Gyokuyoutama

Some day Sanae will insist that "retro" means PS3, and that the PS5 isn't that old.

On 7/21/2021 at 2:25 PM, Raison d'être said:

Years ago I found a schizo wikia kinda like that.

 

https://historica.fandom.com/wiki/Historica

 

It's fucking insane. Here's a random page:

 

https://historica.fandom.com/wiki/Brett_C._Rodgers

 

As far as I can tell the lion's share of the almost ~100k articles are by one guy. It's always fun when you come across an article with his art.

I went back to that wiki and he's made over 100k more articles in the last two years.

 

I want to say it's just him listing all his gameplay from stuff like Crusader Kings 2, but then there's stuff like this where he is classifying things from movies.

 

Well, I say "he" but there does seem to be three people editing it.

25 minutes ago, Moby said:

 

 

 

Holy shit, THAT takes me back.

Here's a fun way to mess with ChatGPT and test boundary cases.

 

Make up a language name and some gibberish to act as an initial sentence.

 

Ask Chat GPT to translate it to English.

 

Do this for a few sentences accepting the "translations" as accurate.

 

Then start saying that it fucked up.  "You used 'kralu' in both sentences but it needs to be conjugated differently the second time because the subject is animate plural instead of semi-animate singular."

 

It has pretty decent memory, but what this demonstrates is that what it is really optimized for is making up excuses for giving you the "wrong" answers.  In a way, it's a perfect representation of a college student.

I'm not going to disagree with anything said here, but Link to the Past is still better.

 

I'm not saying that Ocarina is a bad game.  It is a great game.  Perhaps even the greatest game.  But LTTP is a greatester game.

Outlook question:

 

I end up using the web client fairly often for work stuff, mainly when I have to answer something on my personal computer.  I also deal with a lot of mathematics, and in particular geometry, which means that I write stuff like d(A,B) frequently.  The problem is that Outlook autocorrects B) to .  (Augh, SPUF does it too! In a worse way than Outlook, since at least there if you backspace it undoes the autocorrect.)  This is a pain in the ass, and there's never once been a situation where I would be remotely interested in putting the picture version of emoticons in work e-mails.  But I can't find any way to turn it off.

 

If you look this up online the only "fix" that people talk about is pressing backspace immediately after the correction is made, but you have to do that every time.  Worse, if you do any keystroke in between the autocorrect and the backspace you no longer can turn the smiley back into text and so have to retype.  There are people talking on forums circa 2017 about going into various options menus to disable autocorrect, but none of these menus seem to exist on the current version.

 

So, does anyone know how to actually disable this behavior?

 

(This also makes me wonder if the predictive text features that I was able to disable will eventually become mandatory in the future.)

Played a vs. CPU battle of Ran vs. Yuuma that was far more intense then the actual story battle against Yuuma.

 

This confirms my suspicion that ZUN intended Story mode as an introduction to the mechanics and vs. mode as the real game.

So anyway, obviously I picked up Touhou 19.

 

It kind of answers my question from above: No, there aren't just three games in the Twinkle Star Sprites genre.  Now there are four games in that genre, since Touhou 19 is one of them (despite not having "Phantasmagoria" in its title, annoyingly.)

 

The basics of this genre is that you have a split screen where both players separately play a danmaku game.  The goal is usually for your opponent to die first.  You don't directly attack each other, but you do indirectly attack each other in many ways.  In Twinkle Star Sprites this is primarily done by chaining combos of enemies, which then will send fireballs and character specific effects to the other screen.  This results in extremely fast attacks coming your way, but without a huge bullet density. 

