June, innit
it’s the 31st anniversary of Kirby’s debut in Japan! unfortunately no art from me this time. to make up for it, here’s Kirby out in the world taking in a range of exciting European sights. many happy returns!
finally the content this tumblelog needed: changing almost every instrument in a Kirby music track to be The Synth and then underlining it with the Amen break
Anonymous asked:
what do you think of magolor soul’s true arena desc? makes me think he isn’t truly sorry.
I wanted to save this ask to write something MUCH more comprehensive about this but, um, serious RL stuff (it's positive stuff, no worries. I'm just kinda anxious about it...) popped up during my break so since I'm going to need to duck away for a few days to cool down (and because I'm currently super mega obsessed with True Arena Magolor) I decided to hit this one quickly.
So, in brief, this game has an excellent translation. Forgotten Land quality. I'd say even a little bit above that, since Magolor's writing in the epilogue is so good. (Biased?)
But there is a slight shift of TONE in Magolor Soul's True Arena description, the 2nd phase, where he talks directly to Kirby. (Honestly, this is probably just an issue of spacing. Magolor talks a LOT and you can see this screen is packed with text. Amusingly, spacing was my guess for the loss of a few details from Magolor Soul's pause screen in the original game.)
(Photo nicked from willidleaway)
Here is a quick "alternate" translation from me:
"Kirby, frankly, I found you a pain to deal with. And the way you looked at me with that blank stare even after I betrayed you? It irks me that I keep having to rely on you but... I've had enough. Kirby of the Stars, hurry up and destroy this thing on my head. When you do, I'll come back and... heheheh...I'll tease you plenty!"
oh my god someone says it! I’m probably going to mostly write in verbose agreement here, but ...
my translation would weaken that first sentence even more, ending up with something closer to:
Kirby, I don’t know what to do with you. Even after all my tricks, you just stare back blankly like that ... I resent relying on you time and again, but ... fine. Kirby of the Stars, quick, break this thing on my head. Then, I’ll be back ... heheheh ... for another prank!
it’s also interesting to look at the Korean translation, which generally ties very closely to the Japanese when Kirby games are concerned.
커비, 나는 너를 모르겠어. 속임수에 당해도 멀뚱거리기나 하잖아. 몆 번이나 네 도움을 받는 건 분하지만… 됐어. 별의 커비, 얼른 내 머리 위의 관을 부숴 줘. 그러면 내가, 크크큭… 골탕 먹여 줄게!
Kirby, I can’t figure you out. Even after falling prey to my tricks, you just stare back blankly. It’s maddening to have you help me out time and again, but ... fine. Kirby of the Stars, quick, break this crown on my head. Then I’ll, heheheh ... play a right trick on you!
there are some minor if interesting differences (like how the Korean version explicitly says ‘crown’, which might just be a grammatical thing), but both the Japanese and Korean versions emphasise the fact that Magolor is just a troll, whose modus operandi is constant mischief and trickery and who lives to see the look on the faces on the receiving end. to me, the JP/KR versions don’t suggest Magolor is insulted by Kirby’s (lack of) reaction—he’s puzzled. stringing along this innocent, kind hero under false pretenses to help him achieve control of the universe?! surely his greatest trick yet! and yet ... no reaction? well, that’s ... new ... and he doesn’t really know how to work with that.
and where in the EN version it reads like Magolor’s taunting Kirby, still trying to test Kirby or at least cause trouble for Kirby one last time with this challenge—in the JP/KR version it’s a desperate cry for help. he tries to save face—how did he, who now should have control of everything, come to rely on this pink puff over and over again?—but in the end the situation is long beyond that and Magolor knows it.
while my heart of hearts leans towards the JP/KR tone of desperation, both these tones are entirely plausible in the end. after all, this is Magolor still under the Master Crown’s domination, and he’s probably flashing between his internal desperation and the aeons’ worth of hate and anger infused into the Master Crown through its previous history. so what he’s truly saying in his original tongue is probably something just a little ineffable in human language that has nuances falling somewhere in between all of these translations into English and Japanese and Korean ...
so like @desultory-novice I’ve been thinking a bit about the voice clips that you can hear in the new remix of the final boss track. the exact parameters are a little lost to me but in Audacity I attempted the following on the original track:
- Vocal Reduction and Isolation, Isolate Vocals. Leave the frequency band at the default settings (120-9000 Hz), and set the strength to somewhere around 1.5 and 2. (Too high and Audacity just returns silence!)
