Harry PotterI finally started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone vol2 last night. It begins with a short section not in the original books that gives a short description of the characters, and it was one of the strangest things I've ever seen.
The strange part was
which characters they listed. In order, it lists Harry Potter, Neville, Fred and George, Percy, Charlie, Snape, Quirrel, Filch, Peeves, Nicholas Flamel, and Voldemort.
It would make sense for something like this to list the major characters (what I initially expected), or maybe for it to assume the reader already knows the major characters and to only list the minor characters instead. But listing
one major character and then a bunch of minor characters is incredibly bizarre. In fact, they even refer to "Ron" without explanation in the descriptions of his bothers, as if they expect the reader to already know who Ron is. What kind of reader is going to know Ron and Hermione but
not know who freaking Harry Potter is? WTF?!?!
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Phoenix WrightI finally finished Case 4 this morning. When Phoenix points out that Yanni Yogi's combination (1228) is the same as the date of the DL6 incident, Manfred von Karma tries to play it off as coincidence by saying that his own bank number is 4649 which spells "yoroshiku", but that's just coincidence. It took me a moment to understand the reference, and that it's based on taking part of the kanji reading for each number, especially since it uses different readings for the two 4s.
It seems that in the English localization, they changed this to him saying that his number is 0001 because he "is number one", which makes him seem kind of stupid. I'm surprised they weren't able to find a better translation for this bit.
Also, at one point the word "黒幕" came up, a word on WK that I didn't expect to ever see in the wild.
Anyway, next up is case 5. All I remember from my college days is that Case 5 is
really really long. It presumably also seems to drag on due to being less dramatic than Case 4. Case 4 is the real climax of the game, which makes sense, since it was the original ending of the narrative, while Case 5 is just a DLC that got tacked on afterwards.
Case 4 is also the one covered in the movie. I watched the Pheonix Wright movie (with subtitles) in my college days after finding it on Youtube or the like. I'm interested in watching it again now that I've watched the Japanese version of the games and have studied Japanese and could appreciate it more, but obviously Youtube has changed in the last 12 years and you can't just find movies like that anymore, so it's not clear where it can be watched.
Edit: Or rather, you can't find it on Youtube for free.
Justwatch says that you can "buy" it on Youtube for $3.59. I've never tried "buying" anything on Youtube before, but maybe I'll give it a try and see how it goes.
In the process of trying to find this, I discovered that there is also a 2016 anime based on the games as well. And a stage play, apparently.
P.S. After writing that, I look at the Ace Attorney Reddit for a bit, and learned that apparently, everyone hates Justice For All and considers it the worst in the series, mostly because in a four case game, it has the weakest tutorial case of the series and then case 3 (Turnabout Big Top) is apparently really bad, generally considered
the worst single case in the whole series by fans. Apparently Big Top is one of the creator's favorite episodes and he considers it "basically perfect", so that's pretty ironic.
Back in the day when I watched Bennibanny5's German LP, I made it through the first game. I watched the first two cases of the second game and the beginning of the third, but I found it to be pretty boring and stopped. It's ironic that I stopped right at the worst case in the series. I also found the first case of the second game to be pretty stupid and boring, so it's nice to see that other fans agree with me there as well.
Also, for a long time I thought that they wasted the character of Manfred von Karma. By establishing that he had never lost a case before prior to Turnabout Goodbyes and then having him get convicted and executed after his first appearance, they made it impossible to ever use him again. Or so I thought. Apparently he does show up in two flashback episodes later. He shows up in Investigations, where you play as Edgeworth, which solves the problem of his perfect record making it impossible for him to ever be the opponent when the player is defence, even in a flashback case.
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Satori Reader家の中に入ると、春明は何か言葉にできない違和感を覚えた。
A note from SR here explaining that in addition to the normal meaning of "to remember" for 覚える, it can also mean "to feel", and that authors will often use it in place of 感じる in order to avoid repeating the 感 kanji. It's almost like the Japanese equivalent of Said Bookism.
家の中は、しんと静まり返っていた。
A note here explains that 返る is sometimes used in verb compounds to mean that the verb happens in an "extreme or complete" manner, rather than meaning "return" like you might expect. So 静まり返る actually means "to become still as death", rather than something like "to return to silence".
Two new kanji:
そして瞬時にさっと踵を返して、玄関へ向かって走りだした。
踵 - heel
しかし、玄関まで走って来た春明は、青白い明かりに浮かび上がった建物を見て愕然とした。
愕 - surprise
Also, SR has another note pointing out a Japanese expression that can't easily be translated into English - "the how many-th time":
何度目に起きた？
It happened on the "how-many-th" time?
