dryhands

Day 1

2024-10-26

professor sycamore (apparently named platane in jp!?) has a speech style that is about what i expected, especially since i already have some familiarity with a beautiful, amiable frenchman in jp media prior. however i am a little annoyed at him for having dialogue that did not wait for my button press to proceed. when i anticipated it, i could suspend the game and review the line through the game notes view of my 2ds, but sometimes i am not so quick to realize it and he just keeps talking like i'm not standing there with the blank stare of someone with audio processing disorder.

after half an hour (at least 5% of which was me trying my damndest to spell yvonne in katakana correctly) my little player character finally woke up in bed. was that handsome man just a dream...? i find it cute how yvonne toddles around her room with a pikachu 3ds xl in one hand. when i checked the pc, i cannot fathom why i blinked in surprise when the text was not in english.

i almost left yvonne's room because i was itching to play the video game but i got too scared of however long the conversation with her mother would be lol... crossing my fingers that no scene will ever be so long that i grow too fatigued before the next save opportunity... i'm already shuddering thinking about sitting at a table with 3 other characters after i leave the hometown. please be nice to me, whatever your unlocalized names are... this yvonne is but a simple gaijin who hasn't mastered the language yet...

i feel good about the amount of vocabulary i'll be getting each play session. so far i haven't gotten any sentences i don't understand, but given that most of today was traditional lines i know by heart from playing pokemon games dozens of times collectively, that's not too surprising. my current plan of attack is to create anki cards out of any sentence containing a kanji or word i don't know, and review in my spare time outside of play sessions.

number of anki cards created today: 12

activity log: 0:53 (unsure how this reported higher)

total playtime: 0:47

Day 2

2024-10-27

i ended up being afraid of yvonne's mother for nothing, because she only said three very simple lines and used the last one to usher me out the door. thanks mom!! i met karumu (calem, who surprised me by using オレ; i would have clocked him as a 僕 boy) and sana (shauna, あたし girlie). i haven't got a read on karumu yet but sana is a very cute kind of boisterous that i like.

i spent long enough talking to npcs and checking interactables and trying to pronounce 並べられている without getting tongue-twisted that i felt pretty much done by the time i got to the gates of asame town. i'm a game ost appreciator but one can only listen to the same sleepy hometown loop for so long, so i'm glad to finally hear something else.

i also found myself reappreciating how cute the xy models are. yvonne is like a little creature scurrying around on my screen, i love her so much. i used to take her more seriously as a cool twenty-something on a Mission, but now that i'm a twenty-something myself i just see a beetle or mouse i want to hold in my hands.

i made dinner and did laundry in the middle of today's play session, so i'm not sure how accurate the accumulated time reports are... this was something i liked doing for my persona 5 playthrough (just to prove how freaking long it takes for someone like me to beat a serious jrpg) so i thought it'd be funny to track the insanely inflated playtime of someone learning the language the game is in. two hours to leave the hometown, wahoo!!! could we have a starter pokemon by hour three...!? time will tell...

number of anki cards created today: 19

total anki cards: 31

activity log: 1:35

total playtime: 2:15

Day 3

2024-10-28

i entered the second town and cursed the game's charming little iron-wrought signs introducing each area, because it only stays on the screen for a couple seconds and my katakana reading ability is not that fast. sana called me over and i got to meet tierno (name is the same, ぼく user) and trover (trevor, also ぼく user).

tierno is upbeat and seems to be the most likely to use interjections, like よーし！ and オーライ！ (that one was new to me). reflecting on it, i find tierno to be an interesting character, because in such a small "beginner allies" party, his distinguishing features don't really fit a lot of the archetypes you usually see. dance isn't really like "sports guy" or "music guy". i'm not even really sure what type of dance he does; it's only vaguely described by karumu as "powerful". so i'm kind of interested to see more of tierno! i don't really know what to expect from him.

