[Josho]

Originally Posted by TimovieMan

At the risk of sounding like an idiot here, but can't you just fill those text boxes with spaces or EOL's?

That's a great question!

You can certainly insert ellipses or spaces, and make the player click away empty (or nearly empty) text boxes. It might well be left to the translator's discretion.

And, in fact, we might be seeing that happen over and over in 999. There are many, many instances in which the text box you have to click away contains nothing but an ellipsis, and you often get two such text boxes in a row. But the text is also weighted down with thousands of lines of repetitive, unenlightening descriptions and reiterations, so maybe the translator occasionally got tired of inserting ellipses and went back to writing reiterations of stuff that was already obvious.

Now, there are TONS of ellipsis used in Japanese games. They're apparently supposed to denote (pick one) "surprise," "confusion," "sorrow," "joy," "anger," "delight," or whatever, and I think we're supposed to read them as "(the character) was wordless with emotion." But without comparing the original Japanese to the translation, we have no way of knowing how many of those thousands of ellipses we're required to click through are preserved from the original Japanese text, and how many were inserted by the English translator to "use up" unneeded text boxes.

In any case, I'm on your side. I'd rather click through empty text boxes than actually have to read through volumes of pointless prose inserted to fill up space.

[TimovieMan]

Originally Posted by Josho

And, in fact, we might be seeing that happen over and over in 999. There are many, many instances in which the text box you have to click away contains nothing but an ellipsis, and you often get two such text boxes in a row.
...
Now, there are TONS of ellipsis used in Japanese games. They're apparently supposed to denote (pick one) "surprise," "confusion," "sorrow," "joy," "anger," "delight," or whatever, and I think we're supposed to read them as "(the character) was wordless with emotion." But without comparing the original Japanese to the translation, we have no way of knowing how many of those thousands of ellipses we're required to click through are preserved from the original Japanese text, and how many were inserted by the English translator to "use up" unneeded text boxes.

There were quite a few of these "..." text boxes in 999. I always figured they were either "The characters are speechless by the events that just happened" or "the game developer is building up tension". I liked those. They made me wait a few seconds while I was dying to find out what would happen next...

But then again, I'm not the most objective person in this matter, I loved the game...

[Josho]

Hehe...I would say that if the writer(s) and designer(s) had to make you *deliberately waste time and keystrokes* in order to build up tension, then they're doing something grievously wrong. There isn't nearly enough happening in this story to support a dozen cliffhangers, let alone hundreds of them, which is what they're artificially creating every time they make you click away empty textboxes (or redundant ones) just to get to the next bit.

[TimovieMan]

And that's why those were my thoughts *before* you explained about the "fixed number of text boxes"-thingy...

Good thing I wasn't bothered by them in the least...

[Josho]

Originally Posted by TimovieMan

And that's why those were my thoughts *before* you explained about the "fixed number of text boxes"-thingy...

Good thing I wasn't bothered by them in the least...

It IS good!

I think the bar has been so lowered by games like these that people no longer expect anything better.