Even if a game is only a simple ADV where you make text choices to alter the story, these games can still be very difficult to select all the right options to get a desired ending -- even moreso from the language barrier most foreign gamers experience.
Some people chose to simply try to get the endings on their own, but for others, finding an using a capture guide creates a lot less hassle. A capture guide is a guide that shows the correct options that must be selected in order to get specific CGs, events, and endings.
Nearly all capture guides are in Japanese; some of the most popular capture guide sites for bishoujo games are Foolmaker and Game Kouryaku e no Machi. Some popular capture guide sites for boys' love and girls' games are HalfAdder (which has the largest selection of guides), Kouryaku no Yakata, Camellia Room, Jete Veux, Souen, and Tower of Confession. For boys' love doujin game capture guides, Amano Shoten and Aya Promenade are good choices.
There are only a very small amount of capture guides that have been made in English: for bishoujo games, you can check GameFAQs to see if any are available, and for boys' love and girls' games, there are guides available on the game reviews at my site, Boys' Love Games Headquarters (which are based off of Japanese capture guides).
Therefore, if you really want to get help for Japanese games, you are going to need to use a Japanese capture guide. This may seem daunting, but it is really not as difficult as it sounds. Of course some guides are laid out in a more confusing manner, but most are in a fairly easy format which shows which options to pick to arrive at different endings. Below are some basic instructions on how to locate and use Japanese capture guides.
1. First, you need to know how the title of the game is written in Japanese. If you don't even know what the title looks like, then it would be impossible to browse on the capture guide sites to look for your game. There are a few easy ways to do this. First, you can look on the official company website for the maker of the game. Another place you can go to get the game title, which may be even more convenient than hunting through the company website, is by using the Getchu entry for the game. Getchu is a large Japanese website that sells games, anime, and other anime-related goods. It is known in the gaming community as a place to quickly get some information on a game, since it usually provides system specifications, background story, character images, and sample CGs. On my Message Board, I keep a list of all the bishoujo games that are in my collection (which is over 1,000 titles) organized by company name, and provide the Getchu link and company website link for each of them. I also have similar lists for all boys' love and girls' games. Please be aware, however, that Getchu sells ero ("hentai") material, and may have ero game ad banners on their site: if this is a major problem for you, then stick to using the game company website.
So for example, let's look for a capture guide for Spray's title Kichiku Megane. First, go to Boys' Love Games Headquarters and click on the Message Board, and the game lists can be found in the BL/Girl Game Discussion section (or you can check out the direct link to the post above). You will find the listing for the game by company name in brackets, and then the game title, so find "[Spray] Kichiku Megane" in the list. You'll notice next to it in paranthesis are links to its Getchu page and its official company webpage.
In this example, we'll go ahead and go to the Getchu page for Kichiku Megane. (Note that Getchu sometimes disables hotlinking from certain sites, so you may have to right-click the link and chose "Copy Link Location" and then paste it into the address bar of your browser if it doesn't work).
Now you have the game title in Japanese.
2. The next step is to search for the capture guide for your title. First, it is easiest to simply check one of the capture guide sites linked above and look through their game list for the game title you are searching for. You can also find the links to Japanese capture guide sites in the Links section at Boys' Love Games Headquarters. Usually a good starting point is HalfAdder, because they provide capture guides for a large amount of titles. Looking through the Game section on HalfAdder, you can see they have a guide for Kichiku Megane available.
What if you aren't satisfied with the capture guide, or what if you can't find a capture guide for the game you want? You can also search for one on Google Japan. First, you will need to look at the Installing Japanese Language Support section of this guide, where it talks about setting up the language bar and gives instructions for how to type in Japanese. This is described starting at Step #6.
Basically, once you have the language bar installed (by going into Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Click on the Languages tab > Click the Details button > Under preferences click the Language Bar button and check the "Show the language bar on the desktop") then you can switch over to Japanese text input to be able to type in Japanese in the Google Japan search window.
