Pretty Chill Playlist

I’m in a writing mood and it seems like a good day to write a playlist post i.e. hear me ramble about the games/books/shows/projects I experienced recently! The last one was in February, which is about half a year ago, isn’t it? I don’t know how I keep consistently writing these every half a year.

For one thing, I’m a lot less worried about my day job. I think I’ve found my footing, my niche, even. I feel like I have a role that not a lot of people can cover, which makes me feel… powerful? Less insecure, at least. The one thing that bothers me is that this footing I’ve found is being a game developer, haha. Do you know rare of a posting that is in this country? If I lost my current job, somehow, I might have as much luck making money from opening a new indie studio than applying somewhere else (which is to say, not a lot).

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with where I am now. Working on the weekdays, playing games at night, do silly projects (or just play more games) on the weekends. I have friends, some of which I only talk to once in a blue moon, but when we talk it’s like we’ve never parted, so that’s good. Like… yeah, sometimes I want more. What if I have more friends (what if I have a boyfriend). What if I can spend more times with creative projects. What if I can actually finish a whole dang story without its incompleteness haunting me. But, for now, I’m content. It’s alright to take things slowly.

Anyway! Games!

Arknights

I think I’ve already talked enough about how much I love this game i.e. a game made specifically for me but in a deranged way, etc etc. I still love its writing, it’s stories and characters. I have a very good team now. They might be weirdos by the meta standard, but they’re my weirdos, and I know how to best make use of them. I think there’s something to be said there about how gacha games like this one foster attachment with the characters you get, but that sounds like an essay for another time.

In any case, I can finish the levels that unlock stories comfortably now, and I if I put a little effort I can do the high-difficulty ones without too much trouble. That’s good enough for me. I recently got full achievement in a few seasonal events too; no mean feat, and spending time for that felt very rewarding.

It’s also nice that it’s not a very demanding game. When I’m tired or my brain is fuzzy, sometimes just logging in, saying hi to the characters, and doing a little management is enough. Event duration are long enough that I can read the story/play the stages in peace, and the deadweeks between events are appreciated. I’m still in love with the carp and just seeing him in the game still makes me happy. Yes, I think I’ll be sticking with this game for a very long time.

Tombi – Indonesian translation

Embarrassed to say that I’m so fallen back in my Japanese studies that the only time I ever actually study is when I stumble on an anime song that I really like and somehow propelled me to make a translation of its lyrics.

Trigun Stampede was a good anime, marred with messy writing and inconsistent dramatic placement, but no one can deny that Vash the Stampede is the absolute best boy. When I looked up the lyrics of the opening song and realise it’s all from Vash’s perspective I was like 🥺. I’m sobbing. He’s just such a good man, trying his best despite everything. I am not immune to a good man trying his best.

This opening song, titled Tombi and made by Kvi Baba, is sung kind of like a story being told, like it’s more prose than song. That’s my favourite kind of songs, actually. After hearing it multiple times while watching the anime (for some reason I was rarely tempted to skip this opening), I noticed I could make out a lot of the words, so I figured this’ll be easier to translate. In a way, it is easier, though I’m not sure if that’s thanks to my Japanese improving (somehow?) or if the songwriting really isn’t that complicated. I did misheard a lot of the words though (it’s shirigami, tissue paper, not shinigami, the grim reaper), and there are a few words that use uncommon (archaic?) pronunciation that tripped me a bit.

The official video below has the official English translation, if you’re looking for that. The artist also posted it (and the Japanese lyrics) in YouTube’s comment section. For this Indonesian translation, I tried working without looking at the English translation at all until I was done; so it was fun comparing the result. There were maybe two or three verses that tripped me up badly enough I ended up being influenced by the English translation anyway, though. As usual, there’s more comments below the translation in Indonesian, if you want to read more about my thought process.

Suzume (the song) – Indonesian Translation

It’s one of those posts, folks, where I post my translation of a Japanese song along with tons of commentaries but it’s all in Indonesian, so like half of y’all can only read this short prelude. Sorry!

I love RADWIMPS and I love Makoto Shinkai’s movies and his latest, Suzume, is among one of my favourites. The soundtrack kicks ass too, even though the vocal tracks are not as central as in his previous two movies (Weathering With You and Your Name). This song, also titled Suzume, only plays in the credits sequence, but it’s melody also serves as the leitmotif that’s strewn across the movie. I cried watching the movie and listening to this song gave me so much emotion, I sat through the whole credits to listen to the song in full even though I can barely read the kanji of the names in the credits.

