The SHUI HU FENG YUN ZHUAN

[Zoltor]

English has two alphabets: Printing and Cursive (talk about a pain).

Noone writes in cursive though, most people only use it for signing stuff(some people write personal letters in cursive which is annoying, but thats about it).

[tbp]

This game is awesome in quality as an unofficial (mix of pirated) game(s).
It is like the Knights of the round of the Genesis and includes most of features a professional release could.
None of unofficial beat'em all reaches a such quality. It is definitively the best one I ever played.
I own a loose cartridge version very different from the Soviet's pictured.

Additional informations could be found here :
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...anslation-help
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...-thread!/page3

[Baloo]

English has two alphabets: Printing and Cursive (talk about a pain).

...Not really. This is like saying that Helvettica and Times New Roman fonts in MS Word are two different alphabets. Really, it's just two different ways of writing English.

[soviet]

光耀飞离土窟间，天罡地煞降尘寰
说时豪气侵肌冷，讲处英雄透胆寒
仗义疏财归水泊，报仇雪恨上梁山
堂前一卷天文字，付与诸公仔细看！

I like this game begins with the poetry

[RedComet]

光耀飞离土窟间，天罡地煞降尘寰
说时豪气侵肌冷，讲处英雄透胆寒
仗义疏财归水泊，报仇雪恨上梁山
堂前一卷天文字，付与诸公仔细看！

I like this game begins with the poetry

Care to translate it for me? I've been looking for a translator for this game for *years*.

[soviet]

Care to translate it for me? I've been looking for a translator for this game for *years*.

光耀飞离土窟间 Light, flying from the land
天罡地煞降尘寰 Angels and demons, came to earth
说时豪气侵肌冷 Their momentum, we fear
讲处英雄透胆寒 All the heroes are in fear
仗义疏财归水泊 They generously, they share of property
报仇雪恨上梁山 Them to revenge, came to the Liangshan
堂前一卷天文字 Here are their stories
付与诸公仔细看 Invite you to see it！

[highlandcattle]

Noone writes in cursive though, most people only use it for signing stuff(some people write personal letters in cursive which is annoying, but thats about it).

Really? Here in Belgium block letters are considered for morons and are also much slower to write.

[eddiespruce]

When you guys say "Cursive", are you talking about "Handwriting"? Because I haven't written that way since elementary school. I don't even know how to make half of the capital handwriting letters, and I always found that writing a capital writing Q as the number 2 was stupid.

Doesn't really matter anyway, because in 20 years nobody will be writing by hand, only typing on a computer.

[TheSonicRetard]

Rough explanation here: there really only two alphabets, but the distinction being between what's used for stuff from the native language (hiragana) and stuff used for loan words (katakana). Most of the characters between the two are also pretty similar, but having Katakana makes translating stuff really easy because you can tell if it's a loan word very easily, rather than some word in the native language.

The third "alphabet" is kanji which is used to substitute for hiragana characters in words and make stuff faster to read.
For example: (I'm not sure if you have the JP language installed for your browser) But the hiragana spelling of watashi [ わたし ] takes up 3 character spaces, whereas the kanji of it [ 私 ] only takes up one character. 2 extra characters per word adds up quickly for all sorts of printed stuff, so the benefit of Kanji is pretty apparent when you're trying to concisely convey information.

In general, many JP cart games don't have as much kanji since you need to make a sprite for each of the alphabets, plus one for each kanji character you'll be using, and that eats into the available resources for other stuff. Plus the resolution needed to display a complex kanji didn't always fit with the rest of the character sized. For kanji you'll use a lot it makes sense, but for the more complex words it probably makes more sense to write it in hiragana or put the quote things around the word in the dialog.

tl;dr - I think Japanese is easier than Chinese.

Kinda late, but that's not really how the written language works. You don't use Kanji to be concise, you use kanji for clarity. I took 4 years of Japanese when I was in college and I'm still pretty proficient at it.

Basically, every noun, verb, and adjective in the language corresponds to a Kanji character. Kanji is borrowed from chinese. Hiragana is used for parts of grammar, i.e. particles or conjugation. Katakana is used exclusively for loan words.

