maiji: Party selfie! Alt dream team (Second Story R)

[image: digital ink-brush style illustration. Claude’s distinctively gloved hand holding a photo over a grassy patch of flowers. The photo shows Chisato taking a selfie of her, Precis, Robbie/Bobot/Mujinkun, Claude and Welch. Precis has her arms around Claude and Welch is grabbing him by the arm. They’re all sporting cuts/blood/some bandages. Everyone is smiling, Claude’s looking tired. The background is the pyramid in the desert of the Cave of Trials/Maze of Tribulations.]I did two backgrounds for the photo. The other is based on grassy mountainous Expel fields. You can see both and the lineart below. [READ-MORE][images: 1) The photo by itself. 2) Same photo but the background is the fields of Expel with blue sky, mountains and grass. 3) Same photo but Ink lineart only.][/READ-MORE]I can’t access my O.G. dream team (Claude, Dias, Ernest, Bowman) in my New Game+ playthrough, so my fast-paced fighter team is now this!! A.k.a. (in my head) “Claude and his hyper, bossy sisters”. I just started the Cave of Trials/Maze of Tribulations again, and we’re doing quite well so far. I don’t even have everyone in Bloody Armor yet! (And Precis can’t wear Bloody Armor anyways.)Compared to the other team,  The sound of battle is much higher-pitched, with more fun energy. It’s really amusing when I’m wallopping serious deep-voiced bosses. Overall, they’re slower and don’t swarm anywhere near as heavily. Chisato is usually nearby since she’s a similar type of melee fighter, but Claude really has to chase Precis and Welch around the field to Sword of Life them (thank goodness for Head Splitter/Helmetbreak). Welch also has a habit of being in the air like 50%+ of the time with her knock-off Lenneth Valkyrie attack Nibelungaling, making her almost always out of range. (Hearing her yelling "Nibelung Nantokaaaa!!"/"Nibelung Something-or-Anotherrrr!!" constantly while I'm trying to find her to heal her because I thought she was on the ground is hilarious.) So Claude is frequently lobbing healing items over/up at her. On the topic of lobbing items: the above combined with the fact that New Game+ equals zero cashflow problems and a constantly overflowing inventory means that I’ve found myself being much less stingy about items in battle. So Claude is throwing much higher quality stuff, like syrups and Wonder Drugs and even Angel Statuettes (I have so many Angel Statuettes…) than Rena (okay, I) let him use in all my previous lifetimes, hahaha. Also I actually remember that assault formation exists! And I remember to use it!! In short, this team is better taken care of and supported, though Claude is probably more harried than he’s ever been. Some thoughts on these gals! [READ-MORE] Chisato: My opinion of her hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. She was always fun and cool in my book. She can be a bit zany from both a story and gameplay perspective, likely because the developers wanted to make her memorable since she’s the last person you can recruit. But I appreciate her spirit and her focus on truth and justice in her work; how that gets used to help you uncover more about the history of Nede and the Ten Wise Men; and how we get to see a bit of her relationship with her mom too. Also, I read an amazing fanfic, Federation Morning by khaki knight, which gave me an even greater appreciation of Chisato and her skillset in the context of the gamestory. Precis: My opinion of her has evolved over the years. I always thought she was funny, but now that I’m much older, she’s a character I’ve come to respect. She’s often perceived as immature, ditzy, over-the-top boy-(well, Claude)-crazy, and depicted that way in adaptations... but she's actually really smart, positive, resourceful, self-aware, and her straightforwardness and honesty are refreshing. I think the more natural English translations of the remakes, and the presence of the nuanced Japanese voices and upgraded portraits, help make it easier to recognize and appreciate her merits beyond being simple comic relief. And of course I also like her because she’s very supportive to Claude (her presence really improves the mood of the Tournament, IMO). It’s sweet when you can return it to her in that North City PA (assuming you pick the nice responses instead of the dense joke ones. See “Precis staying cheerful in North City” at the end of this post.). And I love their endings together; their space one is probably my favourite of all the back-to-the-Federation endings. Their relationship feels healthy and positive! Even in spite of hot pepper jam lmaoWelch: Prior to recently, my feelings about Welch were, “I