Down to the lyrics, as is usual with RADWIMPS, it has some interesting prose that tripped me up a bit. 意味をいくつ越えれば, (imi o ikutsu koereba) “how much (do we) cross over meanings” gave me a bit of work. The grammar is pretty simple, but “meanings” isn’t really something you “cross over”, so I was puzzled for a bit. The verse that goes 時はまくらぎ (toki wa makuragi) was also interesting since it’s more about the feelings that the sequence of words/phonemes evokes than the meaning behind them (time is a railway crosstie? what does that mean??).

All in all, it’s just a really sweet, sincere, love song. Not my usual wheelhouse, but this song somehow managed to make me feel really really sad that I’m still single :(. Maybe one day I can have someone to share this with.

Here’s the official (Japanese) lyrics video. You can read the official English translation at Lyrical Nonsense, which I also used to help me translate this to Indonesian. My translation is below, and more commentaries below that.

Btw, disclaimer sedikit, bahasa Jepangku sebenarnya masih payah dan akupun udah lama banget gak latihan. Jadi mungkin ada kesalahan yang kubuat yang “kok bisa gini ya” dan hal-hal yang banyak banget kubahas di bagian komentar padahal sebenernya “halah cuman segini aja kok repot”. Kalau ada saran, kritik, komentar, dll, silakan ya.

Too many games! Too little time! Playlist

So about a week ago I wrote how I should play more games. More weird small games. For a long time, I had just been rotating the same three games, with two of them being live-service so I practically won’t even be able to “beat” them, and it’s about time I spread my wings out a bit further.

Anyway, cut one month later and I’m practically overwhelmed. With… seven games. Which isn’t a lot, but with my full-time job I only have maybe an hour of free time a day before I will plop over on the bed exhausted. Weekends are freer, but I also have like a dozen side projects I want to give some love and hours to and by the way, how’s that Chinese and Japanese study going? Nowhere? Figures.

I’m also cursed with affliction where I’m hyper-aware of the time that I’m using, so if I play a game for, maybe an hour and a half straight? Something in my brain will gently tell me to stop. Gently, because unlike my usual chronic issues it’s mostly harmless, but it does make me feel too guilty to enjoy playing at which point, what’s the point?

Anyway, been a while since my last playlist post, where I can ramble on about the things that I’m playing and projects I’m into. This is my personal blog, after all! I blog here!

So. Games.

My Live-Service Beloveds

(I am yelling and hollering about this scene in Arknights)

Genshin Impact and Arknights. Practically unchanged from the last playlist eh?

My Genshin habits have been scaled back, recently. I stopped playing everyday, I’ve started skipping limited-time quests. It helps that I’m pretty satisfied with that I’ve got, so I don’t really look forward to new characters or updates anymore (but it’s still a source of joy to see what’s new). It’s got plenty enough to sink my teeth into, and I’m happy taking my time with it.

Arknights, I’m a bit more excited about. There’s just so much here. So many stories to read, so many stages to get skill issue playing, so many characters I want to learn more about (and help get stronger). It definitely helps that it can be bite-sized, if I want it to be. Twenty minutes is enough to read a chapter and beat a level (after failing miserably a few times) and maybe scroll through the menu for longer than is necessary (I enjoy scrolling through menus and looking at the pretty pictures and occasionally reading the lore bits). When I’m sick of working, I can open my phone for a minute to click around at the lil base-caretaking part of the game. It’s nice. Like having a picture of your loved ones in your wallet and taking a moment to look at it.

(I’m in love with a carp. Please make fun of me as much as you like)

There’s also a story event I’m super stoked to see, but that’ll have to wait another half a year. Alas. I will be waiting patiently for you, Chongyue (and more content about my carp-dragon husband).

KICK BACK – Indonesian Translation

This post contains Indonesian translation for the song KICK BACK by Kenshi Yonezu, the opening song to Chainsaw Man Season 1. I do these kind of things to practice my Japanese and translation skills. While I try to translate mostly from the Japanese with my fledgling fluency, I also got some guidance from the English translations in Lyrical Nonsense. They list both their own versions and an official version there, and comparing them gave me some pretty good insights too.

I really like the song. Despite how wild and pumped-up it sounds, I always feel like it’s a very sad one. That feeling of how even simple happiness is difficult to have. Reading the lyrics only reinforce that feeling. I’ve never heard of Kenshi Yonezu before but I started listening to his other works and man, he does consistent masterpieces, doesn’t he?

Anyway, here’s the song (with a different English translation! I love comparing them!) and my Indonesian translation below and more of my translator’s comments (in Indonesian) further down.

2022 condensed into the games I played this year

Every year I write a list of my favourite video games I’ve played that year. A Game of the Year list, if you will. It eventually turns into a way for me to reflect back on the year, and only partially about the games themselves.