- Filter Curve EQ with this curve:
and then the only change is to turn the volume back up to max out at -3 dB with Normalise.
this doesn’t work amazingly, unfortunately—the orchestral samples mix hard with the vocal samples so isolating the vocals would probably take a lot of manual artisanal spectral suppression. but! this processing is enough to make things a little less distracting, and I’ve compiled a set of three samples from the resulting output where I think I can particularly clearly hear things:
- kaa—bi ... (this was taken from ~04:25)
- i ... iroha ... (taken from ~05:00)
- ma ke ... fu ... kaa ... bi ... (taken from ~06:30)
(oh, also, these timestamps are for the full track, to avoid confusion.)
and this leads me to my conspiracy theory. keep those audible syllables in your head as you read on. i-ro-ha ... ma-ke-fu ...
if you go look at the Star Allies OST website, there’s a sound staff roundtable discussion (kindly translated previously by Kai), where they discuss how Void Termina’s voice was created (Kai’s translations in square brackets):
（熊崎）そうですね、4人の声です。ゲーム内のボイスではおなじみの安藤さん、比較的若い声の小笠原さん、それから女性の声も欲しかったので『みんなで！カービィハンターズＺ』ディレクターの東藤さん。そして私。4人の演技、声が混ざった鳴き声をやってみよう、って。[Kumazaki: Yes, it was the voices of four people. You, Mr. Ando, being a regular with in-game voice clips, Mr. Ogasawara with his comparatively younger voice, as well as Mrs. Todo, the director of “Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, because we wanted a woman’s voice, too. And me. We wanted to try out a cry made by mixing voice lines from the four of us.]
（安藤）そういえば何て言ってたか、覚えてないなあ。[Ando: By the way, what did we say? I can’t remember.]
（熊崎）「イロハニホヘト、カービィ〜」です。[Kumazaki: It was "Irohanihoheto, Kirby”.]
（安藤）あー、そうか。[Ando: Oh, right.]
（熊崎）全員同じ言葉で、「イロハニホヘト、カービィ〜……」みたいに発して別々に録りました。私が言ったら安藤さんが、「あ、それでいく」って言ったんですよ（笑）。[Kumazaki: We each uttered those same words, “Irohanihoheto, Kirby…”, all recording seperately. When I told you, you said “Oh, we’re going with that”. (laughs)]
hmm. let’s go look at Iroha (emphasis mine):
いろはにほへと ちりぬるを わかよたれそ つねならむ うゐのおくやま けふこえて あさきゆめみし ゑひもせす
some of these look familiar? here, a romaji transliteration (again, emphasis mine):
Iro fa nifofeto Tirinuru wo Wa ka yo tare so Tune naramu Uwi no okuyama Kefu koyete Asaki yume misi Wefi mo sesu
so my conspiracy theory is ... it’s Iroha again. the Iroha is basically a ‘the quick brown fox jumps’-type pangram, and while it has actual literary meaning, it’s often used to simply iterate through all the kana. I think Ando went to record himself reading the Iroha and saying ‘Kirby’ once in a while, and then shuffled the different segments around, and that constitutes most of the discernible vocal samples that aren’t crying or screaming. I say it’s a conspiracy theory because I haven’t gone through all of the vocal samples, so there could be something extra hiding in there (and of course I could be mishearing some things).
and if it holds up? not terribly exciting, I know, but still interesting from a development standpoint!
For those of us who want to follow along at home: what's the timestamp and what parameters did you use for the Audacity filters? I'm having the opposite problem where I can start getting at the Magolor vocal samples but can't get at this mysterious voice ...
Absolutely! Frankly, I'd love to do more digging into this!