 

The Touhou versions of course tend to fill up your screen.  I'll describe how it works in Touhou 19, though I recall 9 being similar.  Each player gets the same patterns of "standard" enemies like fairies.  There's eight or so patterns in total and you'll very quickly memorize them.  Killing these enemies sends more bullets to your opponent, for example killing a fairy sends a tiny spherical bullet.  Eventually advanced enemies will be sent over, which I think has to do with how you chain your combos.  These are largely animal spirits, since you are in the Buddhist realm of animal existence (畜生) though Touhou reimagines this as part of hell rather than Earth.  Killing these either advanced enemies to your opponent or character specific attacks.  For example Reimu will send a bouncing yin-yang ball over, Marisa will shoot a mini-master spark from the side of the screen, Nazrin makes a giant diamond appear, etc.

 

On top of these you have a power meter which can be charged.  (This is another thing borrowed from Twinkle Star Sprites, since no other Touhou has a similar mechanic.)  You gain mana from killing enemies, which lets you charge to do more.  You always have a level zero attack available which takes a little to charge up and does a temporary burst attack.  Next you have a special skill that is usually a more powerful attack. (For example, Ran will double her stationary cannons for a time, in addition to getting burst damage.)  But you usually focus on levels 2 and 3.  Level 2 is an EX attack, which is dependent on the player.  For example, Marisa does a laser barrage, most of the kings of animal hell send a bunch of animal spirits after you, etc.  Level 3 is a boss attack.  This is a straight up spell card style attack like you'd see in a normal Touhou game.  Every time you do one of these attacks its power increases for the next time you use it.  On the EX attack this largely means greater projectile/summon density.  For the boss attack you'll go through different spell cards, though each character only has four or so variations with higher power attacks either combining difficult spell cards together or increasing density of attacks on previously used ones.  When you die this also increases the power of your attacks, as a catch up mechanism.  Where things can get particularly nasty is that you can launch EX attacks while the enemy is dealing with your boss attack, and you can also kill a bunch of enemies to throw those at the enemy at the same time.  You can't stack boss attacks, but if you save your mana you can launch a boss attack immediately after the last one ended.  There are a bunch of other mechanics, but that's the gist of it.

 

This one is pretty controversial because the Story mode is essentially "on rails."  Rather than having the computer do its attacks normally, it will do its attacks at set intervals.  For example, the stage 1 boss on normal will do (IIRC) EX 1, EX 2, Boss 1, EX 3, Boss 2 in that order.  When the computer runs through the last attack in its set list (which is always a boss attack) it dies regardless of how many lives and bombs it has.  You technically can kill the computer in story mode by exhausting all of its lives, but this almost never happens.

 

This fact pissed a lot of people off, but I'm basically okay with it.  You can play the computer in vs. mode and as far as I can tell it plays 100% fair there.  No automatic attacks, and it only dies when you kill it legitimately.  So it's not like you lose the experience entirely.  I think there are two reasons why ZUN did this.  The first is that he wanted story mode to work more like a traditional Touhou game: fight bosses, exhaust their spell cards, win.  The second is that VS mode is actually pretty grueling.  The default time limit on round length is 10 minutes, and I've had most rounds against the CPU go over five minutes.  That's only going through two lives, while you have five in story mode (and so does the computer.)  That would mean something like 15 minutes per level, or 90 minutes across the whole story, which is too long for a Touhou game.  Remember, you're doing it all in one go.  There's also 19 playable characters, and ZUN expects you to play through all of them.   I think that this current set up is fine.  The only thing that I don't like is that I'm not sure how much doing boss attacks and the like against the computer actually helps in story mode, since you're unlikely to kill them that way.  It does seem to limit their ability to kill enemies (and thus increase your bullets) and your attacks do clear some space, so it's definitely not completely worthless, but I always wonder if I shouldn't prioritize boss attacks as much as in vs.

