#Tristia: Restore

[satoshi-mochida]

Tristia of the Deep-Blue Sea: Legacy is a remastered version of the town development simulation game Tristia of the Deep-Blue Sea with fully renewed graphics. The original game first launched for PC on July 20, 2002. The remastered version will launch in spring 2023 with English, Japanese, and Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) language support. Visit the official website here.

Tristia: Restore is a new title that completely transforms the game systems from Ao Umi no Tristia in the form of a “slapstick management action game.” It will launch in spring 2023 with English, Japanese, and Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) language support. Visit the official website here.

The voice cast is as follows:

Nanoca Flanca (voiced by Ayako Kawasumi)

Stuka (voiced by Juurouta Kosugi)

Faury Carat (voiced by Marina Oono)

Nene Hampden (voiced by Sakura Nogawa)

Reygurett Kutanie (voiced by Kanoko Hatamiya)

Rafarew (voiced by Akane Tomonaga)

Visit the Tristia project official website here.

[elizabethanism]

The legend of Qu Yuan (c. 340 – 278 BCE), the poet of tristia and itinera, and how the custom of zongzi eating and dragon boat racing on Duanwu have come to be associated with his sad tale.

On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month—端午 Duanwu—we commemorate the death of the poet-minister Qu Yuan 屈原.

Exiled from the kingdom of Chu for his fierce opposition to Qin (which did indeed demolish all, in its imperial ambition), he drowned himself in the Miluo River.

Legend has it that fishing boats set out looking for the much-beloved Qu Yuan. When he could not be found, food was thrown into the river to prevent fish from consuming his corpse.

Hence Duanwu is also known as the Dragon Boat Festival & sticky rice packets (zongzi) are eaten.

'The Songs of Chu' 楚辭, attributed to Qu Yuan (but more likely by multiple authors) are densively allusive poetic laments dating from the 3rd c BCE collapse of the Chu kingdom.

To quote David Hawkes, Chuci 楚辭are the poetry of tristia and itineria —the laments of exile.

Qu Yuan's 'Songs of Chu' are the laments of one born to "an age foul and murky"

Sighs come from me often

the heart swells within

sad that I and these times

never will be matched.

As it is then, as it is now.

Another version:

Duanwu 端午 marks the beginning of summer heat and pestilence, and the in southern China and throughout southeast Asia it was an occasion to fumigate the household and eat restorative foods wrapped in naturally antiseptic leaves.

The legend of Qu Yuan - the loyal minister in exile, wandering the Southland - then, was a Han Confucian repackaging of local folk customs.

One stayed as low profile as possible to steer clear of all the miasmic, pestilential forces —hence the need for mugwort and spells...

「五月五日天中節一切惡事盡消滅 急急如律令」

FIFTH DAY OF FIFTH LUNAR MONTH: ALL THINGS WICKED AND PESTILENT TO BE VANQUISHED INSTANTLY WITH THIS SPELL

We could *really* do with such a 急急如律令 these days.

[Dunhuang fragment British library S.799]

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Sebastien de Castell, “Traitor’s Blade” & “Knight’s Shadow”

My name is Falcio val Mond, one of the last of the King's Greatcoats, and if you listen very carefully you might still be able to hear me screaming.

- Knight’s Shadow

I’ve always had a soft spot for reluctant heroes. Their hesitance often speaks to a kind of endearing humility that you don’t find in either the earnest Chosen Ones of high fantasy or the slippery antiheroes of grimdark. It can also be an “emperor’s new clothes” situation, where they initially refuse the call to adventure on the grounds that they have too much to lose – what sane person with people to protect, after all, would agree to subject themselves and their loved ones to anything like the hero’s journey?

[Right you are, Rocket.]

Falcio val Mond, protagonist of Sebastien de Castell’s Greatcoat series, is the epitome of the reluctant hero. Falcio has no reason to be humble, though he often is – he’s perhaps the best fencer in the world, the handpicked right-hand man of a once-powerful king, and the leader of a far-flung group of warrior-magistrates who categorically bow to no one and whose meager goal is to restore peace and justice to the land. He also has little to lose – by the time the first book picks up, both his saintly wife and his beloved king are long dead, killed horribly in ways Falcio was powerless to avert. Instead, from the very first of over two thousand pages, Falcio wants nothing more than to die, and the events of the series – plucky rescues, daring escapes, and hair-raising duels choreographed as tightly as neurosurgical procedures – are minor speedbumps on his path to rejoin those he loves in the afterlife. To Falcio, death is the carrot on a stick that he chases unwillingly through the hoops of herohood, and against all odds, it’s an absolute joy to watch.