2022 sure has been eventful, at least for me personally. I graduated from college… I think that was supposed to be something to celebrate, but considering that it happened after months of stuck in bureaucracy hell instead of anything to do with my field of study, and that it came after three years of college-from-home without any meaningful interaction with my classmates or professors, it really felt like it just came and went.

What’s more exciting is that I got my first full-time job soon afterwards: a web programmer in a game development company. Somehow that’s exactly how I thought I’d end up being, despite majoring in International Relations or holding on to this dream of working in translation/localization. Not quite a dream come true, then, but it’s my Plan B (webdev) and Plan C (gamedev) mushed together, so it’ll do.

For the rest of the world, well, has there ever been an uneventful year since the advent of modern communication? The pandemic is more-or-less over by this year. Vaccines are widely available and people aren’t too scared to go out anymore. Life has… gone back to normal? It feels callous to say, since people still do get sick and die, but from what I’ve seen, the cases are manageable. It doesn’t feel as much an existential crisis as it used to be. As for the rest of our crises…

I spent a weekend making a lil game called Plantiful

And you can play it straight on your browser here! You can also peruse the source code on GitHub. It’s… I think it’s the first game I made that I can say is “finished”! One I’m not too embarrassed to post publicly.

My sis and I have been saying we should make a game together for ages. She does the art, I do the programming. Unfortunately neither of us are any good at game design. Or game producing, for that matter.

A few abandoned attempts later, I said “let’s just make a suuuper simple game, something about taking care of a plant?”. She said “sure!” and made these cute assets of growing radish. She named the hypothetical game Plantiful.

The assets were left to rot in our Drive folder for months.

Cut a few months and I was in a bit of a slump. I was eight months into my frontend web programming job at a game company and the project I was working on was getting cut down. There are no more project that uses frontend web, they say, do you want to switch to game programming instead?

Two problems with that: when I eventually, inevitably leaves the company, there’ll be fewer job opportunities that use that specific skillset. And also, I already spent the last few weeks learning Unity programming and it was nooot fun.

But also: the idea of moving to game programming full time made me excited. The pay is mediocre, the job prospect is slim, but game programming! Exciting!

The prospect was so exciting in fact, that on a long weekend I pulled out the old plant game asset and started doodling some ideas. Step one: put things on the screen. Step two: make the thing clickable. That sort of simple stuff. For the engine, because Unity from work was hell, I pulled out an old engine I got some years back.

I’ve tinkered with it a bit, so I wasn’t completely clueless. I’m also a (much) better programmer now, so picking it up was easy. And man, compared to Unity, DragonRuby is soooo much nicer to work with. I actually know what’s going on in my engine, I don’t need to write too much boilerplate codes; only what I need and what I build myself. Sure, it takes a bit more effort, say, creating a whole UI system, but it’s also a lot more satisfying. It feels good.

So I messed around and, surprisingly, had a lot of fun. I gave myself a hard limit: two days, make it polished enough that you won’t be embarassed putting this in public, and then we don’t touch this again. And I did it! It’s playable. It’s reasonably polished. I actually got tempted to do some little fixing afterwards and my brain is bubbling with ideas for new features and game modes and such.

Wow, making a game is fun. Who would have known.

The game is playable on the browser here. The source code in full is on GitHub.

I fully recommend DragonRuby (which you can buy here) if you like silly little programming projects, or if you’re sick of having to deal with bigger, heavier engines and pages and pages of documentation. The engine goes on sale often and it was included in a few of those mega bundles on Itch, so it’s possible you might already have it.

My one issue with DragonRuby is that its documentation is dogshit and the only way to get help is to join a Discord server. I don’t recommend this to people who don’t already know how program; it’s best for those who actually enjoy programming in their spare time.

Ruby is such a blessed language. It’s pleasant to work with and it works exactly as you’d expect it to work. Maybe one day I’ll write a blog post about that specifically.

I made a Cohost where I post Arknights music daily with lore musings, I think it’s pretty neat

Here’s the Cohost page!

Obligatory new post so I can say I still post on this blog once a month, ha!

As it says in the title. I’ve been really enjoying Arknights lately. The game, yeah, the stories, definitely, but also the metric ton of music HyperGryph keeps releasing for the game, whether or not it’s played in-game or just a little extra you can listen to wherever music is usually released. Each piece of music usually corresponds to a character or a story or just a specific thing in the game. Arknights is more than just the game and all that.