 

The characters are nicely varied.  When playing against them the biggest difference will be their EX attacks and spell cards.  However, you can't really pay attention to that stuff in game.  Unlike Twinkle Star sprites, if you look at your opponents screen for even an instant to plan out an attack, you're probably dead.  Playing variety comes from a few different sources:

 

• Movement speed. Marisa is still speedier than Reimu and Nazrin is so fast that she's actually tricky to control when not in focus mode.
• Shot patterns.  Most characters have a stream of bullets that shoot forward plus some supplementary attack.  For example, Marisa shoots a weak laser that penetrates across the whole screen. Sanae shoots snakes that will turn sideways to hit enemies.  Ran has three forward streams, but two of these are from turrets that will remain stationary while you're in focus mode (allowing you to continue hitting the boss while you are dodging elsewhere.)  Some are more fanciful, like Mamizou's very wide spread which she will bring together in focus mode, or Nazrin's bullets which change directions to target enemies.
• The special skill mentioned above (i.e. Level 1 charge.)
• A "Magic Circle" which appears while charging.  This will slow down bullets within it, outright stun animal spirits (including after they leave the circle), and I believe that you also get more mana the more stuff that is in it.  For the basic characters this really is just a circle, but the shape varies widely.  Ran has a large cross, Aunn's circle starts big but quickly becomes a very narrow sidewise ellipse, Mamizou has three circles focused in front of her, and Nazrin's circle will wander around the screen in search of enemies rather than staying with you.

All of this makes each character play pretty differently, and of course they fight different people in the story mode.  Even when two people fight the same character, it will generally happen on different stages which changes up the difficulty significantly.  The main exception to this is the final boss, where a certain character shows up more often (though not everyone gets that boss.)

 

Haven't tried online play yet.  I'm kind of terrified about the skill of the average opponent.  You have to beat the game several times before Online Play is even available, so it's not like there's any chance of playing against total noobies.

 

And for the record this being the first game where Ran is playable is only 20% of why I bought it.  The primary reason is that I just really like the Twinkle Star Sprites format and am glad to play any game in that genre.  I do wish that someone other than ZUN would make one though.  Not because I dislike Touhou 9 or 19, but rather because I'd like to see a modern take on this that isn't married to the spell card format in particular.

In retrospect I wonder if it was the combination of growing up on a farm and being told that Daylight Saving Time helps farmers that made me realize how much of what the mainstream says is bullshit.

This is exactly how your first fight against Ran in Touhou 19 will go:

 

There's only two pieces of advice I can give:

1. There's been a couple of times when I've had BIOS issues and nothing has seemed to do anything, then later I do the exact same things and they work for some mysterious reason.  Not a great help I know, but it's worth trying to "update" the BIOS again to a previous version.  It will probably fail, but who knows?
2. My personal computer is always plugged in, so I haven't really experienced this sort of thing.  But my work computer (the one with windows 10) did have all sorts of problems going into sleep mode.  For example, it would reliably crash if it went into sleep mode while unplugged from power but plugged into a projector via HDMI port.  This was very annoying, since IT also forced an update that made laptops go into sleep mode after five minutes of inactivity (meaning that I had to either constantly tap the laptop while presenting or yank the cord out if there was a chance I wouldn't get back to it in five minutes.)  On the flipside, there was a period where I thought the display was broken on my personal laptop.  I verified it wasn't by plugging it into my TV via an HTML cable. It displayed fine on the TV... and then continued to display fine on the laptop itself and the issue vanished entirely.  So I guess I'm saying to try connecting it through HDMI and whatever else you have available, since that seems to have some mysterious effect on these issues.  Chance of working is very low, but I'm guessing you're in "try anything" mode.

I'm pretty sure I have at least twenty hours in this game:

 

 

CANON INFORMATION LEARNED FROM TOUHOU 19:

 

-Rin and Chen are now playmates

-Chen now likes finding corpses

-Ran used to be part of a gang that ruled part of hell

On 10/24/2023 at 8:39 AM, hugthebed2 said:

I still think it's really funny how in Deus Ex that the laser sight gives perfect accuracy to hitscan weapons and I didn't really know that but it made the game so much more approachable as a shooter for someone in the more modern shooter age after putting it on pistol on level 1.

 

I also remember having to lose an hour or two of progress just to backtrack before I put a scope on that same pistol due to jank where it removes that perfect accuracy (and you can't unattach it).

