Yes, I usually use Trails in the Database if I want to look up an existing English translation from a Japanese line. It lets you filter both by game and by character and searches both ways, which is very convenient. I referred to it a lot during my playthroughs to check my interpretations of complex or nuanced lines.

Every game in the series should be in there, and those with localizations will show the English line alongside the original Japanese one. Zero and Azure are in there already despite not having an English release (yet) because the fan translation team called the Geofront's script is considered to be official at this point, since NIS America has adopted it as the base for the official localizations that will be released in 2022 and 2023.

If you're looking for a single file that contains ALL lines from any given game, that might be a little more challenging to find, though, since every game's script is absolutely gargantuan. TitD will assist you in looking up individual lines and following along until the end of whatever scene they appear in, but it's not organized in such a way where you can just load up the entire game's script all at once.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure. Specifically, the remastered "Kai" versions available for PS4.

I first played through fan translations for these games last year at the height of the quarantine and got so immersed in the world of Crossbell that for a time I was more invested in that world than what was happening right outside my own front door. They're really great, engrossing stories, and I wanted to play through them again but entirely in Japanese to prepare myself to play through the next game in the series, Kuro no Kiseki, that drops at the end of this month. It'll be a couple years before it gets localized to English, and I'd very much like to keep up with the story in the meantime.

From when I began my replay of Zero a few months ago to when I reached the end of Azure last week, my reading speed and comprehension improved immensely. It was a slog at first, since there is such an enormous amount of text in games from the Trails series, but it ended up being totally worth it. Learned dozens of new kanji and countless new words and expressions.

If you're looking for a challenging but extremely rewarding, "am I ready for full immersion" type Japanese RPG to play through, I couldn't recommend these games any more highly.

Something like a year or so ago I watched Lovely Complex all the way through, and I swear I couldn't understand a word anybody said for the entire series. I was unprepared.

I won’t deny smiling like an idiot through the whole intro as soon as I heard Azure Arbitrator start. It was a great callback.

It was actually a challenging boss, too – in all of Trails, the only final boss that’s actually killed me is both iterations of Demiurgos. The one in Hajimari took me I think three tries on Nightmare, and when each try takes 20-30 minutes, it really wears on you. It was worth it, though.

Since most of Hajimari felt like a crossover fanfic anyway, having Demiurgos as the secret final boss almost felt like a tacit acknowledgement that Azure was the series’ high point up to the present, which made me very happy, since it’s far and away my favorite.

This is awesome! I love how quartz lines actually mean something again; it always rubbed me the wrong way in CS when they stopped having an impact on anything but how much EP you got when you opened up or upgraded a slot. I think having quartz lines dictate abilities rather than arts is a great enhancement, too, because I know I did get bogged down sometimes in the older games just shuffling quartz around between lines to unlock particular spells.

Can’t wait to dive in.

おいおい、マジかよ！？

Yep, this is Kai. Must be a known bug, but I have no idea what circumstances trigger it.

Would be hilarious to see it happen with Wazy, though. Why's Wald beating himself up in the middle of Downtown??

Got halfway through this scene before I thought, “wait, isn’t something missing? Where the hell is Randy?”

His disembodied voice seems kind of pissed about the omission.

It’s true - I just got a significant salary bump and I don’t even know what to do with most of what I’m getting. I live on less than a third of what I make; all the rest is just saved or invested. I just don’t want many things, so as my pay has increased and my lifestyle hasn’t changed, I’ve ended up with this massive surplus.

For how easy the job is, I feel massively overpaid, but it’s difficult to complain. Sometimes I do wish that what I did affected the world around me in a more positive way, though, instead of just lining somebody else’s pockets. Sometimes I look at bridges and buildings and other real, concrete things and think it might have been more rewarding to go into a different type of engineering and make a difference in people's lives.

My doctors used to ask me about it because they said their patients tended to achieve lower A1Cs and better control on pumps than on MDI, but I've had an A1C in the 5's for 14 years now, so they don't really question my decision. If you're able to do it without the aid of always-attached devices, there's no real reason to switch.

I'm vehemently opposed to getting a pump or CGM because I don't want to have a device permanently attached to me. When I'm not eating, I don't have to think about diabetes much, and no one can tell that I have a condition. No reason to blow that up.

Lloyd has an are-they-or-aren't-they-into-each-other relationship with Elie, Noel, and Rixia. It's up to the player's choice which one he gets with in any given game (though only Elie is an option in Zero), but no choice is canonical, as the atmosphere as of Hajimari very much has not changed.

Elie's clearly the "blessed" choice, though, as Alisa is for Rean - there are many moments with Elie throughout the series that imply that they definitely have feelings for each other.

I just started a re-playthrough of Ao Kai last night and was reminded of this in an early scene where Elie and Lloyd see each other at the train station for the first time in a month and just lock eyes and wordlessly admire each other until KeA interrupts them and asks what the deal is. There's a lot of that.

