Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (In Japanese) Pt: 1

That’s right, I’m diving in! I’ve still got a lot of other things on my plate at the moment, but I’m too eager to legit play a game, so I’m going to make the plunge.

I came super close to buying both ファミコン探偵倶楽部 and リンクの冒険 over the weekend for the Game Boy Advance… but with the Canadian dollar as low as it is right now, the >$70 it was going to cost seemed a little absurd. The good ole CAD is on it’s way (slightly) back up at the moment, and I’ve got other things to keep me busy, so I’m going to hold off for the time being. But I already decided that I’ve got a couple of games at my disposal that I can try out, and so try them I shall!

It’s exciting, even to be able to recognize anything here given that this is my first attempt to deviate from any sort of a lesson plan. Identifying スタートwithout needing to look it up feels great. The same with the first line of the message in red at the bottom left.

このゲームはコントローラを is stating something along the lines of “As for this game (このゲームは), a controller (コントローラを)[…]”. As we all know however; I don’t know my Kanji yet. I need to continue looking up the next part.

As I don’t quite know how to manage furigana yet, we’ll have to manage like this:

I don’t really know how in-depth to get with this right now, but from what I understand we have words like: 日本人 which mean “Japanese Person”. And we have a little bit of info here about that particular word, and Kun/On readings with Kanji in general.

人 = hito, which means person (The kanji alone means you have to read the kun reading which is the original word for it)

The ON reading on the other hand is used mostly for compound Kanjis.

EX. 日本人＝NIHONJIN which means Japanese person ( There are more than one kanji which means you must read it as the ON reading, chinese reading)

Although the KUN reading serves for other things as you may learn later on. When you see that there is a kanji first and then its followed by the Hiragana alphabet, you read the kanji as the KUN reading. This is used for Adjectives, verbs, and in special cases for nouns. I’ll give the example with another kanji that’s a verb.

Ex. 終わる＝ OWARU which means to finish. ( Notice that the first character is a kanji and the rest is followed by hiragana. When there is such an instance the kanji is read with the KUN reading always which in this case was ‘O’. The same applies to adjectives and SOME nouns.)

There are some cases where the compound kanjis together are read in their KUN reading but very rarely. The most common instance is when reading the name of a Japanese person. Others just have to be memmorized along with the vocabulary writing and reviewing process.

Ex1. 田中さん＝TANAKA SAN which means Mr. Tanaka ( Notice that this is a japanese name being read with KUN instead of ON reading. The easiest way to know to read it as KUN is when at the end it has -san, -chan, -sama etc.. which are types of respect forms to different people.

Ex.2 青空= AOSORA which means Blue Sky. ( This type of kanji although a compound is read with the kun reading. There are rarely any occasions like this but it just has to be memmorized. The ON yomi would otherwise be SEI KARA which means absolutley nothing. These are used for rare nouns)

So the entire sentence is:　このゲームはコントローラを使用するようにデザトンされています。 Now I’ve already run this through google translate, and the meaning is pretty simple, but I’m still going to break it down so I can grok the grammar.

この – this
ゲーム – game
は – as for
コントローラ – controller
を – the subject of the verb
使用するよう – to use
に – kind of means “to” or “at”
デザトン – design
されています – it has been

So roughly, “As for this game, it has been designed to use a controller.”

Let’s break down the other three Kanji in that screen while we’re at it.

Now, I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination… however the above word is pretty common and I’ve already learned it. The Kanji that they chose to use in the language bar says “Japanese Person”… that doesn’t seem right to me… likely one of the devs stuck that in there at the last moment without double checking… because the better word to have used would have been: