I had an odd experience today in FFXI, yet one that’s not entirely unavoidable and I’m surprised hasn’t happened already.
It was a day of catching up on random quests. I got all sorts of things done that I’d been putting off, and got a few more quests to put into the “forget to mark down, and forget to do” pile. Well, one of these involved getting a Wild Pamama (FFXI’s version of a banana) of an Opo-Opo (Monkey) and taking it to a shrine and yelling out my name. Well, I was taking forever to get the Wild Pamama, kept getting normal Pamamas, so I started getting restless, and looking around. I saw on a webpage that there was a Notorious Monster version of the Opo-Opo that spawned every 2-3 hours one grid space over, so I worked my way over to that area. I came into the room, and sure enough, there he was: Mischevious Micholas. I claimed him, but after I did, I noticed another guy right there.
Well, the fight wasn’t an easy one, but I managed to beat him while simultaneously getting berated in Japanese by this guy. I’m not sure exactly what he was saying but as soon as I replied to him using the autotranslator “(I’m sorry.) (Japanese) (I don’t understand.)” he got very angry saying I had a Japanese name, and therefore must be Japanese. (I go by Hamusutaa in FFXI as well, which I’ve come to regret sometimes.) Ironically, I actually understood that part.
I got the rare drop from the monkey, but didn’t know what to do. Was he angry because he was in the middle of fighting him? No, he was at full health when I started fighting him. Was he just angry because he had been waiting there upwards of two hours and I just waltzed in and grabbed the guy right in front of him? When that happens to me, I get angry beyond words, and that’s sometimes on the Notorious Monsters that spawn every hour or so, let alone three hours.
Eventually it seems like he cooled down… and didn’t necessarily apologize, but at least said that things were okay. I took a screenshot of the entire conversation. You can see my conversation with the guy (Rikiriki), as well as another random guy who was messaging me (Eir) who I thought was a friend of Rikiriki’s, but went “sore ga nan da yo” when I asked him if he was Rikiriki’s friend, so I think he was just a victim of circumstance. You can also see my conversation with Luke (Azalyn) about the whole thing, but there was other stuff going on in the Linkshell chat as well that I didn’t include in the screenshot. And best of all, you get to see my pitiful attempts at communicating in Japanese.
Here’s the screenshot. If any of you who know Japanese can let me know what was said, I’d appreciate it.
I think I’m either going to just sell the dagger to Luke or wait a while to sell it, because I don’t want him to see the Auction House history and see my name there… at least if I wait he’ll assume I kept going back to get it. I don’t want him to feel bad.
It looks like Eir thinks a lot of people are lying when they say they don’t understand Japanese … but I’m just skimming there. The “sore ga nan da yo?” is prolly a response to the romanji — a lot of Japanese can’t read romanji very well, and that was a good way to flag that, no, you really aren’t Japanese.
Rikiriki seems to be saying the rough equivalent, “It’s okay. No, really.” Or something like that. And then something about it being okay to “go back”. *shrug*
The only part I can read is that line saying that your name is written in Japanese as well. ^^; I took a few semesters of Japanese, but for the most part, we only learned formal, so I’m sorry I’m not much help.
wow they were really hostile. I’ve never had such a run in with jpn people before. You might have inadvertantly offended them by at frist claiming to not speaking JPN, and then suddendly busting out with romanji. Next time either stick with the autotranslater nonsense or just use “summimassen boku (or in your case maybe ‘atashii’ kekeke) no nihongo wa chottoo …” = “I’m sorry my japanese is a little …. [not so good]” and go on from there.