trover slots neatly into the shy intellectual type, and good god i really felt it when tierno went "sheesh" over trover going on and on with complicated words. it seemed like there was more new kanji in his three lines telling us about the pokedex mission than the rest of the conversation combined. and because pokemon dialogue often has a sentence spread across a press-to-proceed, i quickly gave up on making anki cards out of his explanation in the interest of going to bed on time tonight. the fact that he capped it off with a "in other words, the professor has a very important mission for us" in simpler terms was, for once, genuinely appreciated.

i actually didn't even realize what trover had given me was the pokedex until a few lines after, because it's called a pokemon 図鑑, its most suitable meaning being like a "field guide". it's funny how immersed i've been in pokemon for so many years of my life, then got into learning japanese, but somehow these two things never really intersected until now, so i'm learning a lot of things about pokemon that i've never even thought of before.

prior to this, sana boldly decided i must have a nickname and forced tierno and trover to make pitches. i don't remember how it was done in english, but i found the japanese version super cute. it took the first two kana of my player name, イヴォンヌ, and then each of the three added a suffix to it. (karumu quietly evaded participation). so it was like this:

◌ sana: イブっち (yvu-cchi)

◌ tierno: イブーな (yvuuna)

◌ trover: イブりん (yvu-rin)

it was an interesting consequence of the two-kana setup that yvonne's ヴォ (vo) lost its ォ so it became vu, effectively being pronounced the same as "eve". i almost went for trover's suggestion until i realized it was the same as how "evelyn" is spelled in jp. that's not how nicknames work, trover.

sana's pitch is deathly cute and i wanted to make her happy, so i went with イブっち. shortly following this, tierno started referring to trover as trovercchi with no prelude or reaction, which made me giggle every time he did.

i hadn't thought much about what starter i would pick, but once i got there the choice seemed clear: i'd picked froakie in my first playthrough of y and fennekin for my second in x, so it was only natural to go with chespin. i've become an unevolved pokemon appreciator in the handful of years since i last played a main game, so i'm thinking about leaving chespin as chespin since i find it the most appealing in its evolutionary line. this'll also give me a bit of sorely needed challenge, as a... (counts on my fingers) nine-time pokemon champion? i probably missed at least one.

i've been using the character's japanese names to get them to stick, so i think i'll need to do that with the pokemon too... chespin is called hirimaron, which i find pretty cute. hiri = needle and maron = chestnut, from the french word marron. when sana asked me if i wanted to nickname my new little guy, it was only natural to call him marocchi.

(fennekin is called fokko, which i could not take very seriously, and i think it's just fokkusu = fox with a ko = child ending. froakie is called keromatsu, where kero = ribbit/croak and i'm guessing matsu is "to wait", in reference to the evolution's ninja themeing.)

i kept an eye on karumu during all this to see what kind of personality i could glean from him, and the vagueness i'd been feeling before transformed once i saw him contrasted with the more energetic personalities of the other three. karumu is... calm. says so right on the tin. i think the first and only exclamation point i've seen out of him so far was when he was introducing trover— "he gets full marks on all his tests!" perhaps this is something karumu struggles with. a poor student, despite his straight and smart demeanor? moe...

he then stiltingly introduced himself to his fokko, which is giving student council member vibes instead. i wonder when yvocchi will be called out for staring at karumu so intently. there's some very important analyzation going on behind those huge creature eyes. sana called her new buddy keromatsu-chan, solidifying her as my favorite. i would buy her a smoothie. i would buy karumu a smoothie too if he expressed himself at all.

the moment i was out of that conversation i was ready to turn in for the night. but wait!! i need to look at marocchi. he has... a timid nature, +spd -atk, which i am pretty sure is about as non-optimal as it gets for what i recall to be a slow physical attacker. but i'm not a quitter and moreover i am past the ordeal of caring about such details so i will bravely move forward with my timid marocchi. i opened pokemon amie, took pictures of the tutorial to read later, pet the marocchi, fed a poffin to the marocchi, forfeited all mortal possessions to the marocchi, and closed the game for the night.

