100th Week of IDOLA
We’ve reached our 100th installment of IDOLA JP Weekly!
As a little surprise, we thought it would be fun to learn a little bit about the people that help run this blog!
Azure
Hi, I’m Azure! I’ve been with the site since the first weekly post and my main focus is making the weeklies. I translate the news as it shows up on SEGA’s website and add it to the weekly (or as soon as possible. Usually news comes out really late my time ^^;).
Originally when I asked to join Bumped, I told Ricardo that I was interested in two things; the AC scratch posts for PSO2 and helping with IDOLA news. I added IDOLA to that list because, before the game came out, a lot of phantasy star fans were disappointed that the “RPG to celebrate the 30th anniversary” was a mobile game, but I still wanted to give it a chance. After the subsite was built, and Bob came up with the weekly format, I was put in charge of putting the weeklies together. While I was kind of overwhelmed knowing that my duties were more involved than I originally expected, I was still thrilled to join! (and my PSO2 team/alliance friends were excited for me too! Shout out to Lux, Sage, and Lillanaa!)
There were bumps here and there (haha bumps, like the website), like the week the half anniversary came out (I was up until 3 am translating and I had class at 8 am that day), or when Episode 2 first came out (I expected to be translating a lot, but oh boy it caught me off guard), but overall, I’ve had fun doing this for about 2 years now. Of course, I’m not alone when it gets hectic, WAI in addition to their own duties cover for me when I’m not able to translate and they translate things, so I really appreciate everything they do! Speaking of appreciation, I appreciate the other bumped members for helping me out when I need help making localization choices, and the players that read the blog! I know that I don’t interact too much with the players in the IDOLA discord (I’m really busy with my other social circles), but I really do appreciate people reading and reacting to the weekly posts with emotes!
Closing out my segment, I just want to say a heartfelt thank you to all of you that read the posts and find the databases helpful. I hope you all are enjoying the game!
-Azure★
(p.s. I don’t care how sappy I’m being! I get to be a little sappy, as a treat.)
WHYYOUHERE
Yo, I’m WHYYOUHERE (WAIUHIRU)! I’m the guy who handles the backend stuff like guides, database management, proofreading and from time to time a post like stream recaps. There’s a lot databases and such to keep up so it sometimes comes a bit late. Hope it isn’t a big bother, trying to get better with it!
I joined Idola Bumped around the release of Messala just because I felt like helping out around the site. I didn’t have much experience with the game, so I started playing the game myself to make sure I could give accurate information. Didn’t think I’d be so invested in it when starting out, but the game’s mechanics very much jived with me. The art direction is also quite stellar with my personal favorites being Melissa, Theater, and Gerda. All this got me to the point where I’ve met great people and was able to make a discord community for people that care and want to learn more about Idola. You can find that here or in the sidebar (and yes I AM shamelessly plugging)!
Besides Idola Bumped I’ve done some work on the PSO2 site with a few main posts here and there. I hope they were helpful! You can also find me in Phantasy Star Fleet lurking from time to time. I’ve also (co)written many tierlists for Idola that you might’ve seen floating around!
One of the things I enjoy the most about doing this is making choices in localization. Seeing people use my or Azure’s translations definitely makes me quite happy. I know sometimes people don’t entirely agree with me on some choices, but I hope you can let me pass there. Can’t say thank you enough to Azure for keeping up with the main posts. It’s a lot of work I can say out of experience, so give them some support as they deserve it!
As a little addition from me, here’s a fun little thing I got while watching the streams for the blog. Its where my alt naming comes from!
-WAI-san
Final Words
We hope you’ll enjoy using the blog for years to come. If you have any questions or want certain things from the blog, feel free to ask in the comments and we’ll answer as soon as we can.
Big shoutouts to Hawpoon for letting me use the Melissa and Theater art! You can find them here! Also shoutouts to Afuu and Exa for helping with some of the editing in the background and Ricardo and Bob for managing site stuff!
Really? No Popona or Giselle in the favorites??? Dislike!
Jokes aside, thanks for the updates and posts, it really helps knowing what to do in this game when we dont have a english patch! Keep the good work!
It should be obvious Popona transcends popularity to be in the 0th position! Anyways, thanks for the comment, always nice to hear the work is useful to people!
Just wanted to thank you guys for your hard work and dedication. As much use as Google Translate is, when I want accurate information and details, I’d much rather look over here than try to translate from Google to English.
I’d offer to help, but the most I can do is give basic information on things I see that aren’t here yet and most of the time you guys already have that covered so it’s not like I’m really adding anything of use.
On a side note, would it be feasible at all to add a section for the IDOLAs themselves or would that add too much more to your already heavy workloads? Something along the lines of the IDOLA’s attacks as seen in the character menu, which parts can use those attacks, and characters that can use that IDOLA? Basically the information on game8/swiki but with a reliable translation. Especially since swiki’s info seems to be behind or missing in a lot of areas and game8, translation aside, is nowhere near as easy to go through as what you guys have here.
Thanks for the comment! About the idola pages, it’s definitely been on the table before. The main reason it hasn’t happened is that idola controlled battles just aren’t a thing outside of the story or some random event quest stage and thus for most people not that relevant. It would take a reasonable amount of effort to make them as well, because every attack has like 5 variants for idola’s. This is why effort is generally better put elsewhere. Is it out of the cards entirely though? No, we might get to it at some point when there is time or if there comes content that does facilitate knowing their skills. Or if demand for the pages becomes high enough! Hope that answers your question.
Honestly, I was thinking less about the times you use them in story and more for knowing what you’re getting into when fighting them. Things like figuring out Gemini’s buffs were more akin to form changes was a bit more difficult without having one yourself. Same with how Arch Ares…. “horn” (still not sure which part that’s supposed to be since gacha hasn’t been kind to me) removing buffs can be a nasty surprise. The attacks having so many variants though is kinda… yikes that’s a lot of work. It’s totally understandable and I figured there was something about them that would be way too much work to make it worthwhile for the moment considering how much effort you all put into everything here.
Thanks for the response and for everything you currently provide the community! If it weren’t for you all, I’d still be stumbling around the dark in a lot of the details on combat to say nothing of the systems outside of combat.
Just wanna say thank you a lot for the continued translation of idola! i started playing this game because of pso2 characters being released here, but didn’t expect to get myself extremely hooked to this game outside of its involvement to pso2!
also gerda best waifu. earth gerda when so we can get full element gerda team
A Gerda squad, now that I can get behind! Thanks for the support!