 

I should really play through more 90/00s shooters like System Shock...

I should really beat System Shock so I can finally play the one that everybody cares about, i.e. System Shock 2.  (System Shock 1 is still pretty cool though.  Only bad thing about it is that it's probably responsible for ruining Bioshock for me, since I kept thinking "why did they design it in this way, when they already did things better way back with System Shock?")

 

My absolute favorite shooter from that era is Thief 1 and 2.  Really Thief, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex make up the holy trinity that are entirely responsible for people talking about "immersive sims" like they are an actual genre.  Really they were just three innovative shooters that were so good that people decided that they had to be part of some wider phenomenon.

 

Other shooters to consider from that general era (I'm assuming that you've already played Half-Life 1):

 

-Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (if you can get the damned thing to run.)

-MDK/MDK 2

-Unreal Gold

-Aliens Vs. Predator (the 2000 one; they made a sequel and then another game with the same name plus there's also the unrelated arcade game I guess)

-Giants: Citizen Kabuto

-Oni

-Serious Sam First and Second Encounter (the originals are better than the remasters, though the remasters are okay)

-Undying

-Swat 3

-Postal 2

 

Uploaded 6 hours ago.  That means if Epic had their way, this video wouldn't exist.

A while back I got Stasis off of a Mandalore recommendation, because at the time it was going for like two bucks on GOG.  (Looking it up, apparently it's on sale right now for under two bucks.)  I found it to be pretty enjoyable, though it felt a lot like a free adventure game (which I played a lot of back in the day.)  In terms of theme, length, etc. it reminded me most of the the white chamber.  Aesthetically it doesn't match, since Stasis is in an isometric perspective and has no JP influence on it.   The isometric perspective makes me immediately compare it to Sanitarium, since the only other adventure game I can think of that uses this perspective are the two Twinsen games.  But those are a completely different beast since they contain platforming and other action elements which neither Sanitarium nor Stasis do.

 

There are some broad similarities between Stasis and Sanitarium

 

 

but Stasis doesn't really feel like a "Sanitarium clone."  It's very much doing its own thing.  For example, Sanitarium very quickly puts you into situations which can't literally be true and each stage of the game only ups the ante on making sure that you know that this has to be a delusion of some sort.  The game quickly becomes to tease out how specifically the main character is delusion, and what sort of metaphor each delusion represents for what is happening in reality.  While there are definitely questions about the mental state of the main character of Stasis, it's never suggested that the majority of the game is not literally happening.  You are simply in a very real horrific situation of being woken up on a deep space research ship where things went wrong at some point, and where everything was probably pretty bad "before" they went wrong.

 

Most old adventure games will get to a point where you have one thing left to do but twenty items in your inventory and fifty places you can go to.  Thus you start wandering around from location to location trying to see if any ideas pop up, and eventually you just use everything on everything.  Stasis avoids this by continually putting in points of no return and removing items from your inventory when they are no longer needed.  This is a popular thing for new adventure games to do, though often it results in puzzles being trivial because there's only one place you can go and only two things in your inventory, so brute forcing is immediate.  (And to add insult to injury, a lot of games will have the "puzzle" be to do something you were outright told to do, i.e. "insert tube A into slot B to activate the machine.)  Stasis has a nice balance of having just enough available to not be obvious how to proceed, while not being large enough to get frustrating.  Like Sanitarium, it has great atmosphere, and so even when you are confused it's still fun just to take in the environment.  Being unable to backtrack also is nice for the theme: you are on a man on a mission to save your wife and daughter from this place and escape.

 

That being said, Stasis has issues.  Most characters aren't compelling and the voice acting is horrible.  There were several characters where I wasn't sure if it was just a poor performance or if it was text to speech.  Text to speech definitely was used for the computer systems, and that is used to great creepy effect, but when your daughter talks like that too it takes you out of the game.  The game is also not too long.  I beat it in just under 5 hours according to GOG Galaxy and there were a couple of times when I left the game on while I checked on something else.  Definitely worth the two bucks I paid for it, and so I guess it's worth it on the current sale, but it doesn't feel quite like a polished product.

