To those who have read ZUN's writing in Japanese, what's his writing style like? Specifically in DiPP C62/3, IN stage titles and descriptions, IN music comments, CiLR and greetings/introductions. (I'll be fine with just a (not-too-)general statement though.)
I like the translations on the wiki, but I don't know how much reflects his actual tone versus the translators' own wording.
It would be a while before I can read them myself, so satisfying my curiosity will be much appreciated.
I have two more to ask:
- Did ZUN say anything about DiPP C62's story being solvable, like Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None? Or is it simply a hoax?
- We learnt from a recent interview that ZUN composes music before he creates the stages/bosses. Does he compose based on a title he has in mind, or does he name a piece after finishing it?
The DiPP writing style doesn't actually seem very similar to works after PCB-ish. ZUN kind of went into this pseudo-poet phase where he thought it would be cool for everything to sound super mysterious and deep, and he sort of grew out of it as he started to seriously worldbuild. He seems to have read a lot of books around this time and as you know he became a bit infatuated with Agatha Christie. This really affected his writing style and is kind of what characterizes the uber-quirky interactions in EoSD and PCB. And CoLA to a lesser extent. I think some of this style got infused into Rinnosuke's character a bit. The difference between DiPP/EoSD and CiLR is pretty gigantic -- by the time of CiLR he refined a lot of ideas and wrote way more formally, phrasing choices and references being much more deliberate. And then music comments are usually more casual than his regular blog writing.
Whenever I write on the wiki I try to find tone and match it, but it's hard. Some works get it better than others, and that might be purely because of how easily things translate. Like just in PCB's music comments, there's "和風に和風に" which is translated as "in a Japanese style", losing the repetition and the double-meaning of 和風. The next line is "この曲、「これから弾幕の嵐！」って雰囲気を完全に削ぎます", which conveys an excited phrase that the player is usually supposed to think to themselves before a danmaku, but this song erases all traces of that feeling and calms you down. This is then translated as "This song completely removes any hint of the upcoming storm of danmaku". Like, there are quite a lot of these translations, especially in earlier works, that don't communicate the same kind of feeling as the original and can end up just plain wrong on examination. But it's really case-by-case.
As far as DiPP goes, nobody knows. If he had said anything about it the story might be unveiled as a sham or just be solved, but my gut says that if you were to ask him today, he would say not to try to interpret it too deeply, subtly implying that it never had any meaning. But that could just be my biases showing, since I'm becoming increasingly convinced it was never meant to be an actual mystery, but rather just a nonsense story told as though it were one.
I'm not sure if he's said anything about music titles, but I could easily see it being both. He starts more with a vague feeling and concept first, then writes music, then fleshes out the game around it. Even if he used to start purely with music and just wrote stuff around it, he isn't as whimsical about it anymore. I would say he almost certainly does a ton of research into figuring out what characters he wants to build and the scenario he wants to write, then writes music around those concepts, with a title coming before or after depending on inspiration. The actual game content for sure comes last, though.
For example, Cinderella Cage ~ Kagome-Kagome was almost definitely a title first, then music. He fit that title around the story of Kaguya and used Eientei to represent the Cinderella cage. Meanwhile, he probably also knew that he would incorporate Kagome Kagome into the theme itself. It's similar with a lot of themes; you can see in the music comments when he says "I wanted to write a song like X", and in these cases the titles probably came first (although maybe not entirely formed). But some titles are clearly afterthoughts, like "The Sealed-Away Youkai ~ Lost Place". A lot of the X ~ Y titles feel that way.
