tl;dr

• Sheffy's ice powers are well utilized.
• The interactions between Sheffy and the rest of Bishokuden were cute.
• However, Ruka and Ilya are barely utilized here.

• Easy, only missed 3 lines.
• Skipped most of the chibi section, though.

• Two words were omitted from the title.

The Story Itself

The story starts with Bishokuden trying to decide what to eat for the new years. Not being able to decide, they opt to have a new years feast with a wide variety of food instead. For that, they travel around procuring ingredients.

In their second destination Oma, they get on the fishing boat to, well, fish. Here, we see Sheffy using her ice powers. First, she uses it to freeze the sea's waves to prevent KSKN from drowning, and second, she freezes the fishermen's fishes to preserve them.

She uses it again in the caravan market, where she freezes the river so people could cross since the bridge's busted and also froze some NPCs' groceries since the it was implied that the market was far from Landosol. However, she had to be reminded by a disguised Kyaru that she could use ice magic in the first place. This is where I'd complain about Sheffy being stupid, but the entire point of this event is to train Sheffy out of her naivety, so I guess there's some sense here.

Speaking of disguises, I think the highlight of this event was the disguised Bishokudens. I don't really have a reason for it, it's just funny and le heckin wholesome. I like how with each Bishokuden, the Sheffy becomes less and less convinced.

With Peco, Sheffy just thought she was familiar. With Kokkoro, Sheffy asked how the disguised Kokkoro knew her name. Kokkoro immediately bullshitted that she noticed Sheffy's name on her now broken bag. Sheffy felt bad about it, but Kokkoro reassured that whoever (it's her, that's why she knew Sheffy's name was there) made the bag would be happy to learn that it was used until it could no longer be.

In addition to what I said about Kyaru before, she also told the suspicious man to fuck off since he was trying to scam people out of their groceries with the "better have some rupies and no groceries than have no rupies and have spoiled groceries" scheme. I do think it's fitting that Kyaru is taking the aggressive role...and that's it. That's all I can say about her. I'm just saying this since I noticed I've been shitting on Kyaru for a bit now and I figured it's time to throw her some bone.

Also, I wonder why Pecorine was the best at being disguised? Maybe it's because she's royalty and therefore has to don many masks in order to keep the country running? Nah, I'm just fucking with you. This part of the story was clearly written for laughs and not everything has to have a hidden meaning.

Notice how I skipped over the group's first destination? They went to the temple first before going to Oma. That's because literally nothing happened there. They arrive, all the mochis were gone because the suspicious man bought them all, they left.

The one thing you could argue happened is Sheffy confiding in Ilya and Ruka about her past. What the three has in common is that they barely know anything about their past. Ilya doesn't know jack shit before she was woken up by Diabolos, Ruka not having much memories before arriving in Landosol, and Sheffy's whole deal about being a terminal (haven't read arc 2 so I can't really say more than this).

However, that's all Ruka's and Ilya's contribution in the story. Bishokuden noticed by themselves anyways that something was up with Sheffy, all Ruka and Ilya did was tell them "yeah, Sheffy talked to us". Bishokuden could've figured by themselves that letting Sheffy handle things by herself is one way to make her feel more welcome. My point is, the story would still function just fine even if Ilya and Ruka were cut from the story.

You could argue they contributed in the fight against the bullgod, but Bishokuden probably could've handled themselves fine, and they didn't even appear in the CG!

All in all, I think this was a good Bishokuden event, but not a good Ilya/Ruka event.

Difficulty

These are the lines I missed.

First one, is one of the boss' lines, I got the rest, but this one tripped me. It's the usual, being fully written in kana actually makes things harder. And guy's voice is rough, so the usual "close your eyes and hope you know the words" trick doesn't work. But this is just the event boss and it's a literal who monster so who gives a fuck really.

Second one. I bet this is a Japanese proverb, Ruka seems to like those.

Third one. I'm not sure what the 兼ねました means here. Is Karin saying that she doesn't want to throw a party for Bishokuden, but has to anyways because Bishokuden got so many thank you letters? It could also mean "to think of the future" though, so I guess she's thinking of of throwing a party for Bishokuden? Yeah, this is definitely it, when I took the screenshot and reread the line, I just realized. But I figured might as well keep this in since I already took the screenshot.

And finally, the chibi section. I'm not sure why only some of them are voiced. And I'm not sure why pressing left and right keeps giving you random guilds. In the end, I just didn't bother too much, because of that, and because the texts goes on on its own, making it hard to scan. Also, to the person that suggested Yomininja, thanks for the suggestion. I haven't tried it, but will definitely check it out.

The reason why I don't immediately get to it is because there was a time where I kept trying new softwares instead of actually learning back when I first started. After some point, I decided to stop and just kept whatever I had set up and swore only to change things if something broke. This is also why I haven't migrated to Yomitan yet, I probably should, but Yomichan still does its job just fine.

1170/1173 (99%) comprehension. The 3 I missed are those three I mentioned above. The count also doesn't include the chibi section for the reasons I mentioned.

Translation Differences

The word(s) 大作戦 are straight up gone in the EN translation. Usually, 作戦 is translated as "Operation: (operation name)", we can even see this in one of the episodes' name where 思い出おせち作戦！is translated as "Operation: Memory Food!". How about 大? This kanji here means big, and in this context, it means the operation under way is of the large-scale variety. In the EN title, we can see that they opted to slap the big adjective on the word errand instead. I guess a correct translation of this would be "New Year's Gourmet Memories - Big Operation: Sheffy's Errand!"? "big operation" sounds kinda weird, but "big" is indeed what they went with instead of something like "great" or "grand".

This is really common way of handling 作戦 in this game, apparently. Hatsune's Perfect Present and Halloween Saviors, Assemble! were also translated this way. Wait, Assemble? You may ask. Yes, the word Scramble was outright changed in that event, but we'll talk about that when I get there.

That's all for this blogpost. See ya on the next one.

I really like that Sheffy intercrural picture by Ramuneruko.