 

Now I just got done playing the sequel, Stasis: Bone Totem.  This game makes Stasis feel like a proof of concept.  Everything is improved.  It's a longer experience.  Took about 11.5 hours for me to complete.  You now control three characters with very different personalities, abilities, and who are forced into different areas.  You can trade items between you (giving it a little of a Day of the Tentacle feel) but for the most part each party member has to do things alone.  There will be points where a specific character has to do things before anyone else can do anything, either because a plot flag needs to be swapped or that character needs to grab some items to give to anyone else.  However, most of the time there will be something for each character to do.  Therefore if you are getting stuck as one character you can swap to another to see if you make progress there.  Generally each of them will be in a very different environment too (though there is a general progression from the exterior of the facility, to the interior, to the depths with research labs, to the evil temple of doom.)  On top of that, the fact that we have three characters means that they frequently talk to each other, giving us a much better insight into their thought processes.  There are three talkative NPCs you will have with you later on, each with their own spin on things.  This really might be one of the most compelling group of characters I've ever seen in an adventure game.

 

Oh, and before I forget, there are now no problems with the voice acting.  In Stasis it ranged from "serviceable" to "not very good" to "is this text to speech?"  In Bone Totem all of the voice acting is professionally done with the right amount of emotion.  The only text to speech comes from the announcements from your plugsuit or from the station itself.

 

Bone Totem streamlines the mechanics to make it much clearer what can be interacted with and what cannot.  It wasn't a huge problem in Stasis to see what was just a background element, but Bone Totem makes it explicit.  They also make it so that items can only be used when zoomed in on puzzles, meaning that there's no pixel hunting to see which part of a wall you're supposed to click on with your blow torch or whatever.  There's a hint system, but I didn't use it.  (Though I guess I did look at a walkthrough for two of the trickier puzzles.  Only one of them felt kind of BS in difficulty though, the other one I was just impatient with.)  So I don't know if it is a good hint system, or one like Myst 4's that immediately went from "vague useless hint" to "here are the exact clicks you need to make."

 

I like the story in Bone Totem more as well.  Without getting into spoilers, a lot of Stasis is "evil corporation does evil stuff."  I guess that's a spoiler, but you should be able to figure out you are dealing with an evil corporation in the first ten minutes.  (The fact that people in stasis are called "products" which are "damaged" or "lost" instead of killed is a good hint.)  Since you are in crisis mode the whole game, and separated from your family until the end, you don't get much of a sense about your relationship with your wife and daughter.  In contrast in Bone Totem we are constantly seeing new wrinkles in the dynamic between the main trio (a husband and wife Mac and Charlie, together with Moses the robot bear toy.  Each is in mourning of Hope, their daughter.)  The horrors in this game still have a lot going into them, but it's more focused on one theme rather than being general evil science done.  We also get a much better sense in terms of how the corporation actually interacts with the world, and how satisfied (or not) people are with this.  The result is a much more fleshed out world, whereas Stasis feels more like a sci-fi haunted house in comparison (not that it's not enjoyable for what it is.)

 

Anyway, I recommend both.  Pick up Stasis for cheap first and if you like it, get Bone Totem later.

 

EDIT: If you've seen the Bone Totem review from Mandalore, he points out a bunch of AI generated photos in the game.  I didn't see any of the images that he mentioned when I played through it, so I guess the updated to remove them actually did go through.

14 hours ago, Moby said:

Official media of Edgy Anime Rayman eating sushi ans snorting coke off a naked cow woman isn't something I had on my bingo card.

Edgy remakes for internet hype have happened so often that honestly nothing about this surprises me.

 

I mean, I wouldn't have put together this specific configuration of details, but "Ubisoft makes edgy remake of classic property" seems like it would have been a safe bet.