number of anki cards created today: 14

total anki cards: 45

activity log: 1:28

total playtime: 3:43

Day 4

2024-11-01

i've yet to figure out when to do my anki reviews on weekdays, so i slipped and let a bunch of cards pile up... i decided to do whatever i could in about 10 minutes as a warm-up and get to my next play session.

i explored the rest of meisui town and collected a bunch of game-relevant vocab like キズぐすり (kizugusuri, potions) and モンスターボール (monster balls, poke balls. this surprised me at first, but it makes sense!). i've examined a number of shelves in the houses in asame town and now the stores in meisui town, and it annoys me to see the same vocab written in hiragana, katakana, and kanji with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

before departing meisui town, sana challenged me to a quick battle. it was my horror to remember that battle text proceeds on its own, and VERY quickly at that. it hardly stays on the screen at all once all the characters have appeared. i figure it'll push me to start reading faster though, so i just read what i could as it went along and changed the text speed to the slowest setting afterward. i beat her soundly with my type advantage; she's more interested in the friend aspect of pokemon, anyway.

i returned home to deliver the letter from dr. platane to yvonne's mother, who (jokingly?) guessed it might be a love letter and commented on the beautiful handwriting. with mom and saihorn's blessing, i set back out to proceed onto route 2.

karumu and sana were there for the catching tutorial; sana said that karumu's parents are strong trainers, and karumu made some weird remark that "that's got nothing to do with him", or something like that. bit of coolness/pride kind of personality coming through there... feels like he wants to prove his own strength independent of his parents. he appears to still be benefitting from their pockets, however, as i saw during the catching tutorial that he had a whole 50 monster balls. at least he shared 10 of them with me after i winced buying just 5 for myself.

i caught a yayakoma (fletchling) and realized i now have access to the true vocab mine: the pokedex entries. after catching a kofukimushi (scatterbug) and getting 8 new words in one sentence, the majority of which seemed rather niche in usage, i wondered if i should be bothering with it all... i'll keep going for now to see if some of these words at least repeat in other entries.

i tend to spend a lot of time on pokemon nicknames when i commit to using them in a playthrough, so i was very thankful for the scheme provided to me last time and named my guys komacchi and kofukicchi. i checked the name origins on bulbapedia to make sure that the segment i'm highlighting makes sense. i don't know whether i'll use either of these pokemon, but at least they're nicknamed in case i do!

i backtracked to get free healing from mom's cooking and decided that was enough for today. my longest play session yet, even though it didn't feel like i did much... next time i'll be heading into hakudan forest.

number of anki cards created today: 25

total anki cards: 70

activity log: 2:06

total playtime: 5:47

Day 5

2025-10-15

IT'S BEEN ALMOST A WHOLE YEAR....!?!?!??!? i knew i'd been putting it off, but time really does fly sometimes....

tragically, the past year has seen a change of phones, and my anki deck didn't survive the transfer. i did attempt recovery processes but i think i accidentally overwrote the old data. oops.... i'm fine with that, i'll just proceed and remake cards as i go.

that said, i'd intended on returning to pokémon y as a warmup before i attempt to play pokémon legends z-a entirely in japanese for my first playthrough. days slid by after my mental proclamation of intention, and to my surprise, my z-a preorder is actually going to arrive on release day, so in the end i only managed to squeeze in a brief 20 minutes of pokémon y the evening before. better than nothing!

when i picked y back up, i was at the start of the grass patches before hakudan forest, and, falsely thinking i hadn't done the obligatory first wild pokémon capture, i walked in and caught a jiguzaguma (zigzagoon). i followed my nicknaming convention, but i misremembered which character set to use and ended up spelling it with katakana. so now i have one ッチ in a party of っちs.....

a second encounter in the next patch was about as far as i got before bedtime. with z-a impending, i'm not sure when i'll ever return to y.... i suppose i'll be cloning this page to blog my z-a playthrough in the same way.

maybe it'll be a fun test to see how much more i understand after z-a. maybe it'll be another year before i return to the original kalos.... au revoir!

number of anki cards created today: 5

total anki cards: 5...

activity log: 2:26

total playtime: 6:03