If you have to cheat, at least make it enjoyable cheating, right? I’d play Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn in Japanese if I could, but since all I have is the English version and an English Wii, no way am I going to deny myself my right to delicious rock-paper-scissors disguised as a strategy game. Part 1 is the most annoying part of any FE I’ve ever played to date but thankfully I’m almost done with. So long as I get to kill that stupid cheating Black Knight again in the end, I’m cool.
Still this doesn’t change the fact that I’m devoting a considerable amount of time to a game that is not furthering my studies of Japanese in any way, shape or form. So to counterbalance that, I’m also playing Rune Factory 2 on my DS. Actually I’ve been playing it fitfully for a while, but the restrictive nature of the Kyle parts has got me rather down. The second generation is better in terms of things to do, but the main character just isn’t a patch on cute little Kyle so it’s a bit of a dilemma. Why they couldn’t just skip the whole second generation thing and keep Kyle throughout I will never figure out.
So I’m enjoying the game, but am I learning anything? Quite a lot, actually. In the beginning I thought I’d take my DS over to the computer and enter sentences into the SRS as I played, but it’s a very tedious and slow process, not recommended in the least. So now I just play the game like I would any other. Occasionally a rather tricky kanji comes up and I note it down for future checking, but other than that I’m breezing through. It’s important to me to get my Japanese to the point where it feels just like English to me, and playing through games without constantly running to the dictionary is part of that for me. What I am thinking of doing, though, is seeing if I can find a script of the game, or at least a comprehensive FAQ in Japanese, and then ripping the sentences from there. I’ll get round to that…some day. And that’s all for today.
