perfect it is. I have some theories about how Zestiria is going to play out. Looks to me like becoming the Shepard will kill Slay or at least affect him horribly in some way. … ah yes, getting my heart broken is my favourite pasttime.

-aggressively refuses to refer to Slay as Sorey because its a stupid romanisation-