Just got through the six hour long
Tokimeki Memorial review. A bit repetitive, and could have stood to have about an hour cut from it.
I've always had the impression we missed out on an important cultural milestone, maybe video games would have sucked just a little bit less if it had been localized.
In the world of anime, it's certainly responsible for popularizing the "girl makes food that hurts people" trope. In the game, it's a one-off scene that not everybody will see. The consequence? Your health gets permanently, massively slashed and your character gets stuck in bed for like half the game, strongly pushed toward the Forever Alone ending. In anime, it's never consequential, or the subject of an elaborate greater whole. Just an attempt at a brief "haha try to not eat the food funni" diversion. It's akin to repeating "I'll be back" or "check please" - divorcing a catchphrase from any meaning is... the same as saying something meaningless. (I say this, while approving of DTysonator's use of "hasta la vista". That's just proper macro usage.)
The odds of these games ever getting translated outside of an AI overlay that translates on the fly (which we've had for many years now... actually holy fuck the guy who made this video offered to translate for Gideon Zhi, maybe there is a way to do this
now...) is as close to zero as it gets. One specific nightmare orbiting this thing: The GBC port literally constantly loads in pieces of the font as its needed, as there isn't enough room in VRAM to hold a font and the graphics. Imagine how much fun that is, and add the fun fact roman characters use about twice as much space. (And I thought waiting for the SNES Dragon Quest 5 translation was taking a long time..)
All this made me stumble on the hit Evangelion game everyone's talking about: Girlfriend of Steel. Which in turn reminded me of how much I like the lighthearted school-life segments where Shinji's being brutally punched in the face by his new friend or being ignored by girls. And what a bummer that it's probably not going to be in Rebuild #4.
In Girlfriend of Steel, there's one ending I think is wonderful: If you break Shinji by forcing him to do something completely out of his character that he'd never ever do (
talk to his dad), it completely breaks the universe. They enthusiastically reconcile, go off somewhere to become lumberjacks, and I guess the horrible nightmare alien shit doesn't happen.
It amuses me to think of the world of Evangelion as such a feeble and brittle thing, akin to Drakengard's planet that's always three minutes away from some random nobody asshole bringing about an apocalypse of one sort or another. That the world is what you make of it, and if Shinji wasn't such a potato
maybe it would be a world of carefree highschool escapism.
).
I was thinking of your old 
Loved the "new phone, who dis?" ending sequel hook 
Gonna have to bust out the grey mullet ala Oyaji Joseph. 
