Aoi's Toy Friends

tl;dr

The Story Itself

• The plot of this event is literally just Toy Story 3. Not necessarily a bad thing, but...
• There's very little interaction between the characters. Is this just how all Aoi events are like?

Difficulty

• None. Easy event. But that could just be me getting better, heh.
• Event title is pretty funky though, discussed in the Translation Differences section.

Translation Differences

• What the hell is 以心電心?
• The rest of the title is in katakana. It's impossible to screw up unless someone decides to """"localize""" it.

The Story Itself

The Plot

You know I'm struggling to think of things to say when I do a story rundown on a normal event. Oh well, I suppose it's impossible to write masterpieces after masterpieces. The writers of this game are still human, after all. Humans that are expected to write a story event every month. You're bound to miss every now and then.

Aoi wants to upgrade her My Friend-kun. She needs money for that. To get that money, she works in a toy factory. She works under Mifuyu in said toy factory. Things go smoothly for a bit until some strange package arrive. Aoi hears voices from inside the box. Inside is Toy King, according to the factory owner, it's from a discontinued product chain.

Turns out, Toy King could call out to Aoi because he gained her bocchi spirit. From there, they get the idea to revive the product chain. It's a massive success. Another package arrive, inside are a bunch of broken toys that they plan to revive, seeing how succesfull reviving Toy King was.

Toy King suddenly left at one point. At the same time, the non-sentient Toy Kings that were sold start rampaging in town. Turns out, it's Toy King is behind all this. Aoi and Mifuyu confront and defeat Toy King with the help of a fused Everyone's My Friend-kun, the toy that the factory produced before they revived Toy King.

Toy King confesses that he was abandoned in favor of a new toy by its owner. And by the time the owner remembered that he even had Toy King in the first place, he had already grown up and leaving for college. He decided to donate Toy King to an orphanage, but the package somehow ended up in the factory instead. (I don't think it was specified if it was Sarendia, but that's the only orphanage in Landosol and the members of Sarendia did make some minor appearance in this event, so the writers probably intended for the audience to piece the two together.)

The character interactions

Or lack thereof. I don't think Mifuyu did anything but do her job. She encouraged and cheered on Aoi, sure, but that's because it was her job to keep the factory running. Yeah, the Romancing Salasaria event really soured my opinion on Mifuyu. Greedy bitch.

Noticed how I didn't say anything about Tamaki in the QRD? She literally did nothing. She came to the factory thinking it was a taiyaki factory, but decided to stick to learn the know-how of running a factory because Akino blew up her last one. When Aoi and Mifuyu went after Toy King, Tamaki even STAYED in the factory to hold down the fort. Robbing her of the opportunity to at least contribute in the fight.

...Yeah, that's all I have to say here. There's just so little to talk about.

Overall thoughts

Disappointing. Both Aoi events I've read so far have been meh. Gonna try to put myself in the writers' shoes for a moment here; I think the intended "appeal" of Aoi events is seeing her struggle with her bocchi-ness and her random outbursts. Obviously, there will be less interactions when dealing with a loner. Then again, if I wanted to read about Aoi being alone, I'd go read her bond stories. You can still cover her bocchi-ness and her outbursts in bond stories, though, since most bond stories are done solo with KSKN occasionally butting in. So ideally, her events should cover something else entirely. For example, how about...her actually interacting with other characters?

Difficulty

Not much to say here. Easy. 100% (1156/1156) comprehension. For a normal event, this is on the longer side. Unfortunately, longer doesn't always mean better. Despite its length, this event managed to communicate so little...

If I included the event's title, my comprehension score would drop to 99% because I have no fucking idea how to interpret those mishmash of kanjis.

Translation Differences

The first thing that Japanese learning guides usually does when telling you about kanji is not to think of them as individual pieces, but as straight up words. Say, you encounter the word 頑張る. You're not supposed to memorize 頑, 張, and る (lol) individually, but 頑張る as a whole. Of course, doing so anyways is an option if you're struggling to remember whole words, people usually call it the "isolated" approach or something like that. The purpose of doing so is to give you the knowledge to guess the meaning of words from the radicals to lessen the amount of look ups needed. But this isn't something I personally did. I did like 2 weeks of RTK before thinking to myself "wow, this isn't fun!" and dropping it. I don't mind looking words up anyways.

So, what does this have to do with the title? Because 以心電心 isn't a word! At least, to my knowledge. 心 is simple enough, that's the name of my wife. And 電 is lightning. Thanks, Lyrael.

Now, what's 以? Well, I know it's a part of the word 以外, 以上, 以内. But the three are completely different in meaning. Let's see what it means individually.

That didn't help at all.

So..."Because Heart Lightning Heart!"? Yeah, "Fully Automagical!" is probably fine.

This is the first time I had to check an official English translation of something to understand said something.

For the katakana in the title, nothing much to say here. I guess you could say it's Aoi Toy Friends instead of Aoi's Toy Friends, but this is probably just done to make it easier to pronounce for the VA.

That is all for this blogpost. Again and again, I dislike being negative, but I dislike self-censoring even more. If there's something I dislike, I'll say it straight up.

I always said that Aoi is literally me. But I guess I never said I liked myself...