Still not Sophie.

Alright, it's FINALLY time for the fourth (and final) character designer interview from the Tales of Berseria Illustrations book. This time it's Minoru Iwamoto, who designed Eizen (hot, we stan) and Laphicet (cute, we stan). He was also the art director of the game itself, so he was very important to how Berseria's art turned out generally. He's the one who insisted to Inomata that it was fine for Velvet to have underboob. Maybe she would have gotten scared and not done it if it weren't for him, just kidding knowing her she'd probably have tried it anyway.

Also this is certainly not the last thing I'll be translating from this book, it's just the last of the interviews. There's still one last section that actually is pretty long that goes more in-depth into the details of each character's design, so that'll be fun whenever I get to it. I'll have to apologize so profusely for my likely-incorrect terminology because I never actually played Berseria or Zestiria in English. Anyway, back to Iwamoto. This guy talks about character design a lot in terms of childbirth so forgive me for any phrasing that seems odd in that respect. As far as I'm concerned it was a little odd in Japanese (though I get the logic of using those words) so it should be a little odd in English. Anyway LET'S GOOOO. ( Read more... )

Last Update: 4/10/2026 (Added Chapter 15. DAD KNOWS, GUYS. HE KNOWS.)

Chapter 12 and on of the Concrete Revolutio novel. The first 11 chapters can be found here.

I decided to split my translation of the novel here, not because I was running into any character limits, but because it was getting seriously annoying to navigate it unless you were viewing it on the journal itself with all cuts intact, rather than the actual post that people can link to where all the cuts are automatically expanded. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. And as for the usual disclaimers I mentioned in the previous post, that had the first 11 chapters of the novel, there's no way there aren't mistakes in my translation. Hopefully any errors that are actually important will become clear to me before I'm done, but hoping for a thing doesn't magically make it reality. I'm just doing my best in the moment while still ultimately focusing on getting it out there. I can and will edit it later anyway. Anyway, time for the second third of Superhuman Phantasmagoria: Shinka 36!

Chapter 12( Read more... )
Chapter 13( Read more... )
Chapter 14( Read more... )
Chapter 15( Read more... )

Just the third of the four interviews with Berseria's main character designers here. Nothing to see. Except wait, this guy's been working on Tales games for... way longer than I expected, actually. Him describing the type of work he did gives a bit of a better idea of the inner workings of what goes into final character designs other than the overly-simplified idea of like, "we hire inomata and she make a pwetty thing :)" He's also someone who had to guts to criticize the series and insist in an interview that the Tales series needs to step out of its comfort zone a little and try to do more different things. And I mean, he really DID insist even after the interviewer was like "yeah but the fans want the comfy usual Tales experience." I love and fully agree with his reasoning, too. It's been a long time since I've felt what he's talking about feeling with being super excited at some awesome surprise a game had to offer, but I still have unforgettable memories of times when games have made me feel that way. It's an unexpected interview and I'm more interested in what he has to say about other things after translating it. Enjoy!

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I know, I know, this isn't ConRevo OR Inomata. But alas, it must be done, because I see no reason why everything in this book shouldn't be translated. By me, since I really have no clue whether anyone else has translated any particular thing from the Tales franchise at this point. Boy was everything so much easier to find in the internet of forums and fansites compared to the internet of Reddits and Discords.

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Last update: 3/29/2026. (Added the sixth story, If Winter Comes. I actually liked this one a lot and it didn't make me uncomfortable like Oysters did. It's a nice little goofy sci-fi story.)

Another collection of stories I got from, if I remember correctly, Midway Bookstore. It has a Kinokuniya sticker on it though so I'm just going to keep being jealous that I've been to Seattle's Kinokuniya once and Chicago's Kinokuniya once. And don't live in a city that has a Kinokuniya. Ugh. Then again, I spend my entire paycheck from working at Daiso AT Daiso, so maybe it's for the best that Kinokuniya does not exist in my state.

Also, the first story absolutely did not take me just 10 minutes to read. Actually it took me way more than that. Darn! I can't imagine the others are going to either. What a sad life. Also, I'm not going to say who did the illustrations anymore, from here on out. There's just no point. It has nothing to do with what I'm doing, which is translating the written word as best as I can.

A Single Bunch of Grapes (by Takeo Arishima)( Read more... )
Rail Cart (by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa)( Read more... )
Mother's Garden (by Noriko Takazaki)( Read more... )
Oysters (by Anton Chekhov)( Read more... )
If Winter Comes (by Shinichi Hoshi)( Read more... )