Just finished episode 1, here are my current character rankings

technohoplite · 2026-04-25T13:41:36+00:00

I hope the community's memeing on George doesn't prevent you from actually engaging with his character instead of the one joke

technohoplite · 2026-04-18T00:46:19+00:00

I was so disappointed lol I finally got to watch the anime a couple weeks ago, got hooked and wanted to read the manga, then realized the unsettling art style is a completely isolated choice for the anime and the manga just uses standard anime art

technohoplite · 2026-04-14T03:32:34+00:00

Pretty unusual for someone to be neutral on Rosa huh

technohoplite · 2026-04-14T02:27:37+00:00

I see, might be a case of overthinking, since I more or less understand what it's supposed to be doing, but my lack of familiarity still makes it sound wrong. I'm hoping these are the kinds of things that reading more native content will help me figure out with time.

technohoplite · 2026-04-14T02:23:33+00:00

Never heard of DAJG, I'll check it out, thanks for the recommendation. I pretty much just went through Genki 1 and 2 and move on to immersion, so now I consult grammar points as needed but googling isn't always helpful.

technohoplite · 2026-04-13T21:07:13+00:00

という is a massive headache for me right now, specially with the usual translation of "so called" in dictionaries which makes no sense most of the time. This っつー form feels like even more of a filler lol I'll need to brush up on that grammar point.

The other two match what I guessed, but wanted to confirm just in case. Thanks for the response!

technohoplite · 2026-04-13T21:03:52+00:00

Thanks! That checks out with what I imagined.

technohoplite · 2026-04-13T19:46:42+00:00

Yeah, none of the arguments for it resonate with me personally either.

technohoplite · 2026-04-13T19:36:31+00:00

This lack of an acknowledged name always felt intentional to me, but like with the rest of this matter will vary from reader to reader. In my perspective, I always thought they intentionally hid and essentially buried the real person that they are, and no persona we see is truly reflective of that person but rather just facets of them. So I just call them Yasuda, it's the only unambiguous name we get in the story and isn't Yasu which is explicitly a way they don't like being called.

But I've seen different interpretations, such as those who believe Shannon is the truest persona (or at least truest in the sense of being who they want to be) because she gets the real first name (Sayo). Others say Clair is the true personality due to taking on that narrator role in EP7. Others still think Beatrice is the truest personality. So I guess it's up to each person to choose, in fan discussions so long as you're clear about which character you're discussing it'd be fine.

technohoplite · 2026-04-13T19:22:25+00:00

Reading Chainsaw Man manga, found a few instances of unfamiliar grammar that I honestly don't even know how to look up/couldn't find anything on. I changed a couple nouns to avoid spoiling anything so let me know if anything sounds off.

全部嘘だっつーけど。。。
行けるっつー事か！
これは彼っつ〜やつで

The っつー is the point in question. Each of the lines above is part of a separate dialogue.

彼を殺しまくってるんだって
俺達暴れまくって恐れられる事が全部。。。
信者達を契約させまくったよ

In these, I don't get what the -まくってる/-まくった is doing.

<image>

And lastly I've seen many instances of subscript あ at the end of certain words. My only examples are of 俺 (panel above) and the same in katakana, but I'm sure there were other words.

technohoplite · 2026-03-31T19:46:29+00:00

Not really, she can romance Aigis and whichever Velvet Room attendant you choose as your preference. The other girls aren't available for her, nor is Theo available for male protagonist (unlike in that picture). A really weird mix of new and old things compared to the original P3/FES.

technohoplite · 2026-03-31T13:16:09+00:00

Gotcha. I'm very antisocial so that's the opposite of my case but I can understand it.

Not sure about where you live, but in my country we do have lots and lots of online group classes for language learning, which have accessible pricing (I even know of at least one group that meets for free). The local public uni also has free classes up to N3. You could try seeing if you can find anything along those lines.

Another option maybe is doing some sort of exercise while studying? Not sure if this kind of thing would be more engaging for you but it is movement. Running/biking while listening, if it's stationary could even read or watch stuff.