When I started out I was just “oh cool song!” but these days I actually know the background story behind the songs and it’s usually pretty neat, added to my understanding-slash-enjoyment of the piece. I’ve also been lately frustrated at how inaccessible most of Arknights is, since its gameplay is pretty hardcore and its storytelling is also hardcore (this is *not* the kind of game you play for five minutes while waiting for the bus). Makes it hard for me to talk about it to my friends who aren’t also fan of the game.

So this Cohost page is an attempt. You might not play the game or know jack about Arknights, but maybe you’ll like the music? And here’s some context to it that might enhance your enjoyment of it. You can be an Arknights fan without actually playing Arknights! It’s fine!

I’m on Day 11 at the moment, and I think that’s a pretty good streak! I try to post a variety of genre, and I try to arrange it so the same composer doesn’t show up in two songs in a row, and for now there’s a slight bias to songs I personally enjoy (sorry, Steven Grove and his ambient music). And obviously there’s a bias to songs whose lore I actually understand and can write about… Might be a while until I post songs from late Act 1 of the main story then.

You can read all the posts so far on the page. Every song came with a short blurb, at most a few paragraphs, about the story relevant to the song. For character themes, it’s usually about the character or their place within the event with which the song was introduced. For battle themes it’s a toss-up between the event itself or the enemy you face. Contingency Contract songs (I’m planning to post this once a week), since they don’t really have a story, can contain whatever musing I can think of. Songs with official uploads to Arknights YouTube channel gets quotes taken straight from the upload. Others usually get quotes from the game or from the lyrics of the song.

Posting on Cohost because I want to try it out. It’s basically Tumblr, but fresh, and Tumblr terrifies me (and also its interface annoys me). Cohost is pretty neat. It feels really nice and easy to post there.

Snippets From the Vaults of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

The first-print edition of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles for the Switch includes “From the Vaults”, which is basically a digital artbook containing concept arts with commentaries, along with other tidbits, about the game. A friend of mine just finished the game and didn’t have the bonus artbook so I figured I’d post some of it here for her, but also for any of y’all who are interested.

This contains major spoilers for The Great Ace Attorney 1 and 2, so don’t look if you haven’t completed both games! Also this is only some of the pages, biased to our favorites and those I find particularly insightful. I might add more later.

All the design notes are from the character designer and art director, Kazuya Nuri (who is an unprecedented genius in my opinion)! All typos are mine, however.

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Bouningen – IND translation

This post contains an Indonesian translation for 棒人間 (*Bouningen*) a song by RADWIMPS, but I also want to talk about the song in English for a bit.

As with my previous song translation post, this is mostly done to practice my Japanese. For this one though, to my shame, I immediately gave up after the first verse and looked up Lyrical Nonsense’s excellent English translation as well. So I guess this is more like a translation from both the original and LN’s English version? I’ve tried my best to defer to the Japanese version, though.

RADWIMPS’s lyrics often feels a bit more like prose than a song, the way the words rush along, creating full sentences instead of the typical verses. The way they rhyme and how they’re structured is… well I don’t know the first thing about songwriting and even less about songwriting in Japanese, but I still feel like it’s very nice, despite or perhaps because of the way the words ram into each other. And the way this song in particular is sung! The implicit, nonchalant heartbreak. The way it kinda catch you by surprise with all the implicit emotions.

I’ve never looked up Bouningen’s lyrics before working on this translation, but I did pick up a few words here and there. “僕は人間じゃないんです、ほんとにごめんなさい (boku wa ningen janain desu, hontoni gomennasai) (I’m not human, I’m truly sorry)” is the easiest part to recognize, the centrepiece of the song. I had thought that the song is about a robot or other type of artificial life who can’t become human no matter how hard they tried. Reading the whole lyrics though, it’s a lot more heartbreaking than that. I want to give them the very biggest hug, and this goes out to everyone who reads these lyrics and feel like they relate!

Anyway, below is the Indonesian translation.

Biasanya kalau nerjemahin prosa, aku sering mengubah struktur atau memilih kata yang berbeda demi menyampaikan maksud implisit yang gak bakal ketangkep kalau gak kuubah dikit. Berhubung ini lagu, terjemahanku lebih berusaha mendekati arti per-kata dalam bahasa aslinya. Kalau ada yang lebih mahir bahasa Jepang dan bisa koreksi, mohon bantuannya ya!

棒人間 (Manusia Coretan)

ねぇ
僕は人間じゃないんです　ほんとにごめんなさい
そっくりにできてるもんで　よく間違われるのです

Nee
Boku wa ningen janain desu, honto ni gomennasai
Sokkuri ni dekiteru mon de, yoku machigawareru no desu

Jadi…
Aku bukan manusia. Mohon maafku yang sebesar-besarnya.
Aku dibentuk begitu mirip dengan manusia, jadi aku sering salah dianggap sama.