First, I used "Supreme Lord's Coronation ~ OVERLORD ~ Phase 2 Extended", ripped from the YT channel "B-cah"
Audacity > Vocal Reduction and Isolation Action: Isolate Vocals Strength: 2.00 Low Cut: 120.0 High Cut: 9000
I caught the sound at approx. the 00h00m15s mark (My original clip stretches from 00m14.8s to 00m18.5s)
--
I have no idea if audio actually works this way, but it feels like, since the base of the song is the one from Star Allies, you should be able to inverse the original track, lay it over the DX version and have them cancel each other out, leaving only the chirps? Am I thinking of some sci-fi BS or would that actually be possible...? ^^;;
oh! I thought it was going to be at the start of the second loop :P
I can actually kind of hear it myself. the only question is: if you take the Star Allies version and put it through the same procedure, can you actually hear it in there too?
and that’s Crown% (which I guess here is also 100%) on RtDL DX! I have to say that the True Arena is mighty impressive. sure, some of the epilogue bosses don’t really put up any more of a fight than their Story Mode counterparts, but the True Arena version of Magolor Soul alone (new music! new attacks! new pause lore!) makes the whole thing worth going through. and while the Colosseum’s feature of ‘carry on from last boss’ didn’t make it in here, you can still use as many souvenir items from Merry Magoland as you have, so I managed to refill my health multiple times and even regain Stone (the ‘Random’ Copy Ability star’s roulette slows down over time).
overall this is a wonderful version of the game that will probably be a bit more future-proof than my slightly precarious Wii and the equally precarious optical disc, although I really wish they had put the New Challenge Stages in Merry Magoland and had a Classic Kirby mask instead of Gold Kirby. well, there are old-fashioned Kirby sounds that go with the Gold Kirby mask so I’ve been met halfway, I guess.
errrrrrrm yeah not sure the whole ‘save a new friend’ thing worked out. bye Magolor Soul, have fun in the non-canon interdimensional vortex I guess?
and there’s another mode down. only the True Arena remains, and unlike the Colosseum from Forgotten Land, I don’t think this one’s canon, unless Kirby battling the Magolor Epilogue bosses can be canon. those bosses are going to need some really intense figuring out ...
ah, so Extra Mode has new lines for Magolor (and I think Story Mode does as well) after you get 120 Energy Spheres, in addition to the lines that were already in the original RtDL. it would seem that the player may read between the lines as they wish in terms of whether there may be a connection between Shopkeeper Magolor and Manager Magolor ...
but more importantly, if Magolor really wants to be a theme park manager, the Master Crown seems a bit overkill for his purposes ...
... I’ll admit, once I saw that the Story Mode bosses took up residence in Merry Magoland, my secret hope was that either the Doomers or the EX bosses would also arrive and cause havoc, and then Kirby and company would have to confront the consequences of a completionist playthrough. ah, at least we get masks for them.
progress here is basically now everything up to the end of White Wafers and the Bomb Challenge Stage, which apparently brings progress for Extra Mode on its own to 51% and total file progress to 80%. I don’t think anything can top how that epilogue ended, but I’m still braced for the possibility of a bizarre twist after the end of Extra Mode ...
taking a much-needed break while I let my Joy-Cons recharge, but have some pictures of fun times from the main Story Mode of RtDL DX
OK, I’ve properly cleared the epilogue now, including the extra stage. in the process I upgraded trickery to maximum level because Magolor is nothing if not a deceitful egg, and what he says at that point is certainly interesting in terms of Manager Magolor ... but it could be a blatant red herring, of course.
it turns out basically the only thing that matters as far as getting gold medals on the epilogue stages is using black holes and cannons for massive combos, and everything else is really secondary. at that point I kind of wonder if the whole skill system is even necessary or if we could have just had something on the level of Guest Star mode in Star Allies. I mean, look, there’s the name room like in the Guest Star mode for Dream Friends! (it is very cute that using the cannon on the name results in a 86-combo, though.)
that, incidentally, puts RtDL DX completion at 64%. so the epilogue is probably about 8% of completion, which makes sense—I’d say it’s about 20% the length of the main story mode. but with that, Extra Mode awaits ...