So...y'know, technically Lloyd's not with anybody, but it's hard to see why he wouldn't end up with Elie. Even if you choose someone else for Azure's final bonding scene, he doesn't come right out and say "I love you" to anyone but her.

Personally, I don't really feel like just having diabetes itself is a disability, no.

I'm very meticulous with my health and self care and always have been, and as a result I'm much more fit and capable than the average person. My A1C is low enough that it drops into the completely normal, non-diabetic range every once in a while; the likelihood that I'll experience complications in my life is very low as long as I maintain my habits. I think trying to sort myself into a disabled category just because I have to take medication to survive has the potential to make light of the suffering of others; I can't equate what I go through every day to the suffering of people with truly debilitating conditions. I would be very uncomfortable slapping a "disabled" label on myself for these reasons.

It's true that everyone has a different experience with this disease, and I fully believe that you can easily BECOME disabled depending on how your condition progresses and how your management over the long term goes. But just HAVING diabetes is not, to me, a disability. To me, a disability would be the complications that arise from having uncontrolled diabetes for a long period of time.

I don't know even the first thing about how the law classifies disabilities or whether T1D is actually treated as one - it's never come up. All I know is that no one would buy it if I tried to sell myself as disabled. Not unless my body began to fail me. Some day it very well may, but until that day, I don't think I could feel comfortable with that label.

Definitely get it. I got Pfizer dose 2 at the beginning of June. I had an unusually strong reaction to it, with a fever and a splitting headache, but it had zero effect on my blood sugar.

Just prepare yourself to maybe feel kind of bad starting about 12 hours or so after the second dose and lasting for maybe 12 hours beyond that. But it'll fade just as quickly, and you'll be able to live your life with more confidence and less worry. Don't pass it up.

Whaaaaaat? Is that true? I admit I keep myself intentionally ignorant of fandoms and shipping, but I don't think I've ever seen that take on them. I always thought they were pretty overtly in a relationship by Azure's end. Or if not in a declared relationship, at least obviously in love with each other and headed in that direction. Reading them as just platonic friends seems like a huge stretch to me. Been over a year since I played 3rd and Azure, so I can't cite specific lines as proof or anything, but I'm not buying it.

I’ve never had a GP that would even discuss anything about my diabetes with me - it seems like they readily admit that it’s not their area of expertise and I need to see an endocrinologist for diabetes-related concerns. Even just renewing an insulin prescription is not something they’re willing to do. Maybe the ones you’ve been seeing get testy when they don’t have the answers, I can’t really be sure. But in any case, I wouldn’t continue to see a GP that treats their patients that way. It should be possible to admit that you don’t have all the answers without being condescending.

On the other hand, every endocrinologist I’ve ever seen has been incredibly receptive to any questions or concerns I’ve had, they’ve all referred to me as a model patient for being so engaged and active with my care, and they’re always very patient in explaining things to me. They’ve never pressured me to get a pump, either. If you have the ability to see a specialist, I would definitely do so. It makes a world of difference when they’re laser-focused on treating your specific condition.

I’m replaying Zero Kai right now on Nightmare at the end of chapter 3, so I guess it makes sense to chime in just for that game.

Once you learn Randy’s Crash Bomb (100% blind to everyone not immune), that craft alone can carry you through a lot of encounters. Lloyd’s Brave Smash has a 75% chance of sealing and strikes in a straight line, which can be enormous. Just with those two crafts it’s possible to completely neutralize a lot of encounters. Basically, status effect crafts have been doing a lot of the hard work for me - not unusual to see everything on the battlefield be petrified / blinded / sealed / frozen within just a couple of attacks. It makes sense to go ham on those as much as possible.

Just about everybody knows this trick, but Lloyd’s Burning Heart pretty much allows him to be perpetually buffed and receive free turns with no downside as long as you reuse it before the buffs run out and he faints.

Most of your damage later on in Zero is going to probably come through Tio and Elie’s arts, particularly Dark Matter, Calamity Claw, and Spark Dyne. For Ao specifically, putting the Jupiter Bell on Elie and repeatedly casting Spark Dyne is basically the strategy that will allow you to melt almost anything.

Enemies hit harder on Nightmare in Zero, but usually the extra damage is pretty easy to mitigate either with Elie’s Holy Bullet or (if you have the time to cast it) Bless / Holy Bless. I’ve only really had people die to enemy S-Crafts and unexpected instant kills so far.

Oh yeah, for sure, maybe the way I said it was a bit too strong. Didn't mean to imply that self-study is useless, but more that the brain is kind of wired to pick languages up naturally by hearing and emulating them. So much so that you end up learning even when you aren't necessarily trying, like OP's brother. Didn't mean to imply that watching anime with subs = fluency. Well put.

Yeah, it's Kiseki. It was an inspiration for me as well; I started learning kind of aimlessly, not knowing if I'd ever have a reason to use it, but I got into Kiseki and realized that since there's at least 2-3 years before each game makes it to the west, becoming fluent would actually allow me to keep up with it without having to wait. Gave me something to work toward.