For a man more or less constantly on the lookout for ways to die – especially, in Falcio’s case, for ways to nobly sacrifice himself for king and country – the world of the Greatcoats series offers opportunities around every corner. The kingdom of Tristia, an Alexandre Dumas-esque land which it seems almost compulsory to call “swashbuckling,” was once steered towards socialistic utopia by the benevolent machinations of the idealistic young King Paelis. Five years ago, the local Dukes, from whom Paelis was trying to wrest power, banded together to have him killed. All that remains of Paelis’ legacy are the Greatcoats – musketeer-like magistrates and masters of fencing, singing, and law who roam the land settling disputes between the common folk and their cruel overlords. Their secret weapon? The “greatcoats” from which they draw their name – uniforms, Bags of Holding, and bulletproof vests all in one thanks to hidden pockets and bone plates sewn into the leather – which along with their skills make them nigh-unkillable. In the years since the king’s death, however, Greatcoats – or “Tattercloaks,” as they are derogatorily called – have become the political scapegoats (or “scapecoats,” if you will) du jour, blamed for everything from the current plight of the poor to the suspicious deaths of powerful Dukes.

[Some people even respect the Greatcoats as opponents, but that doesn’t stop them from wanting or trying to kill them at every opportunity.]

Hunted and/or hated by everyone from the Dukes and their retained knights to a mysterious order of world-class assassins to the average guy on the street, for Falcio, the so-called “First Cantor of the Greatcoats,” life is an endless procession of narrow brushes with death, usually the result of some barely-eked-out victory in the face of impossible odds. It’s a good day for the First Cantor if he doesn’t end it by passing out from blood loss for the next week (the punchline of more than a few chapters in first book Traitor’s Blade) after a fierce fight or a bout of torture. In sequel Knight’s Shadow/Greatcoat’s Lament, Falcio spends most of the novel slipping irreversibly into death as a slow-acting poison gradually paralyzes him. By Saint’s Blood, the third in the series, Falcio’s tendency towards being very nearly killed – and his equal propensity for jumping back into the fray only half-healed because the world is on line and there just isn’t time – is a running joke that almost everyone in Tristia is in on. What impresses me most about the series is that, despite Falcio’s tendency to fail or nearly fail at almost everything he does, he never feels underpowered as a character – instead, the compelling antagonists against whom he faces off are developed in such a way as to create the sense that Falcio is an extraordinary protagonist whose bare and often pyrrhic victories are nonetheless admirable in the face of very capable villains and almost certain disaster.

[Just another day at the office for Falcio val Mond.]

If Falcio sounds a bit unbalanced as a character, he is, but purposefully so; as with the Greatcoats’ musketeer models, he constitutes just one third of a triumvirate of lead characters who together make up a single semi-functional human. Serving as counterpoints to Falcio’s passionate idealism and suicidal spontaneity are the stoic, logical, and fiercely loyal Kest, whose mastery of the sword rivals Falcio’s; and Brasti, who eschews the seriousness of the other two for persistent sarcasm and practical joking and trades the typical fencing foil for a trio of imposingly-named greatbows that, in his capable hands, may as well be sniper rifles. The friendship between the three is one of the series’ greatest strengths, and plot points which occasionally separate them left me counting down the pages until their reunion.

Seeing as the series’ main trio of men are characterized as the embodiment of certain traits, it’s perhaps unsurprising that their female counterparts start out equally archetypical. Unfortunately, however, without the additive and complimentary relationship shared by Falcio, Kest, and Brasti, the series’ scattered archetypical females tend to come across (at least at first) less as timelessly heroic and more as two-dimensional. Falcio’s wife, whose honor was besmirched in a Braveheart-esque turn before her untimely death, initially codes as an impossibly good “angel of the house” and little more than a motivator for Falcio, fueling his homicidal anger at ne’er-do-wells and his underlying desire to die. His new love interest begins life as a pretty stereotypical female healer support character to the mostly male movers and shakers. Several teenage damsels cycle in and out of the plot of Traitor’s Blade at regular intervals as big strong Falcio selflessly rescues them from certain death again and again. Most egregiously of all, the female villains who (spoilers) eventually emerge as the puppeteers of each book’s grand conspiracies are primarily characterized as evil through their sexual aggression and kinkiness – a particularly ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black considering the novels’ seeming obsession with keeping Falcio bloodied and half-dead at every turn.

[At one point, Falcio is literally crucified and tortured for over a week, during which the novel toes the line between whump and something more… vindictive.]

Luckily, however, many of these characters make great strides over the course of the first two books. Healer Ethalia shucks the angel’s endless patience, holding Falcio accountable for his choices and actions and refusing to support him unconditionally. Falcio’s female wards become deadly warriors and serious political players in their own right, similarly stepping out of Falcio’s shadow and finding their own priorities. The series also introduces memorable female characters who work against other stereotypes – the supernatural sage who guides the heroes on their quest, for example, is a morally dubious, scheming old woman who spends more time scolding the Three Greatcoateers for running afoul of her plans than she does actually helping them, undercutting both the classic male sage and the mother-figureness of female spirit guides. Marking this great progress over the course of a couple books, I’m crossing my fingers the rest of the series will undergo a similar evolution with regards to sexuality. The way the novels develop the trio’s bromance and import a lot of seventeenth-century social norms has kept the world pretty firmly heteronormative thus far, though a few hints here and there have opened a fissure in this facade that I’m holding out hope is expanded in installments to come.