WAIT IT WAS ACTUALLY ALL ABOUT THE GEM APPLES ALL ALONG??? I mean, the moment the ‘malus pumila’ bit came out about one of the song titles, I was joking about it tying back to the Gem Apples in the Kirby Clash games, but I didn’t realise the Magolor Epilogue was literally about connecting the Magolor at the end of RtDL to Shopkeeper Magolor ...
anyway, that aside, I don’t really know what to make of the Epilogue gameplay-wise. if the Guest Star mode of Star Allies was about your character sort of incidentally getting stronger based on what bonuses you find, this game is about being a bit more intentional on that front, replacing the Point Stars with Magic Spheres and trying to get you to level up your character intentionally by allocating those. me, I just ended up mashing a barely upgraded attack and abusing the mid-air guard, and just hitting Continue on the final boss fight again and again until it went through. so I don’t know how successful this attempt at a platformer-RPG hybrid is, especially one that’s also trying to accommodate the wide and often inexperienced audience for a mainline Kirby game.
but what about Manager Magolor? any closure there? or is it just meant to be taken at face value? I mean, never take Kirby lore too seriously, but still ...
OK, so here’s the rough progress on RtDL DX so far.
- Story Mode (what used to be called Main Mode, I think) is 100% cleared (ignore the fact that none of the Challenge Stages have platinum medals).
- the Arena has been cleared, although honestly the story mode bosses aren’t exactly the most challenging ...
- I’ve completed the first three areas of the epilogue.
this apparently adds up to 56% completion. previous Kirby games only factored side modes into that percentage after they’re fully completed, so I wager the epilogue isn’t part of that percentage right now.
it seems somewhat quaint to have Extra Mode mostly as is from RtDL, given the more abridged extra games from Triple Deluxe all the way to Forgotten Land, but we’ll see ...
... so even in a state of utter powerlessness, Magolor has to wink at the camera
it’s kind of amazing really how essential to his being it seems to be
OK, I actually quite like Merry Magoland. it kind of reminds me of those old minigame collections on the Wii, especially because of the minigames that have motion control options. there are also lots of other fun touches clearly intended to keep players coming back every once in a while. I just wish the game would let you see the nighttime scene again because it’s absolutely gorgeous, isn’t it?
well, it felt appropriate to truly finish off Merry Magoland by returning to Ninja Dojo, one of the subgames actually returning from the original RtDL.
and look Magolor says the thing! he says the thing! and I basically got what I wanted, which is some more dialogue. it really does seem like this alternate universe Magolor is a good egg, saying slightly ominous things that prime-timeline Magolor would say but truly having nothing but theme parks on his mind (apparently travelling to the worlds of the other mainline Kirby games for ideas! like some sort of BioShock Infinite scenario!). hmmmmmm, I wonder if prime-timeline Magolor might run into Manager Magolor in his post-game travels ...
OK, so these extra missions are starting to feel within the realm of reason. I mean, it’s going to take hours and hours of replaying these subgames and I’ll probably want to go back to the story mode first, but it’s still fun. I mean, it’s getting a little frustrating, but still fun in all honesty.
Checkerboard Chase in particular has a very straightforward strategy, which is to just spam-erase the row and column that you’re on, so that other CPU players can’t get onto your row or column to wipe you out. then it’s a matter of getting the CPU players to wipe each other out and hoping you can finish the job ...
... but at least that’s a game where you can strategise. Kirby on the Draw ... that’s going to be absolutely infernal ...
bravo, bravo. I load the game back up and Magolor immediately casts aspersions upon whether I truly have mastered Merry Magoland.
well, as a veteran of Kirby’s Adventure, I at least had to clear my name as far as Egg Catcher was concerned, even if it took double-digit attempts ... but some of these? eight bulls-eyes in Ninja Dojo?? clearing the fast intense difficulty of Checkerboard Chase without falling??? I don’t know, I really hope that these don’t count towards completion ... oh no these are totally going to count towards Kirby Master, aren’t they??