don’t really care”, so this is the longest commentary because it was my biggest surprise. She didn’t exist in the original SO2, and I first met her in SO3, where her appearance is almost exactly the same but her personality and role are totally different, much more of a general NPC. When they added her to the Second Evolution remake with this new over-the-top persona, it felt like a really weird shoehorning thing to me. I had no interest in interacting more with a joke meta character whose humour seemed primarily built around being obnoxiously intimidating. I watched some videos of her in English, but never got her in SE myself. The only thing I did was watch her recruitment scene, see what happens if you say yes to her joining, and then decline and move on. After recruiting her in SO2R... she’s still a joke meta character, but I do like her a little more now. I think what made the biggest difference is being able to access the Japanese in SO2R. Welch’s seiyuu, Hanba Tomoe, is fantastic. (Fun fact: She was Precis in the Star Ocean EX anime. Hot pepper jam forever!!) I love the dynamic tonal shifts that she brings to this role, and how she speeds up or slows down her lines to create a really engaging performance. It makes Welch fun and interesting to listen to instead of grating. Another reason is that several of her scenes with Claude are actually really cute. Her dragging him to a doujin event and getting him into doujinshi (translated as fanfic in English) is entertaining, of course, but there are also some other moments I enjoyed, like when she actually starts to thank him when he tries to help her. (I suppose basically if you’re nice to Claude, then I like you. I am a very simple squirrel.) Her L’Aqua beach scene with Claude, in particular, is actually really charming in Japanese. Partly due to translators’ choices, the voice actors ended up making delivery decisions that result in the mood being rather different in key parts. So you can see/hear what I mean:L’Aqua beach scene in English from Second Evolution (this person nicely recorded all the PSP Second Evolution ones for Claude; the link goes directly to where the Welch one starts)In Japanese SO2R (Ueda Yuuji as Claude)  In English, Claude's "Welch?" sounds so "...why the heck is it you" 🤣 but in Japanese he’s much more welcoming/receptive. Also, in Japanese Welch’s lines have a more sincere-sounding tone when she comes in and starts chatting with Claude.  The game they play, “I Spy” in English, is Shiritori. I think what the translators did was pretty clever to make it work in English; but that said, this is definitely a situation where tweaking is necessary and things being lost in the conversion are inevitable. In shiritori, you have to come up with a word that starts with a syllable matching the ending of the previous word. Welch starts with uchuu (universe); Claude replies with usagi (bunny). Welch responds with ginga (Milky Way); Claude struggles a bit and comes up with garasu (glass). Welch then says "suki" ("I like you"). So Welch went from everything in the universe, zooming in on the galaxy, zooming in on Claude specifically. Claude is just trying to keep up in the game with random words, ahha. At the end, English Claude has to say “*sigh* Yeah, yeah”, and unsurprisingly Spike Spencer does a take which makes him sound annoyed/irritated/resigned. A very reasonable decision when you’re given the script we see in English. But in Japanese, it’s more like “Ahh, got it/I gotcha” - “I understand what you mean/what you want!” And you can see in both Second Evolution and SO2R the portrait is a smiling Claude, and it’s more positive and playful which is how the Japanese voice actors tackle it.  The final line after the camera pans up to the moon is also special—I don’t believe any other L’Aqua scenes have it. Claude's thought in Japanese is something like, "And then/this time/now, I'll...!" and I'm like what?? Now you’ll what??? In short, the English plays her up as the joke character; the Japanese plays her more as a character. The Welch and Claude ending is also cute. I honestly like it more than any of the Rena and Claude endings. It’s especially amusing because of how much of a hard time she gave him when they first met (and by “gave him a hard time” I mean “completely terrorized him”), and their ending together is like… Claude figured out how to game the system, hahah. At this point fans pretty much assume Welch is in actuality a 4D being, so it creates an interesting dynamic/narrative of something like a god getting attached to someone in this created world more than they expected to, kind of like SO3's spoiler spoiler vibes.[/READ-MORE]