Konnichiwa! Here's a look at my current Dreamcast collection here in Japan. It's
not much as of yet, but will hopefully continue to grow as time goes on. As
devotees of the system and of gaming history in general are aware the
Dreamcast was Sega's final entry into the home console market before becoming
the Sega we all know today. If you're interested in the full story behind this
particular swan song, well, welcome to the Internet. I've got a plain Jane Dreamcast and
controller, which, remarkably, are hardly yellowed at all, as well as a funky
*MILLENNIUM 2000* controller with the see-through bits that allow you to, uh, see
through it. They, along with the VMUs, are all in fantastic working order save
for a bum system clock battery that I'll be changing in the near future and it's
and it's been a lot of fun finally playing through a lot of the classics for which this
system is so fondly remembered. So far, and in no particular order,
I've got Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure International, a super-fancy 10th
Anniversary Edition of Sonic Adventure 2, Phantasy Star Online original
release and version 2, Biohazard (otherwise known as Resident Evil) Code:
Veronica, Marvel vs. Capcom, Capcom vs. SNK 1 & 2, Powerstone, Crazy Taxi, Ready
2 Rumble Boxing, Samba de Amigo, Chu-Chu Rocket, Evolution, Shenmue, and
Berserk: Falcon of the Millennium Empire Arc: Flowers of Oblivion Chapter. If that
last one sounds like a mouthful, welcome to the world of Japan's proud tradition
of verbose naming schemata, particularly in anime and manga
whence Berserk derives its content. Something you've probably noticed is just how much
English is involved in these game titles indeed a lot of games in Japan are
titled primarily in English usually with katakana subtitles which phonetically
mimic their pronunciation. This is primarily because in Japan English is
cool. Or, if you want to be cynical because it likely reduces time spent
developing marketing materials for international releases. Anyway reading
katakana is fairly straightforward and because it's the syllabary primarily
used for the representation of foreign sounds, usually fairly easy to suss out
their intended meaning. Some things to keep in mind: As katakana is a *syllabary*,
and not an *alphabet* as English and many other languages have, and realistically
made for the Japanese palette, the pronunciation is almost never 1-to-1.
Sonic Adventure becomes ソニックアドベンチャー, Power Stone becomes パワーストーン, and
Samba de Amigo becomes, well, サンバ de アミーゴ.
Obviously, the transliteration process works better with some languages than
others. The rules for transliteration are not especially
consistent, but there are a few rules of thumb. First, there is no V sound in
Japanese, so most Vs end up as Bs, as in Sonic Adventure and Code: Veronica.
If you're aiming for accuracy, as with Evolution, the technically correct
transliteration for the V sound is ウ with a dakuten followed by a
half-size ア, イ, エ, or オ. Considering that the V sound simply doesn't exist in
Japanese, however, native pronunciation of this convention typically sounds somehow
*less* like a V than the other method, and is in any case entirely less common,
but still worth knowing. On the topic of half-size characters, they are especially
common in katakana. Generally they come after another kana meant to represent
the initial sound, themselves representing what we would call the
vowel property of the syllable, as in Phantasy Star Online with big フ and
half-size ア for ファ, Ready to Rumble with both デ and ィ for ディ and ト and ゥ for トゥ,
Shenmue with big シ and little エ for シェ, and so on. The one that goes *before*
the character it modifies is the half-size ツ, which represents a kind of
glottal stop (⟨ʔ⟩) meant to accentuate the initial,
consonant aspect of the character which follows, as in Sonic Adventure where it
more accurately mimics the hard ⟨k⟩ sound by morphing the pronunciation from ソニく to ソニック,
and in Chu-Chu Rocket where we go from ロケト to ロケット. One
character unique to katakana is the one that resembles a long dash (ー), known as chōonpu (長音符),
literally "long sound symbol". As its name suggests, its sole purpose is to extend
the vowel aspect of the preceding character, as in Power Stone where it
extends パワ to パワー and ストン to ストーン. As with the rest of this whole shebang,
the placement of chōonpu is not perfectly consistent, but you'll get used
to seeing where they tend to go pretty quickly.
Well, that's it. As I said, I hope to expand this humble game collection of
mine going forward, but in the meantime, these tips, coupled with a healthy
command of standard, full-size katakana characters, should have you well on your
own way to mastering what is colloquially known as カタカナ英語, so
study hard! 頑張って
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