[Game] Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru - Ep. 5 End of the golden witch

[blitz1/2]

Originally Posted by Maho Momo

Whoa... somebody who actually LIKES Erika? O.o;

I personally don't know whether I should like her or not since I haven't played the game, but judging from the spoilers it could honestly go either way. ^^;

Count me in, I'm a Erika fan too. she's my 2nd fav. female character, 1st is Ange.

[Shinguji]

I'm also an Erika fan myself. Despite the fact she's quite a hateable character, there's just something about her that keeps me from despising her. (Even if I don't like some, if not most, of her actions).

[Kitsu]

About 4th in my list...since I like them all

[luckyssol]

I loved Erika's villain role in episode 5. She has some big shoes to fill replacing Beato as the new villain though.

[Golden Witch Drugs]

... I don't like her <_< I want Beato back.





...................


I've realized an important fact.



If Yukari Tamura already does Bern's voice (Rika thingy) then... WHO WILL DO ERIKA?!?!?!

[TsundereCake]

Originally Posted by Golden Witch Drugs

... I don't like her <_< I want Beato back.


If Yukari Tamura already does Bern's voice (Rika thingy) then... WHO WILL DO ERIKA?!?!?!

Seconded TT_______TT waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh..........[/emo]



Someone else, I guess? Or maybe Tamura with a more Rika-ish voice?

[momobunny]

Originally Posted by Golden Witch Drugs

... I don't like her <_< I want Beato back.





...................


I've realized an important fact.



If Yukari Tamura already does Bern's voice (Rika thingy) then... WHO WILL DO ERIKA?!?!?!

I've been wondering this since her name was revealed.

Would a voice like Bern or Rika's really suit her?
Would it be a bit too predictable?
Would it be a bit repetitive?
Would it get confusing if another Umineko X Higurashi drama CD came out and all 3 of them were in it?

These are the questions that have crossed my mind. I personally kinda hope that she gets a different seiyuu, but getting Tamura would make sense I suppose.

[Marion]

Erika shouldn't be done by Tamura. Erika is Bern's piece but she is not Bern herself. Plus Erika is obviously more childish and less mature than Bern - Tamura probably won't fit, even if she did a similar Rika-esque voice.

[Used Can]

Can we say Erika has been EP5 villain? She was trying to solve the mystery.

Anyway, Lambda keeps me intrigued. In wonder what exactly she is after. She doesn't seem to care about losing, and she doesn't care about tying eternally. She doesn't expect to win.

I think this is the first episode in which Beato was an underdog from the beginning to the end.

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by Used Can

Can we say Erika has been EP5 villain? She was trying to solve the mystery.

"Antagonist". She's still opposed to Battler, the protagonist, despite her viewpoint.

[Tjfarmer]

I'd call Erika a villian, mainly for being a bitch to my favorite character.... and other reasons I suppose.

[Marion]

I think Lambda just wants to play and not get bored at this point.

And yes, Erika is considered the antagonist.

[momobunny]

Originally Posted by Marion

Erika shouldn't be done by Tamura. Erika is Bern's piece but she is not Bern herself. Plus Erika is obviously more childish and less mature than Bern - Tamura probably won't fit, even if she did a similar Rika-esque voice.

Yeah it wouldn't quite fit. I always imagine her with a different voice, but it'll probably be a long time before we find out who will voice her anyway. ^^;

[Riche]

I noticed a few of you are trying to play this game with machine translation, using agth and atlas. If you have little to no japanese reading ability, let me tell you now: its impossible. Atlas will get maybe 20-30% of sentences roughly correct, but its impossible to follow the game like this, the plot is FAR too complex. Atlas is only useful as a helper, a guide, when you get stuck.

However, if you have some confidence that with enough time and a dictionary, you could understand the game (this is harder than it sounds) there are tools that can shorten the amount of time needed for this by several orders of magnitude (it took me about a week for EP5, been reading it since it came out). These are:

- Translation Aggregator. As the name implies it aggregates translations from multiple sources. These sources currently are atlas, google, babel fish, excite, free translation. More usefully, it also provides kanji lookup and readings, using WWWJDIC, Mecab, and its own internal (and very impressive) JParser. The way i ended up using this was to read the kanji lookups, translate it in my head, then check what I had with what the machine translation tools got. It hooks in with agth to automatically read what the game is outputting.

- TAHelper. A helper application for translation aggregator, it sits inbetween your chosen text hooker (on windows that will probably be agth) and provides filtering support. In other games it lets you remove the name tag that often appears at the beginning of each line, but for umineko its mostly useful for auto replace of names, for example you can configure it to automatically replace "真里亞" with "Maria". This is very useful for improving the accuracy of the machine translation tools. This program also adds support for systran as a translation source.