The reason Kanji is necessary is because there are a ton of homophones in japanese - words which sound the same but mean different things. Since japanese doesn't place spaces between words, it makes reading in strict hiragana near impossible. An example of this is the word shin - しん. Shin can mean many things - it can mean truth, or heart, or new, or even refer to a year. Phonetically, it's all the same, but when written, it can be confusing. Hence different kanji to differentiate -　新　or 心.

Hiragana is also used for conjugation when attached to Kanji. Kanji only make up the root of the word. For example, "to eat;" taberu - 食べる. 食べ is the root, pronounced "Tabe" and "ru" is the conguation, in this case the dictionary form. You can change the ending to indicate politeness:　食べます　(tabemasu), or past politeness: 食べました　(tabemashita, "I ate (politely)") or past actions without politeness: 食べた　(tabeta, "I ate (plain)"), or negation: 食べない　(tabenai, "I didn't eat"), or intention: 食べて行きます (tabeteikimasu, "I'm going to eat (politely)"). In that last case, we used hiragana to conjugate two verbs, Tabe for it, and Iku　(行く), "to go." You can conjugate Iku the same ways, example:　行かない (Ikanai, "not going"), and form complex words like "食べて行かない" (I'm not going to eat (plain)").

Hiragana also represents particles, which is important in knowing where words end, and indicating subject and actions. Example:

私は牛を食べた

Watashi wa gyuu o tabeta

"I ate cow"

in that example, は (the character ha, pronounced wa in this case) indicates that watashi (I) is the subject, and を (the character wo, pronounced O in this case) indicates that gyuu (cow) is the object that the verb (tabeta, "ate") is directed upon.

You can flip the particles in the sentence and switch the meaning:

私を牛は食べた

Watashi o gyuu wa tabeta

"the cow ate me"

It's a bit nonsensical, but it illustrates the point.

In reality, reading japanese (or chinese) is no different from reading a phonetic language. We don't actually sound out each letter of every word to decipher it's meaning, we simply look at the shape of the word and recognize it. Tahts wyh yuo cna sitll raed tihs sentacne. Phonetic character sets simply have a built in advantage that, if you don't know the word, you can decipher it's meaning. But with day to day reading, the process isn't all that different.

[xelement5x]

Wow, very nice post explaining the basics of Japanese! Much more in depth than my quick post.

[tbp]

@ soviet : I see that you have managed to get an instruction manual of the game. And an insert too.
Could you share them with us please ? Especially with creative people like djshok who can reproduce great artwork.
I think most of people who own the cartridge would appreciate to put it in a regular Genesis/Megadrive box with a booklet.

[djshok]

Yeah I already asked him if he could scan the stuff. But he doesn't have a scanner I'm hoping one of his friends does, or maybe there's a print shop around there where they let you use a scanner.

[tbp]

I find this page with a bootleg packaging I have never seen before :
http://kimimisblog.blogspot.fr/2011/...yun-zhuan.html

Here another page, maybe you would be able to do something with that stuff (with permission) :
http://www.segagagadomain.com/megadrive4/shui.htm

[djshok]

So does anyone here read Chinese? I'd really like to know what this game is about, ie: the general plot. Can someone fill me in please? I've been curious about it for some time now.

[Black_Tiger]

...Not really. This is like saying that Helvettica and Times New Roman fonts in MS Word are two different alphabets. Really, it's just two different ways of writing English.

The comment I was responding two, was a complaint about Japanese having "three alphabets". Katakana and Hiragana are actually the same. Katakana is straight and structured like printing and Hiragana is slanted and curvy like cursive/handwriting. They are the Japanese equivalent of our alphabet. Kanji is all the words that have non-photnetic characters building them, it's more of a vocabulary. Typically, Katakana is used to spell out adapted and/or foreign words and Hiragana is used to spell out Kanji words.

So Japanese only has the equivalent of one "alphabet", in printing and cursive. It's "a pain" to deal with as much as any new language is. But it's very easy to pickup most of what you need to play through Japanese games.