taskforce wrote:
Wildbill, I think that scene has 3 Japanese puns and has nothing to do with the guy showing up earlier in the game. That at least is what I gathered by that scene. Unfortunately, I doubt those puns will work in English here.
Okay, these three lines not making sense makes sense now, but the overarching activities in this particular town seem to create a tenor that doesn't lend itself well to humor - except the old couple in which the woman confuses a girl for a boy, and the man drools over the female fighters (or was that one a town back?).
The humor in Minerva comes primarily from three sources: good-natured cultural and gender clashes between the citizens, banter between the heroines and would-be villains - both male and female - who frequently wind up looking like buffoons after battle, and teasing and missteps among some of the heroines. The game is really funny, and this mixes well, albeit incongruously at times, with the deadly serious conflicts in the plot.
Regardless of the frequent slapstick nature in Minerva, this encounter with the would-be punster, as I mentioned and you explained, doesn't seem to work with this NPC. He's a traveling merchant who is fearful of entering the countryside for the usual reasons.
What we do have in this town that relates to three of something are the item, weapon, and armor merchants who are VERY worried about some troublesome activity in town they can't quite pin down. As the story in this town develops through plot triggers elsewhere, the problem finally leaks out after repeated visits, and the heroines must make a decision about confronting it.
I read in a Minerva "review" about 3 or 4 years ago when I first started researching this game that some player who understood not a word of Japanese seemed to diss the game because it had too much "talk" and not enough action. What Minerva really has, it turns out, is a captivating story hidden inside that Japanese.
I thought I'd resolve discussing my quandary with this string here since I started that way. Interested parties can see the length to which we go, rendering every minute detail of a story into a segment of a professionally rendered English localization.
I should be sending an update over later this week, into the start of Chapter 4. I have some saves for a few major scenes in Chapter 3 ready for you to backstop.
Right now, this is how the whole conversation reads in the script.
Yes, it's a plain vanilla "townie" comment, but I don't see how this particular stranded person could be a in jovial mood. He's in a private house off in a room by himself in an isolated town that mountain climbers normally use as a jumping-off location. Now if he was sitting in a bar half drunk and surrounded by dancing bears, we could do some comic relief with that!