Open Google Japan. The easiest thing is to first copy the game title from the Getchu or company site, and then paste it into the search box (so you don't have to type it back out and search for the right kanji). Now, switch to Japanese typing mode, and type "kouryaku", then hit the spacebar once to change it to kanji, and then hit enter (making the Japanese word for capture, 攻略). Now you will have your search terms: the game title, followed by "capture" (in this example, 鬼畜眼鏡 攻略). Go ahead and let Google search. Google will bring back any potential hits for a Kichiku Megane capture guide.
This should give you an idea of how to manually search for capture guides using a web browser. However, you will probably find what you are looking for on one of the linked Capture Guide sites.
3. Now you have located a capture guide. So what do you do with it? The best thing you can do is open two copies of the guide up: one which you will keep in Japanese, and one that you will use a web-based translator on. Firefox makes this especially handy since then you can keep the two open next to each other in tabs.
To get a copy of the capture guide machine-translated into English (in other words, "Engrish"), then go to the Excite Japan Webpage Translator (you may also use Babelfish, but I personally recommend the Excite translator, which seems to have a better engine for Japanese to English conversion). Put the URL of the capture guide into the translator box, and below it change it from the default of English to Japanese, to Japanese to English (the second bubble under the search box). Click the button to translate the page (it has an orange arrow pointing towards it). It make take it a little while to load up the converted page.
If you have Firefox, there is an even easier way to do this. You can install the East Asian Translator plug-in. Once you have installed this plug-in, you can simply right-click on a webpage, go down to "Translate From" in the drop-down menu, and select "Japanese to English". It uses the same translation engine as the Excite Japan Webpage Translator.
Now you will have two copies of your capture guide available: one in the original Japanese, and one machine-translated to English. Why? You will use the "Engrish" capture guide to figure out how the Japanese guide itself is set up, if there are any special notes, information about the different routes, etc., and you will use the Japanese guide to see the correct selections you must make on the route.
Let's take a look at the comparison above. The game Kichiku Megane is about a man who's personality changes when wearing a demonic pair of glasses: this can make many different routes depending on whether he is wearing them or not. From looking at the "Engrish" version of the webpage, we can see that the author has designated when to wear the glasses and when not to from their notes at the top of the screen:
眼鏡脱着選択は↓のように書いています。 眼鏡使用→ (眼鏡) 眼鏡非使用→ (ノーマル) The glasses detaching selection is being written like ↓. Glasses use → (glasses) Glasses non-use → (normality)
Understanding what the (眼鏡)and (ノーマル)markings in the guide may have been confusing if you hadn't seen a basic translation of their meaning from the "Engrish" capture guide.
Now we can take a look at what choices we need to make in the game. Again, you can get an idea of the set-up from your Engrish copy, and use the Japanese copy to see the exact lines you need to select in the game. Take a look at what we can learn from the image below:
The first thing we can see, by using the Engrish copy, is that all the routes will have the same correct options until the holiday on Week 2. The second thing we can see is a time reference, Week 1, so we know the following options will all occur during Week 1 of the game. The third thing we see is a list of the correct options you will select: the first correct option you will pick in the game is 受け取る, the second one is 追いかける, and the third is 仕事のことを話す. When you get to these points in the game, you simply match the text from the option box in the game up with the text given on the capture guide.
Capture guides are broken into different routes: what options need to be selected to win a certain ending. Usually, these are broken up into the different character endings. If you want to win a specific character, then you will look for the section on the guide that provides the correct options for that character's route. Since online translators can't handle the kanji names of characters, this is where it is handy to also keep open a copy of the game Getchu page, so you can learn to recognize the different character's names.
This concludes a very basic rundown of how to find capture guides, and how to use them to win your desired ending in Japanese games, so you don't get completely frusterated by never picking the right choices due to language barriers.
Boys' Love Games Headquarters Complete Idiot's Guide to Japanese Gaming © March 2009
Presented by Mastress Alita @ Boys' Love Games Headquarters
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