Never a better time to pick it up, especially since the next one drops at the end of September! I know I'm using this time to brush up so I can play the next one on day one.

It doesn’t really take that much analytical skill to figure out when a cute anime girl shouts, “ケーキを食べたい” and the subtitles say, “I want to eat cake!” what everything in the sentence represents. There’s nothing else there except an English loanword and a verb, and you hear the -たい form dozens of times in any episode of…almost anything, really. You could probably work that out in a single episode if you’re actually listening. It’s not some kind of monumental achievement.

Not sure what else to say here; exposure to a language leads to learning it. Ten years of consuming a particular kind of media and hearing the same things over and over again should lead to a significant amount of passive absorption.

If anything, this should probably be taken as a sign that the most efficient way to learn languages quickly is just to listen to them. Infants learning languages faster than any adult don’t scour textbooks and watch dozens of hours of instructional videos to learn; they just listen to people and emulate them.

Try not to place an inordinate amount of emphasis on Anki and stuff, OK? Number of Anki cards doesn’t necessarily translate to actual proficiency. Try just reading and listening to native-level material for a while, filling in the gaps when you encounter something you don’t understand. Actually, I’m expanding my knowledge of Japanese more quickly than I ever have before at the moment, and I owe it to playing through several extremely long, text-heavy JRPGs full of formal and informal dialogue, colloquialisms, yojijukugo expressions, slang, and vocabulary and kanji I haven’t seen before even after going through all 60 levels of WaniKani…can’t recommend the immersion approach strongly enough once you have a foundation.

Any time I've alerted the TSA to the fact that I was traveling with insulin pens, syringes, vials, etc. they've looked at me like they had no idea why I was bothering to tell them, so I just stopped. Nowadays all I travel with is pens, but even back when I had vials and syringes they never said anything.

It's up to you whether you want to alert them or not, but just be forewarned that they'll probably just end up scouring your bag for other stuff. Most of them don't seem to know or care about diabetes meds, all they hear is "Just so you know, I've got <thing> in my bag" and take that as a sign that you've got something dangerous.

Never really tried carrying any significant amount of food in my luggage, but TSA's got what appears to be a pretty comprehensive guide to what foods they'll let you carry at https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/food.

As long as it's a 1xx level class that's the first in the language sequence, yeah, no experience should be assumed. It's been a decade since I graduated from UVA and I didn't take a language while I was there, but there should be detailed write ups of what the course teaches and what's expected in the course catalog.

Actually, with a quick Google search for "uva course catalog" I was able to hunt up JAPN 1010 - First Year Japanese, that clearly says what it teaches:

Introduces the basic speech patterns and grammatical units, including casual, daily spoken style, and the polite speech used in formal occasions. Emphasizes speaking, listening, and reading. Writing hiragana, katakana, and 200 kanji are also introduced.

So it sounds like you'll be fine. If they're teaching hiragana and katakana, that's a beginner's course, since that's generally the among the very first things you learn.

Hey, that's awesome, I did the same myself with Sen IV and Hajimari. Playing through Zero and Ao Kai now without any spreadsheets as practice for when the next game, Kuro no Kiseki, drops in September.

Kiseki games are incredible as practice material. Such an enormous amount of dialogue.

Back when I did contracting for the government, I met an older lady whose job it was to scan long documents for specific words and suggest edits or request deletions. She'd been doing the job for years and was incredibly proud of her eye for detail, that she could stare at her monitor for hours reading every single word of densely worded documents maybe 60-70 pages long. She always found the words she was looking for.

While trying to help her with an unrelated problem, she described her job to me and my boss and I suggested, "If you know exactly which words you're looking for, can't you just Ctrl+F to find them immediately?" Blank stare.

We showed her how you could hunt up anything in seconds with one tiny shortcut, and she just kind of didn't say anything else after that. I dunno how many years she had done that job without knowing about Ctrl+F, but I cannot believe she never once thought, "Isn't there a better way to do this?" And moreover that no one else ever told her, or complained about how long it took her to do something that should take seconds.

I got to agree. Until I see posts like this one, it really never even occurs to me that people have difficulty with this sort of thing. I'm left handed and never even thought that handedness applied to holding controllers. It's not like it requires a significant amount of dexterity or coordination, it's just tiny movements of your thumb. Surely it can't be that hard?

Trying to shoehorn in a left handed mode would be kind of difficult with the controllers of today laid out the way they are, too. You want to move with the right stick and swing sword with the left? That means you have to stop moving any time you want to press a face button, or use some wacky awkward grip to press a face button with one of your other fingers without letting go of the stick? Controller's just not made for it.

Overwhelmingly vast majority of the world is right handed; it's hard to get mad at the idea that most devices are designed for them. Plus side for us is that we're a lot more ambidextrous. Only thing I can't do with my right hand is throw at max velocity and write.