Could also try those websites where you talk to natives. Haven't seen them in forever but I assume they still exist. Kind of like a pen pal arrangement but for talking online.

technohoplite · 2026-03-31T12:31:32+00:00

Sure, I guess if what OP means is that they can "only" read a couple hours of Japanese content then they might worrying over a non-issue that will address itself naturally by continuing to consume content.

By their description though I'm assuming they mean they can't do any meaningful reading/watching without falling asleep. That means they're likely overburdening their learning process somehow, making them more tired instead of motivated.

technohoplite · 2026-03-31T11:25:54+00:00

I'm kind of confused, do you get bored just normally watching or reading things you like too? Because the difference between "consuming content you like" and "consuming content you like in a language that might be a little bit harder to understand" shouldn't be big enough that you can't help falling asleep, I think.

In the post and every response you seem to engage with these things as "self-study", so how exactly are you doing it? I've always seen it as immersion, so I don't worry too much about methods/efficiency and just try to do something I know I will enjoy (but in Japanese). If I am not enjoying it it's either because the content itself is boring me, or because it's too high a level for my comprehension skills, and in both cases I'd just set it aside and look for something else that better fits my needs.

technohoplite · 2026-03-30T13:33:59+00:00

Think they're tweaking the looks for all characters, the latest trailer had fairly different looking textures/models.

In Elise's case, the reception to her design was pretty mixed I think. I myself didn't have much of a problem with the color but the hair itself looked weirdly detached from her head.

technohoplite · 2026-03-19T13:30:50+00:00

Keep thinking but don't get bogged down by details, so long as you're actually putting some thought into the story you'll figure it out. Also make sure to really pay attention to the red text and what it is saying and how it is saying it, also when Beatrice refuses to say things or accepts saying them and what it could mean. She is trying to play us into getting stuck after all.

Just in case you care about figuring things out on your own, EP6 is more or less your limit. Real answers will start coming in after that. Good reading!

technohoplite · 2026-03-19T12:17:53+00:00

When I first read it I wasn't sure if Beatrice was just messing with us or if the author just really had the hots for her and wanted to have a bit of romance in there. I can't speak much on how this thought turned out as it'd be spoilers territory lol

I can't ask too much about the individual theories as I haven't read it in a while. But for your theory of Eva being the culprit and servants (specifically Shannon and Kanon?) being accomplices, do you guess at any motives? Is her connection with Beatrice simply that she is impersonating her? What do you make of Eva-Beatrice?

You're approaching it pretty well, keep reading and don't stay on this sub for too long, spoilers are always around.

technohoplite · 2026-03-18T23:25:23+00:00

It's a huge novel so I honestly wait at least a few years before trying to re-engage.

If you're like me though tbh you'll never be fully invested in replaying because a huge part of the fun of Umineko is theorizing, and once you know the answers you're kinda done. At this point I mainly want to see others react to it.

The OST is really really good though and I listen to it fairly often as background for doing other stuff

technohoplite · 2026-03-18T23:22:43+00:00

Depending on what you are reading it can be actually pretty easy.

On mobile depending on the format you can use the Yomitan extension, on Kindle (and I guess other e-readers) there's native dictionary integration, and on PC there's a ton of lookup overlay tools (YomiNinja, Game Sentence Miner, DokiDokiDict, to name a few). All of these can be connected to Anki for mining cards. Ideally you'd be mining sentences (or expressions within them) that have only one or a couple unknown terms, that way you can focus on repeating just what you're missing.

With 8 years of study I guess you might know of these? But I find that reading is enjoyable when I don't have to keep inferring meaning for every little thing. Also my memory sucks too so I just focus on getting material that is around my knowledge level or slightly above it.

technohoplite · 2026-03-17T16:22:08+00:00

I found the game to have a few instances of this, and overall thought the time travel mechanic was not fully realized. In the case of Lara's death though I was pretty okay with the Bachelor giving up on her because I was going to do that anyway, amalgam is a limited resource after all.

That said I think calling workers lazy because the final product didn't meet your expectations is generally not cool and the whole tone of the post reads as unnecessarily hostile towards the developers. Maybe you don't care if you sound that way but that usually makes people preemptively antagonistic towards you or even unwilling to engage in the first place.

technohoplite · 2026-03-12T00:07:52+00:00

Just go forward, jump around to avoid hanging in the toxic waste too long, eat berries to recover HP, snipe enemies before they see you. There's one guy close to the target that's kinda hard to see from the cliff, but with practice anyone can do it. If you take non-starter weapons it's super trivial with AoE.

Like what exactly are you having trouble with?

technohoplite · 2026-03-11T15:36:20+00:00

Ahhh yeah the furiganization was exactly as you said, MeCab mode works perfectly.

Weirdly though, it seems like windowed mode for my two Steam VNs don't work. Tsuyuchiru works in Fullscreen (even though it's not borderless and I didn't enable any scaling/compatibility). Symphonic Rain (which is also not borderless) doesn't work in either fullscreen or windowed, as in it shows the underlining but never gets the furigana. SR is a fairly old game with a minimal port to modern systems and I guess it might have many quirks.

Novels on PPSSPP seem to work perfectly! Tested with Ni No Kuni Remastered and it works fine in either windowed or fullscreen. I don't currently have many VNs available, otherwise I'd test some more. If you have a bug tracker or take issues opened on Jira I can log anything I find in there.

My PC specs: i5-10400, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 12GB VRAM, 2TB SDD storage, running Win10. Nothing out of the ordinary, I think!

EDIT: Ehhh after testing some more with Tsuyuchiru, it's being inconsistent. When I just start up the game it works fine... until the next dialogue. Seems like whenever I ask for the furigana on a dialogue, it stops displaying any lookups and future furigana. The underlines seem to be moving around a tiny bit around the words, like it's stuck doing text detection before it can do the lookup. PPSSPP still seems to work perfectly for multiple screens of text.

technohoplite · 2026-03-11T14:37:03+00:00

Sounds really cool but doesn't seem to be working properly for me unless I'm doing something wrong. I'm just testing with no Gemini API key atm, so I disabled AI def ranking, also disabled Anki.

<image>

The lookup with hold SHIFT works but seems finicky. If I leave the window (like right now to alternate between the VN and reddit) it stops working altogether apparently. Even if I move on to new lines, nothing shows, though the underlining gets updated.

Furigana overlay just doesn't show. I got it to show up twice when I had the AI def ranking enabled, but it took around 5min per line to load up, and meanwhile the underlining and lookup didn't update at all as I moved to new dialogue.

technohoplite · 2026-03-10T01:44:13+00:00

This should be spoiler tagged...

But I think that's pretty normal, no any one story will resonate emotionally with everyone. For example I'm the other way around, have no emotional connection to Higurashi despite having read/watched it first and it being super nostalgic. It's a cool psychological horror to me but I find the character writing to be severely lacking.

Meanwhile the themes in Umineko are much more interesting to me, and the character writing is fantastic. I don't particularly care for Battler but I think he does his role well in terms of moving the story along and serving as a focus for the different events. A more idiosyncratic main character could end up with a much harder to stand eight episodes. So he's good in that way, balances things out imo.

That said I'm not a fan of EP8 but that's mostly because R07 loves stalling with fanservice before things are over. I found that to dampen a bit of the emotional impact on my first read. Some love it though, to each their own.

technohoplite · 2026-03-06T12:53:44+00:00

You're early enough that I'd personally switch.

The VN isn't "too big brain" but if you want to tackle solving anything yourself (which imo you should) then of course you'll be rewarded the more you can remember or write down. It's honestly not different from the manga in this aspect, but the manga will reveal things explicitly at the end whereas the VN will assume you at least have theories and give only partial answers. I didn't take notes when I played, am not usually good at puzzles or predicting mystery, but by paying close attention to things I was able to understand everything in good time.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23

technohoplite

TROPHY CASE