I haven't posted links to these applications as they are from another forum that I'm not sure I can link to, but i'm sure people who are interested will be able to find them.

With these two programs, properly configured, it is possible for someone with only an amateur level of japanese knowledge to enjoy the game. I estimate that I understood around 95% of the game - there was not a single line or scene that I did not *think* I understood fully, but I do expect that I got some parts wrong (damn it, lambadelta).

Just to warn anyone tempted to do this. It took me pretty much a whole week to read the game like this. Its hard, you really need to think things through and you'll need to go back through the text quite often. But its MUCH quicker than sitting there with a kanji dictionary. Even then, I'm expecting to find bits where I got it wrong once I read the proper english translation.

Oh, and one final thing: I've linked a screenshot of my setup, to give you an idea of what it looks like fully configured: http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/3230/hehlyr.jpg

[luckyssol]

Originally Posted by Riche

I've linked a screenshot of my setup, to give you an idea of what it looks like fully configured: http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/3230/hehlyr.jpg

Excellent information, thank you. I'll probably run through it again using some of these since my Japanese is still at a beginner level.

[Leinne]

I REALLY undesrtood pretty much what they say, I think it my Atlas caught about the 90% so I could catch the sense of the sentence (I'd have to thank Watanagashi and Tatarigoroshi arks for that), you just need a bit of experience in the kind of translation Atlas do and it allows you to have a good translation. For people to know, I could still read the game at a quite normal rythm and I love re-reading the ura party everytime I want. The only thing you have to do with it is things like adding names and change some words meanings to fit the translation, but for understand it, only a bit of imagination is required.
The only con I have about agth+atlas it's that it can't catch images like tips description and so on, and so the Beato questions were a bit difficult, but you just have to understand how it is refused to understand the question, it's not really difficult at all

[k//eternal]

Well... no, you probably didn't, but what you got was likely coherent enough to be playable. I think playing the game by machine translation WILL more or less let you understand the plot, but the mystery element has always relied on subtleties.

[Leinne]

Originally Posted by k//eternal

Well... no, you probably didn't, but what you got was likely coherent enough to be playable. I think playing the game by machine translation WILL more or less let you understand the plot, but the mystery element has always relied on subtleties.

Sorry, but i did meant that I got enough translation to figure out the corrct version, I mean, it's not really that difficult, when I couldn't understnad something I lookes at the original writting or accessed another translator, but that happenned very few times, because sometimes Atlas goes a bit crazy with some sentences, but it's noticeable. What I want to say is that I read the game Monday-Tuesday and if I hadn't understand something I would've asked, but I was able to understand more or less everything that happened (I'll have to admit the narrative was better translated than characters speech, but that's normal, it's not that difficult either way).
I went with ease trough the game with my Atlas, I hadn't had to go crazy over the translation and the important things I made sure they were more accurate for my understanding and you can't talk about Alas translation for ep5 till you haven't done it, knowing more or less how it translates isn't reading the translation. Everything that I thought about the game, the characters, the feelings I experimented through the game don't come from a really bad translation and talking about subtlety, I had figured more or less the twilight with my OH not-good translation. With a bad translation you can't know half of it and the only information I would have of the game would?ve been the spilers people gently leave here. But again, the translation I read wasn't that bad, I'll admit some things were a bit hazy, but not that you couldn't understand them, but most things were clear enough. Bye

[k//eternal]

Okay, I guess we're obsolete and should just avoid wasting our time now.

[Riche]

Originally Posted by k//eternal

Well... no, you probably didn't, but what you got was likely coherent enough to be playable. I think playing the game by machine translation WILL more or less let you understand the plot, but the mystery element has always relied on subtleties.

Indeed, this is why I said in my post that these kind of tools will let you enjoy the game. Understanding the basic plot is the easiest part (it helps that Ryukishi can be extremely verbose at times), but you will miss out on quite a lot of the wordplay and subtleties. For example, the screenshot i linked - look at the mess that atlas got. Its pretty much the same for all such lines that don't really conform to 'normal' written japanese (i.e. a huge proportion of dialogue).

With JParser/WWWJDIC this isn't quite as bad, but this is pretty much unavoidable unless you are a fluent japanese reader. It could be argued that the same applies to the witch hunt translations, although to a much smaller degree (information loss is unavoidable in any translation, especially when you don't know what information is important and what isn't). I'm quite interested to see how they deal with the epitaph scenes.

Having said all this when you get things like zombie Hideyoshis showing up, you do start second guessing some of those subtleties!