Just to show how crazy this is, I finally got around to watching the 4th Project A-Ko from them.  One of the extras included were the credits included in the original VHS release.  See, for some reason the original Central Park Media release re-used the credit insert videos from Project A-Ko 2 while having the audio be the song from Project A-Ko 4.  Later releases corrected this to have the insert videos come from Project A-Ko 4.  This is the version used for the English credits in the blu-ray (after the original JP credits play.)  But they still included the original VHS credits with the wrong video as an extra.

 

No one would ever demand this.  There is no reason to have it there other than to be an amusing curiosity.  But they did it.

One thing I really love about Discotek is how they are as comprehensive as possible with what they put on their discs.

 

For example, their release of Project A-Ko has the animation used to prompt you to flip over the laser disc to get from Side A to Side B.  Completely unneeded in a blu-ray release obviously (and they don't play it in the middle of the actual movie) but it's a cute little animation and I like that it's there.

 

Similarly, the Sgt. Frog collection comes with little animations that were on the JP DVD's where the characters from the show remind you to not sit so damned close to the TV.  There's 13 of these, so it's actually quite a lot of animation.

 

This is part of why I like having physical copies.  The bigger reason is that I can't get cockblocked by an external server, but it just feels like a more complete product when you get all these extras.  (I pity those that saw the extended editions of LOTR but didn't get the loads of featurettes.)  Most of the time you don't even get the commentary track on streaming.

I would think that it it is insane that Epic has a store and you can't get stuff like Jazz Jackrabbit or Epic Pinball on it.  That is, if it wasn't the case that you couldn't even buy a single Unreal game on their store.

 

It's like an alternate reality where George Lucas owned a competitor to Amazon and said "Fuck you, we won't sell Star Wars movies here, buy 'em on Ebay or something."

 

EDIT: Apparently they even pulled those games from GOG since the last time I checked?  Glad I picked up Unreal Tournament and Unreal Gold when I did then.

We need to market our store to American tourists.

 

Well, use English in the commercial then.

 

That's not enough.

 

I don't know, use the Battle Hymn of the Republic I guess?

 

 

 

I'm kind of disappointed that this is apparently being recommended to everyone, since Youtube recommends weird Japanese commercials to me all the time and this is one of the best ones.

1 hour ago, Doopliss2008 said:

Well, I don't post much here now, but turns out this year, two of my remaining uncles got diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, one passed already and one is in pretty bad shape, gonna go visit him while I still can.

 

moral of the story, don't smoke, esp a pack or more a day.

Don't know what I can say other cancer is rough (and my upvote is meant as sympathy.)

 

42 minutes ago, Moby said:

So, was looking at the newspaper () and there was an article about "digital dementia". It talks about a study from a Canadian child hospital research institute, Alberta, about the surge of kids glued to screens since early age.

 

The study points:

- Lack of actual reading, because they are more easily distracted to whatever they find on the internet than with a plain book

- Short attention span, the overload of colors of sounds make usual reality and classes "boring", so kids don't pay attention

- Weak memory and info retention, since the info are only read superficially, they are quickly forgotten

- Brain atrophy, affecting areas responsible for memory and focus

 

It also points that kids should not have unsupervised access to internet and phones, kids under 6 should be forbidden of getting close, kids between 7 and 13 should be limited to 1 or 2 hours per day and social media should be allowed only to 16 and up.

 

But again, it won't matter for shit because shoving a phone or tablet on your toddler face with Roblox or Youtube Kids on is easier than being an actual parent.

I've frequently told people that we are moving into a "post-literate" age.  People act like that is crazy since literacy has long been associated with technological advancement and obviously we have technology.  But the truth is that many kids get almost all of their information in video and podcast format.  So they need very little in terms of reading.  When I say "post-literate" I don't mean that they'll be completely illiterate, since you still do need a very minimal amount of reading and writing ability to navigate through apps and so on. (Though that amount is decreasing each year from the increased use of voice commands and preferring icons over text in GUIs.)  What it does mean is that their reading ability doesn't need go beyond the third grade level.

