The gameplay looked to me even more like the Mario & Luigi games, where the timed defense is a full dodge or parry rather than reducing damage and it is necessary for survival.

If you’re being serious, World Food Programme. It’s the UN’s food handout program.

Mystic Quest has a single main character with guests rather than a party, enemies on screen, and Zelda-esque items to traverse the environment. All three of these are more and more common in FF.

I agree now that the “Fall of the Noldor” movie(s) has/have to end with the realms of the Noldor in place. And I like that epilogue idea of discovering Men.

How could we make the first movie interesting to a blockbuster audience? Maybe expand on the Great Journey?

I’ve been thinking since I posted and I fear I might have to split the last movie too. The fall of Doriath, the fall of Gondolin, Earendil’s voyage, and the War of Wrath and general tying-up of loose ends is an awful lot to pack into one movie. It’s a shame that these are also the stories Tolkien expanded upon the least.

But now we’ve got six movies!

That’s not too uncommon for the “short a” sound of “cat” and “campus”. All I can figure is that it’s so far front in the mouth that it sounds more like ヤ than ア to the Japanese ear.

I think we need at least four movies:

1. The Fall of the Noldor: from “as early as is reasonable” to somewhere between the rising of the sun and the establishment of the realms of the Noldor

2. Beren and Lúthien. Put the Dagor Bragollach in the prologue.

3. The Children of Húrin. Put the Nirnaeth Arnoediad in the prologue.

4. The Fall of Gondolin and Raising of the Star. Put the War of Wrath and the fate of the Silmarils at the end of this movie.

I’m not sure where we can put the Fall of Doriath, but I’d put it in The Fall of Gondolin instead of Beren and Lúthien. I don’t want to ruin the end of Beren and Lúthien by ending it with their son and grandsons killed.

Probably not, at least not an uncensored version. Japanese and American ideas of what body parts are appropriate for children to see are very different.

Krita has been working on the text tool in recent years, so it might be better than you remember it.

If you were bored after that cliffhanger in the plot, I can’t see much point to continuing Chrono Trigger.

I’d finish out Magus’s Castle, because that does change things some. But if you’re still not having fun after beating Magus, it’s time to cut bait.

Everyone says DQ5, for good reason, so I’m going to suggest some other options. Please keep in mind that these are 8-bit games, so their dialogue is less copious and their art style is more retro than anything else.

DQ4 is my favorite. Every version has its own problems, although the mobile version [sic] might have the fewest for someone who isn’t comfortable playing in Japanese. It’s broad rather than deep: it’s got a big cast but doesn’t go as deeply into each character as DQ8 does. If you like the Middle Ages parts of Chrono Trigger, DQ4 is a lot like that scenario at full game length.

If you’re able to go even further back, DQ1 is calling. It’s a simple and grindy game, but you will learn the basics of JRPGs and have a solid foundation for DQ2 and DQ3. (You don’t have to play DQ2 before DQ3.)

As a fan of Chrono Trigger, how far did you get? There’s a section that’s noticeably duller than the rest before it picks up again.

https://archipelago.gg/ is not the same thing, but you can set up a multi-person, multi-game asynchronous randomizer that usually lasts for days because Link’s sword is in the Marsh Cave, but to get to the Marsh Cave you need the ship and the ship is in Pewter Gym…

It’s a real shame that they broke font fallback and it’s staying broken. That was one of the main reasons I’ve been sticking with Firefox and I’m going to have to find a new browser if they don’t fix it soon.

I think a specialist would be interested. I don’t know enough about dyslexia to make a sound guess as to whether this is more like hearing-people dyslexia or character amnesia.

Character amnesia (forgetting how to write Chinese characters, often ones you can recognize without trouble) for me shows up as forgetting components or slightly misremembering them, as if I couldn’t quite remember whether it was “CD” or “CP” or “CO”, or if it was a “DVD” or a “DVV”.

That’s interesting. Since they were born deaf and can’t speak Dutch, do they act like they’re memorizing words as if they were hieroglyphs?

There was a study of Chinese kids learning English, and only 1/4 or 1/3 of kids who were dyslexic in one language were dyslexic in the other one too. I don’t have the link to hand but can probably dig it out if someone is interested.

There’s also the famous case study of Alex, who was dyslexic in English but an excellent reader in Japanese.

So my uneducated understanding is that “dyslexia” has to be a cover term for multiple issues. Difficulty matching characters to sounds might make for a below-average reader in Chinese, and difficulty recognizing characters might make for a below-average reader in English, but reverse the languages and both kids would be dyslexic. On the other hand, there are those 1/4 to 1/3 of kids who are bi-dyslexic which suggests there may be some global mechanism accounting for some dyslexia.

P.S. The most recent trendy thing I know about is the “crowding” explanation for dyslexia, which hypothesizes that dyslexia really is a vision problem, but the problem isn’t mirroring but rather difficulty separating characters at normal spacing. This only appears to hold true for a subset of dyslexics, and that particular study totally failed to distinguish between the effects of increased spacing between characters, increased spacing between words, and increased spacing between lines. This study of Italian dyslexics found that increasing spacing between characters without also increasing spacing between words is worse than nothing, a condition that wasn’t tested in the study above.

I’d like to see a test of increased line spacing only. I remember that increasing line spacing was (and is) helpful when reading a script that I read slowly and poorly because when reading what were very long lines for me but normal for natives I’d lose track and my eyes would wander onto adjacent lines.

Edit: The English study I linked to showing spacing greatly helping a small group of dyslexics drastically helped with reading “pseudowords”, a common test of ability to sound out words. It helped much less with real words. So it’s interesting that the Italian study showed no useful effect, because Italian spelling is much simpler than English spelling and so you’d expect Italian readers to rely much more on sounding out words.

What language do those deaf dyslexics read? Could they speak it before going deaf? Is it their first language or a second language after a sign language?

I can’t think of a comparable situation elsewhere in the world for hearing people. The closest that comes to mind is learning Classical Chinese in ancient Korea or Japan or ancient and medieval Vietnam, but nowadays all those countries have good phonetic writing systems and still don’t expect everyone to learn Classical Chinese.

Not really a recent discovery, but I’m in the mood for serif fonts without too much contrast. Appli Mincho seems decent for Japanese in that regard.

Crystalis has forced or near-forced grinding due to level requirements to hurt bosses, so it’s on the fence. If its progression were a little smoother it would be a shoo-in.

There is a hack to remove boss level requirements but fighting a boss below the intended level may not be fun.