[Because we all know manly devotion doesn’t always have to be totally definitely 100% straight.]

Perhaps my greatest initial reservation about the Greatcoats series was its meticulous focus on fencing in its many, many fight scenes. I had read in a blurb that the author was a professional fight choreographer and feared that, just as the linguistics-obsessed among us have a tendency to undertake pages-long fights of fancy about the etymologies of invented words, the fight scenes would devolve into extended chunks of jargon that the average layman wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of, let alone enjoy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found the deft and precise explanations of combat maneuvers to be some of my absolute favorite parts. Narrator Falcio balances the clear and evocative explanations of a patient and experienced teacher with snappy humor and rapid-fire pacing to create not just the image of a fencing match, but the emotional rollercoaster and the rhythm of one on the sentence level. As such, these sequences move the plot forward thrillingly rather than forcing it into an eddy (a.k.a. Naruto syndrome) and further characterize Falcio and his friends as knowledgeable masters of their respective martial crafts. It almost makes me miss my high school fencing lessons… almost.

For anyone already eager to jump into Falcio’s tempestuous adventures – or even those on the fence – I can’t recommend strongly enough that you check out the audiobook versions of the series. As an auditory learner, a compulsive multitasker, and a grad student with waning eyesight, I seek out audiobooks at almost any cost, up to and including suffering through stilted narration and dubious character voices if it means not having to subject my eyes to 500 plus pages of tiny paperback print. Greatcoats narrator Joe Jameson is not only perfectly cast as Falcio, but a joy to listen to. At 1.75x speed (a leisurely pace compared to the 2.5x or 3x I usually aim for when reading for work), his cadence and inflection are engaging and lifelike, capturing especially well the main trio’s personalities and mannerisms, and even his soprano-pitched female voices hold up to the chipmunk test. Armed with the audiobooks and a lot of menial labor I needed distracting from, I tore through the first and second volumes of the series in just a few days and have happily started the third. Falcio may be itching for the Great Beyond, but here’s me hoping he, his companions, and their collective hijinks stick around for many, many books to come.

[eyreguide]

Book Review: Tyrant’s Throne

Plot Summary: After years of struggle and sacrifice, Falcio val Mond, First Cantor of the Greatcoats, is on the brink of fulfilling his dead King's dream: Aline, the King's daughter, is about to take the throne and restore the rule of law once and for all. But for the Greatcoats, nothing is ever that simple. In the neighbouring country of Avares, an enigmatic new warlord is uniting the barbarian armies which have long plagued Tristia's borders - and even worse, he is rumoured to have a new ally: Trin, who's twice tried to kill Aline to take the throne for herself. With the armies of Avares at her back, she'll be unstoppable. Falcio, Kest and Brasti race north to stop her, but in those cold and treacherous climes they discover something altogether different, and far more dangerous: a new player is planning to take the throne of Tristia, and the Greatcoats, for all their skill, may not be able to stop him. As the nobles of Tristia and even the Greatcoats themselves fight over who should rule, the Warlord of Avares threatens to invade. It is going to fall to Falcio to render the one verdict he cannot bring himself to decide: does he crown the girl he vowed to put on the throne, or uphold the laws he swore to serve?

The Greatcoats series is one of my favorite fantasy reads ever, and it was a little bittersweet going into the final book in the series.  I absolutely love the characters and how the author writes them with so much emotion and heart.  The characters have their quirks as well, which brings a lot of humor to an otherwise dark narrative.  But although every book has some seemingly insurmountable conflict brewing, there is this sense of idealism and hope that makes me love the world of Tristia and I am fully invested in how Falcio and his Greatcoats will try to make their world a better place.

Tyrant’s Throne has a compact, suspenseful plot that I found absolutely riveting. There are many twists and turns and new revelations about characters and backstories that expanded the world and made for a compelling finale to the series.  The plot begins with a breakdown of a dangerous scenario and how justice can prevail.  The ending is pretty much a similar set-up, and that symmetry is a beautiful framework for the story. 

The way the stakes are raised throughout the series is fascinating to me.  In the first book, the conflict is comparatively small in scope and each novel successfully creates a bigger backdrop to the issues the characters face, until in Tyrant’s Throne - I truly felt afraid that the Greatcoats would not be able to win because their opposition was so strong.  The story also created a villain who is so different, yet so perfect as the antithesis of everything the Greatcoats stand for.  And this villain would not have been as effective if he was not the final boss in this series.  The pacing and structure of the whole series has led to this final novel, and I’m impressed at the author’s crafting of the story.

I’m such a big fan of this series because of the heart and the idealism of the main character, in spite of some of the amoral beliefs, the greed and desperation of the people in Tristia.  It’s a tribute to the characters though, that good and evil aren’t really cut and dried, and the choices made by some individuals made sense given their background and their alternatives.  The story is also interesting to me as the conflicts feel relevant to today as well as being a throwback swashbuckling adventure with enthralling action and suspense.  I’m sad that this series is over (in a way), but this has been an excellent read all the way through.

5/5 Goodreads