Incoherent Thoughts

So late already.. But due to having only a couple hours of sleep before, I slept for around..15 or 16 hours. x___x Today I've just been doing my standard stuff. Reading news, learning to write kanji, and then continued reading 遥かなる翼. I'm on page 100. =D;; Going a bit slow, but it can't be helped I guess. There are times when I try to read faster, but after a bit of that my mind just refuses to accept it anymore, that I could actually read Japanese and be fast about it, and all the kanji and kana become incomprehensible scribbles for a while. *sweatdrop* It'll come with more practice, but for now it's a bit annoying. This same thing happened when I was starting to read books in English, and then the letters at least were familiar...
(plus I have this slight difficulty finding the right line to continue reading from, since the lines are vertical and go right to left. Funny, I never considered that a problem when reading manga..)

Oh, to those people that didn't know it yet, FF4 DS was slated for US release this summer. Can't remember the exact date, but it's there. :P The press release didn't mention any extras for it.. usually they're mentioned in the initial press release if there is any. So maybe there won't be, for this game.
Pochikas are called Whytkin in English. xD; And Decant Abilities became Augment Abilities. Whytkin is nice enough, but Augment Abilities? Bah.

It wasn't in the press release, but I also heard that the Summons will be Eidolons this time around...I wonder if that was just a rumor?
In contrast with English and its many names for them, in Japanese they're always just 召喚獣 (shoukanjuu) or 幻獣 (genjuu). 召喚獣 is the Summon (/'summoned beast') part. 幻獣 is more 'illusionary beast', and that's the word used in FF4 (even though Summoner is still 召喚士 (shoukanshi)). It was also used in Revenant Wings for Yarhi, and it's Dagger's Trance command in FF9 (which is Eidolon in English, in case you didn't know. Personally, I think they chose the word Eidolon because both her Trance and normal command translate into the same word (=summon), so they needed a different word for the actual beings and the act of summoning). Probably others too, but I haven't really paid that much attention/have never seen them referred to in Japanese.
This is just one more example of how different translations over time have needlessly complicated the Final Fantasy multiverse in English. As time passes by, different translators translate the same word in different ways, and thus the general English-speaking audience takes them to be different concepts/spells/monsters/etc. In Japanese, this problem doesn't arise, and the continuity is preserved.
At least they haven't messed up the Summon/Eidolon/Aeon names too badly, after the first couple translated games. The spells are another matter indeed. Those are a complete mess. *sighs and shakes head* Even now, when things were finally looking up for a while and they translated the spells directly, they've started introducing new fancy words as spell names. FF12, I'm looking at you. 'Vox' indeed...that manages to both ignore the original word, and the -na line of spells that cure status effects. Or Syphon! It's really Aspir, and has been all the time in Japanese. That particular one used to be translated as Osmose all the time, and that I didn't really have any trouble with..why change it, after consistently having it the same for so long? Now it's been known with all three words in English. D: