Most Japanese schoolgirls are as thin as Sailor Moon. No blonde hair though. And most Japanese schoolboys are as thin as Gohan. No blonde hair (and no muscles) though.

It's Aerith in the booklet in the Japanese game itself, as I remember.

It's a question of what the studio is willing to pay. Good voice actors cost money. Dubs probably sucked traditionally because the budgets for hiring the English voice actors couldn't compare to the original budgets for the Japanese voice actors (and the translations that the English voice actors were reading sucked…

It's available as a download for the PS Vita portable system. It's not updated in any way - it's just the PS1 version in emulation - but it's still fun to be able to play it anywhere.

Most importantly, Murakami is a real writer. Dialogue in most RPGs is often just as clunky or insipid in the original Japanese. Dialogue in English games is clunky as well. It's not being written by award-winning novelists.

Square Enix has in-house translators. Most of the large studios do. Smaller studios use contractors. (I know because I did some videogame translation after college at a contractor, and interviewed for a position at Square.)

I love "Theme" myself, which I think is awesome and sexy as hell in three languages. I love Miho's line (and bizarre delivery thereof), "he stared me up and down, as if I was a restaurant menu".  And I especially like the song now since I bought this album in college but listened to it again years later after learning…

Well, since apparently the Ghibli museum is about 20 minutes from my apartment in Tokyo, maybe I'll just go there this weekend. I do love Totoro.

Incidentally, Skinny Pete was playing "Solfeggietto" by C.P.E. Bach. And not particularly well.

Incidentally, Skinny Pete was playing "Solfeggietto" by C.P.E. Bach. And not particularly well.

Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come. Pretty much any song will work.

I'm from San Diego (North County, north of Imperial Beach), and I hated this show because of the central conceit that there is something mystical and fascinating about surfing. If you are from San Diego (and presumably, from other surfing meccas like Hawaii's North Shore or whatever), people will often and genuinely…

What he says in Japanese is, 「マミ美のためにできること、いつもそばにいてやろうと、僕は決めた。」
Which is: "I decided that what I could do for Mamimi was to always be by her side." This is different than saying "I decided never to leave Mamimi's side" both in English and in Japanese.

Funny, I always interpreted the song as describing them sitting around drinking together, them having sex, him going off to sleep separately in the bath since she had to work in the morning and he didn't want to wake up then, then him waking up later after she left for work and lighting a fire (in the fireplace, since…

That Japanese doesn't make sense.

Saw the Fiery Furnaces at Coachella in 2004 at the height of their hyping online, where they strung together all their songs into what Pitchfork insisted was "one breathless block of music" but what I heard as one 45-minute set of boring, indiscriminate crappiness, performed continuously to distract from the fact that…

The Japanese seems like English run through Google Translate, but the English doesn't make much more sense; it's some sort of ouroboros of terrible writing.

Neither "First Love" nor "First Kiss"
"Also a tin with no English wording, which depicts two people kissing atop a series of pink hearts; the website translates this flavor as either First Love or First Kiss."

My one memory of reading Mother Tongue was learning that English is the sole language with a thesaurus, a fact I mentioned later that night to a group of friends representing a gamut of European nations who let me know that was complete BS.
There's no reason to go read books written by authors less qualified than…

Willups Brighton is the Brian Wilson parody in the song awards sketch, where he sings songs comparing various things to his "mouth full of sores." Incidentally, such a fantastic musical satire of a Beach Boys track that it doesn't matter that Bob can't sing for shit.