 

Or to put things another way, I probably have a better Japanese literacy level than the average US high school graduate has as an English reading level, and I'm hardly fluent in Japanese.  I do think that we will reach a point where ESL classes are repurposed to be used for native speakers too.  College English 101 classes practically fill that role already.

 

There is an obvious fallout here in not being able to read literature.  But to be honest that had been failing for a while, due to the Prussian education model doing its damnedest to make sure that kids hate reading for fun.  The bigger fallout is that even when speaking people who are "post-literate" have trouble parsing all but the simplest grammar.  This makes discussions of things like logic practically impossible.

On 12/12/2022 at 10:47 PM, Veez said:

I am a developer for Microsoft Teams because I sold my soul for a paycheck a long time ago.

I know you're not responsible for it, but maybe you know who is responsible for adding "reactions" to outlook.  If so, give him a smack for me.  I hate opening up my company e-mail each morning and seeing a million notifications.  Usually a few of those are meetings that I might actually forget about and need to see, but all the rest are reactions.

Oh shit, it accepts JP inputs despite the claims.

 

However, it still bans terms.  Even 尻尾 (tail) is banned, probably because the first character means "butt."

You get different results but they aren't exactly more reliable.  For example, here's what I get for 八雲藍, 東方 (Ran Yakumo, Touhou)

 

 

Well, it's got the Touhou vibe down, but there's no sign of Ran particularly.  Let's try:

 

八雲藍, 東方, 狐, 天狐, 式神, 九尾 (Ran Yakumo, Touhou, fox, tenko, shikigami, kyuubi)

 

 

It's definitely went the kyuubi route, but we've lost all sign of Touhou project and this still isn't Ran.  Maybe it needs a description, so let's try:

 

八雲藍は橙と散歩している, 東方 (Ran Yakumo is on a walk with Chen, Touhou)

 

 

Well we're in the Touhou wheelhouse again and we do have the correct scene, but these still aren't recognizable characters and certainly not the Yakumos.  Let's try something more mainstream (and I also mixed up the grammar 

 

霊夢と話している魔理沙, 東方 (Marisa talking with Reimu, Touhou)

 

 

Okay so even in Japanese it knows Touhou style but doesn't know the characters.  They are talking though so it is parsing the Japanese grammar.  Let's try something more mainstream:

 

空条承太郎, ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 (Jotaro Kujo, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)

 

 

So yeah, this is definitely a "doesn't know Touhou characters" problem not a "can't parse Japanese text" problem.

 

Japanese searches seem like they dig into more untapped regions of the data set.  For example here's what you get for "Tomoko Kuroki, Watamote" in English:

 

 

It's clearly pulling the title of the manga (though not quite correctly), but otherwise this isn't very Watamote related.  Here's a result from the equivalent Japanese search, 黒木智子, ワタモテ

 

 

We have the title appearing again, but now it's a black and white manga with a character who still isn't Tomoko, but at least getting into the same ballpark.  There were other results for the Japanese one and they were all black and white manga of a nerdy girl in a cluttered room.  (They all had glasses for some reason.)  Some had even more mangled Japanese text which might have been part of the title.  In contrast the English search is all cutesy color images.  The same thing happened with Jotaro by the way: Search in Japnase, get black and white, search in English, get color.  Except there you get Jotaro either way.

 

I don't know what to do with this knowledge.  There's still a large number of forbidden words even in Japanese, the output frequently gets censored as inappropriate, and I haven't been able to find anything that it can successfully draw in Japanese that it couldn't draw in English.  The only real difference seems to be that if something is based on a manga, the JP searches are derived from the manga artwork while the English searches are derived from the anime artwork.

 

EDIT: For example, here's what I get when I put in every single variation of Girl und Panzer's name and every way of referring to Erwin (including her real name  松本里子 - Satoko Matsumoto)

 

 

That is, the same generic anime girl in front of a tank that I got when I did similar prompts in English.