Paul Chi (paulchi@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU)
Sat, 26 Sep 1998 02:15:21 -0500
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1998 02:15:21 -0500 From: Paul Chi <paulchi@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU> Subject: Re: Question for you ST fans. (Some ST1 spoilers)
Well, despite my Chinese-sounding last name, I'm actually Korean. ^_^
So I probably know the least Japanese out of any of us. Yet IMHO, even
someone with as little knowledge of Japanese as myself can still enjoy
Sakura Taisen.
I also perused Nickel's page after I finished ST 1. Heck, I downloaded
his whole ST section to my hard drive. It filled in a lot of holes. I found
Ming's page useful too, because it outlined several paths instead of just
one.
Basically, I had no clue what people were saying most of the time,
except for what I could glean from the backgound music, facial expressions
of the characters, and the excellent voice acting. I didn't have a problem
figuring out the plot though, since I was already vaguely familiar with the
storyline and the movies made it pretty obvious. I just went with the flow
and didn't worry about making wrong choices. Had the seiyuus not been so
engaging, I probably would have been tempted to auto-fire-B through all the
dialogue and rush to the battles, but lucky for me the voice acting was
stellar.
I made my LIPS choices based on punctuation, mostly. I figured that
responses with "..." in them indicated a more tentative/cautious/sad
attitude, while I assumed sentences ending with an exclamation point were
more on the firm to angry side, or surprised, depending on the context. If
I made a bad impression, it wasn't a big deal; sometimes it was even funny.
When I was going through the game a second time, I mapped out all the LIPS
choices, so it was a non-issue.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
So to sum up, I pretty much hacked my way through the game, with the
results being that Kanna destroyed me while we sparred, I upgraded the
koubus randomly, I shot Ayame, I didn't understand what that the
Teikokukagekidan split up to do training, etc. etc. The story itself didn't
really make a huge impression on me (although I was caught off guard by
some of the plot twists) but I still enjoyed/enjoy it immensely for the
animation, the charaters, the voice acting, the battles, and the minigames.
Paul