long post ahead. please input, I wanna hear from others too!!
to disclaimer. this is not a hate post. this will not become a hate post. criticism is welcome and encouraged. no anger or pure negativity about the OG or the remake here.
I will love and defend Grand Bazaar until I leave this earth and go to the massive fixer-upper farm in the sky. I was SO ecstatic when this release was announced. I watched the trailer immediately. I lost my mind. I messaged friends that had never played a HM or SoS game before to yell in all caps about how my favourite HM game was getting a remake. I will forever be emotionally in Zephyr Town no matter what.
so far, I am enjoying the crap out of the new one. I love that it's voiced now by like... real voices instead of Felix just going "BAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!!!!" every time I speak to him. I like the remastered music. I LOVE how it looks in 3D. the characters look amazing. the animals are adorable. the way the bazaar works is similar enough to be familiar and new enough to be a tiny bit of a challenge, and I like it.
I LOVE that we have Harvest Sprites now! I'm so excited! As one of the few HMs without them in the original, I love that they put them in. I can't wait to see how they work in Zephyr Town!
I'm excited to get to know the new characters. I'm really excited to build up my bazaar. I can't WAIT to have an alpaca!!!!!
but also............ sorry, I'm still gonna be calling most of them their old English names to myself, even by accident at first.... but Ivan/Jules and Antoinette/June will probably be on purpose.
if I could have been a girl married to a girl in the OG game, I would have married Antoinette. I adore that introverted sweetheart. I love her angsty little depressed attitude and the shy lonely girl on the inside and the adorable way she talks to you once you become close, like she isn't sure how to have friends. I can't wait to see more of her in the remake and to see if they flesh her out a bit more with more events or anything like that. I found that in the new AWL, I got to see more of some of the characters, and I'm so excited for that here, especially with Antoinette.
instead, I ended up marrying Ivan, and I absolutely adore him too. my brilliant, sweet husband who loves his flowers and his perfume and and his brother and our cats. he is so good with children. I will definitely also be marrying him in a playthrough on the remake because I can't not have my soft chocolate-hating, dog-disliking nerd. my twink boy. sorry he's twink I don't make the rules.
but... the names. the NAMES. I don't hate Gabriel for Angelo, I think it fits cutely. Mina for Marian seems like a cute fit too, but that also might be me being reminded of Sailor Venus. Raul and his brothers having new names is, uh, certainly a choice, but at least they're still Hispanic names (flashbacks to anime characters being given White AF names in American dubs... Tomoyo Daidouji from Cardcaptor Sakura becoming "Madison Taylor", literally every character in the old DiC dub of Sailor Moon, and other such fun instances).
I don't quite understand Cindy becoming Sylvia or Lauren becoming Laurie, since they're not that different and neither names are a literal translation of their Japanese names. Dirk's and Angelo's aren't either. Joan's is... kind of similar I suppose. Same with Nellie.
I know Maple isn't actually Daisy but....... she's basically Daisy. That's an odd change to me.
And before you jump at me, I know. I know that most of the new names are just basically a better translation of their original Japanese names. I know it's low-key hypocritical of me to throw shade at anime dubs for using anglified names when the change I'm grumbling about is essentially the same thing. I know.
But I'm AuDHD and whiny and I hate change, so I will be salty about it regardless, particularly Ivan and Antoinette.
Also, my favourite masculine name ever is Julian. I name any masculine/AMAB/boy version of myself Julian in video games. I'm just a tiny bit bitter that Ivan's name was changed to Jules and not Julian. Julian is so much nicer. I'm incredibly bias because of how much I love the name. But Jules sounds like a nickname, not a full name, and Ivan doesn't quite feel like a 'nickname' kind of guy to me... unless Dirk came up with one when they were kids and it just sort of stuck and that's how Dirk introduces him now so he just goes with it. That's a vibe I can see LOL
But June for Antoinette? Why? Antoinette is such a gorgeous name! It fits her so well! June doesn't sound as... regal, I suppose? Even Enju as the translation of her name is adorable. June isn't even an exact translation anyways - it looks more like they saw the letters and went "hey, this can be scrambled around to a name". But even just to keep her name as Enju would have been cute.
In fact, almost everyone's phonetic/literal translations are cute, just keep those!
....except Amir. Please don't call Amir his literal translation. PLEASE.
