I have mentioned before how extremely impressed I am with pages such as the Japanese SDE guide that has not one but several “Meta” lists, including an environmental characters and equipment summary that lists excellent characters across sensible roles such as general DPS, attribute-specific attacker, support, and even “tank”.
The individual character pages are also astonishingly good, imho - e.g. Sesta’s that, aside from translation difficulties, offer great support to newer players. Explanations as to the major things to look out for (in multiple forms, some for beginners and more advanced advice separated out for veterans of the game), exact party line-ups that can work well, exact listings of several pieces of suggested equipment, including thoughts requiring deep knowledge of very fine-grain technical artifacts of the game that would otherwise require direct testing (e.g. in her case, that Enhance Normal Attack grasta does not work, which is not mentioned on the global wiki at the time of this writing), etc.
Like for a veteran player who left the game for a year and returned, such a person could stare at one of the character pages on the global wiki for an hour to get even deeper knowledge as to how they work, and then still be left guessing what other characters exist that could work well alongside them, but these pages get you a significant fraction of the way there, very quickly (which is what most people want from a guiding resource? well, at least casual players do).
But that much is obvious: what I am wanting to mention further today is that there is so much more to the Seesaa wiki than even all of that! That wiki btw is where the global wiki gets the Superboss ranking list, but even so I had no idea that also the specific enemy boss pages are also so helpful! Such as the one for Land Avatar & Crab Bonze. The global wiki version has some weaknesses and moves each turn so I am not claiming that it is empty or useless or anything like that, but in comparison the Seesaa wiki’s has just so much more! e.g., the distinction between a merely “large” physical resistance debuff vs. one that is fully ONE HUNDRED PERCENT, renewed each & every turn - and that written in red lettering to really draw attention to that fact, so that you really know what you are up against. Then, scrolling down, I see strategy, an entire long description of multiple parties that would work, turn-by-turn descriptions for them, alternate approaches for those bored with the easy way and want to mix it up a bit, and even direct links to videos to watch some of those in action.
I think most non-Japanese-reading people do not know about all that is available on that site b/c of the rather large difficulties in interpreting the translation. e.g. you cannot just type “Eva” or “Yipha” into the search box and find who you are looking for, and often the names differ in spelling. A particularly troublesome example is that the wind-based Yipha is sometimes called Efa, and other times Eva, which can be confusing! However, even with those significant barriers to understanding and using the site, these days I still find myself visiting the Seesaa wiki as my first stop oftentimes to look up information.
The same writer akashic_lin apparently also made the superboss ranking list (or at least made the last edit, but I am unable to see prior to that for whatever reason). All of that enormous body of work (you can see their contribution logs by clicking their username) must have taken a GREAT DEAL OF EFFORT!! And I, at least, want to say that I appreciate it. I do not know if more than a handful of people will read this, and even then how many will make it to the end here:-), but I did want to offer that regardless, just in case someone was interested in hearing it:-). (yet sorry not sorry, I will not crosspost this to Reddit, b/c it would instantly be drowned out by accusations that I “hate the global wiki” or some such nonsense, as my own contributions log should be well more than enough to dispel any notion of but… you know how Reddit works:-)
akashic_lin, I wish to extend to you my public thanks for your extraordinary efforts on behalf of the players of Another Eden.
Regarding Yipha, her name should have been localised as Aoife, which is definitely a tricky one to get from katakana, so little wonder machine translation has trouble with it, but it would have been nice if it had been properly localised.
I watched a panel on localisation lately in the FFXIV fan fest, and they were talking about all of the additional notes that they receive along with the base text, including details of where there are specific references in the text to other media such as Shakespeare, so that the localisation can maintain the original intent. I suspect that this extent of detail being provided to localisation teams is quite rare, sadly, since pretty much everything in Another Eden is heavily referential, but there are definitely cases of that being lost in translation, and I’ve seen similar in other games.
Yeah, it would REALLY help out the community if WFS would be more up-front about so many different matters - like if it would host its own wiki, or help out with expenses to host it elsewhere, and more important than hosting costs if it would help provide things like translations into different languages. Or even just the content itself, like the fact that Sesta’s Twinblade Wolf is not enhanced by the Enhance Normal Attack grasta, even though I believe that grasta functions to enhance the likes of AS Tsubame’s
Ningi: Resshusen, Flammelapis’ Houle Trechoo, and other basic attack replacements. The amount of information offered in-game is such a paltry subset of that which they MUST be aware of as they craft & fine-tune the character… it would have been nice to share some of that. Especially since data-mining the game is made much more difficult by the fact that they do not want people cracking it for reasons of profit.
I think the reason that WFS does not offer that is not some kind of conspiracy theory where “they don’t want you to know!”:-P, but rather that they simply believe that it increases enjoyment to have to find these gems and make use of them appropriately to handle the challenge fights - kind of a meta-game if you will, to help play the actual game. And YouTubers can even make profits off of discovering & sharing this type of info, so there is incentive for it.:-) I mostly agree, and approve to the extent that it is not too onerous to have to do that work - and they even provide the Nagsham dummies to help with a good deal of that, offensively anyway. Although there are times when the coders work against people understanding things, e.g. AS Milsha’s providing “the effects of lunatic”, where no icon appears on the character, no text goes into the Status pull-down screen, no animation effect is shown for the character (the glowy aura thing), and yet skills that depend on Lunatic boosts still function - THAT is somewhat less than full transparency on their part.:-(
In our case though, while these facts may be buried inside of YouTube videos somewhere (not easily discoverable, especially with a mere text search of a few keywords), the global English-language wiki says nothing about them - I suppose treating it as obvious that the “Enhance Normal Attack” will also work on basic attack replacement skills. Except personally I thought that assumption was always at best ambiguous, and now that Sesta’s normal attack does not work, also unwarranted, at least some of the time. Nor did I see this fact in Backy’s Battle Tips offered for Sesta, nor in her announcement on Reddit, etc. Which means then that it is not something that the “community” has to discover, but rather each player individually, all on their own. And ngl, some of us really enjoy “theory-crafting”, others enjoy direct testing with their fave chars, and so on… but it would be nice to have somewhere to record those observations from the tests, so that others who do not wish to put in that kind of time can still enjoy the game, on a more casual basis.
Which is why I am so grateful to see it on the Seesaa wiki! In that case I did the personal in-game testing myself already, so seeing it there also helps confirm that they know things, which none of the aforementioned places offered. Plus, not only did they go to all that trouble of doing the direct testing, but they then shared it with the entire rest of the world! In a game setting I understand that that may not be so easy, since while many people would be appreciative, others can also be quite a bit… ah… toxic. I am so glad that they did not let that stop them!:-P
And if all of this seems too tangentially related to your point, to circle back around: I started here from what I knew about the effects of a single one of a single character’s skills in relation to a single Grasta, but the same ofc applies to EVERY piece of information in the game! Character names, names of skills, lore / back-story, locations of hidden items / secrets / rewards, etc. If WFS offered their own English-language “reference guide”, that would be just fantastic, so that we would not have to guess at what Google Translate was trying to convey, in cases such as Yipha’s name. Like even just a single table, listing out the character names in both English and Japanese would go a long way towards helping, would it not!? :-D Instead, their website looks quite barren, existing only to sell / promote downloading the game but providing little to no info for after having started playing it. Oh well, I cannot solve every problem that I see, but I did want to at least take a moment and appreciate when I see others working so very hard to offer what they can:-D.