Hey, could anyone give me a lowdown on how difficult the japanese in this game is? like how would i fair with JLPT N4 and 400 kanji?
I first played this game after living in rural Japan for a couple of years and passing the previous JLPT3 (not on the N# scale, like it is now). My grammar was pretty good, and I spent lots of time looking things up in the dictonary. I even kept a pocket notebook of new vocabulary as I played so that I could review all the new words - and there were a lot! Even if you are fairly conversationally fluent with daily Japanese, there are words you will see in a fantasy setting that wouldn't come up in real life very often. Things like "cape", "bracers", "mallet", "great axe" or whatever else for weapons and items, as well as some of the more nuanced descriptions of things.
I would highly suggest that you
play the DS Legend of Zelda games (Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks) first, as they have this awesome feature where any kanji you see you can click on to see the furigana. If you can play through those games and mostly understand what is going on, you'll be able to tackle Ni No Kuni.
Note that I *still* look up fancy words in the dictionary when translating things, so while you don't need to be perfect you need to be able to read and understand fast enough that you don't get impatient with the game.
I can't tell you how long I even played NNK for, since the in-game time maxxes out at 99h:99m in the official game. I think it was probably around 120 hours, since I was always looking up words in the dictionary, or solving puzzles with the real ~400-page Magic Master book beside me with the game running. Luckily, the Spanish translation team rom hackers figured out that the game actually tracks your full game play time, but that it wasn't displaying the 3rd digit for the hours. They also figured out how to fix that, so you'll be able to play up to 999 hours of NNK DS before your timer gets permanently stuck.
I hope you're right, because I'm totally obsessed with this game and I can't wait to play it.
I check this thread almost every day.
Wow, then you check this more than I do. Ha ha! Sorry for the lack of posts, February feels like it just evaporated with being sick, work, and some family visits. While I was away, the zkarts managed to figure out a few of the big issues with the build, so we're farther ahead on some things, and about the same on others. I'm not sure how else to describe our progress, please see previous posts where I lament the ability to report on % done because we're just iterating through bugs now.
So they have to test the game entirely with their translation to be sure it's playable and readable.
Yes, and even still I'm sure there will be some NPC conversations some where that we didn't get quite right, or a side quest that got missed. But, in general it will be playable and understandable and assuming we don't get C&Ds we can release updates to fix bugs that people find in the wild.
@Anjiera, is it possible to quantify how much blocs are done and how much remains?
Last edit progress on first post was 13% in October 2017.
Unfortunately some of the editors weren't marking off files as done as they edited them, so I can say that we're farther along that 13%, and we're not at 100%. Not a very specific range, I know. I'm trying to nail down a better number for our own purposes, so when I have it I'll let you know.
(P.S. Thanks to
@Cyan for holding down the fort while I was in the time warp!)