All I want is to play Trails into Reverie right now but I got a call from work and need to fix an issue remotely!

As it says on the tin, I started Trails into Reverie last night. I'm actually currently in the middle of a play session right now as I'm typing this, but I got a call from work while doing a dungeon, and am now stuck waiting for responses before I can go back to relaxing and gaming. Figured no better time than now to start typing something up so I'm at least doing something. I think this issue I got called about is resolved now, just waiting for confirmation... Gotta admit, and my friends already know this, but being on call most evenings after already working around 10 hours is hell.

Anyway, so far Trails into Reverie is very enjoyable. Lots of characters I was really hoping to see again returned, and I'm really curious where the story will go. I was a little worried about starting Reverie because I was getting so burnt out from Cold Steel. The pacing in those games honestly got brutal sometimes. I generally like a lot of the character moments in these games, but Cold Steel had a lot of "Go to this place and talk to everyone. Now they've all moved, go talk to them again. Now do it a third time." scenarios. I was really eager to go through them the first time, but every time it would cycle into a "Talk to everyone again" I'd start getting a little exhausted and just want to move the plot along again. I think the biggest weakness in that series of games was how they delivered plot points on past events. When something is currently happening, the story telling can be really engrossing, but a lot of the dialogue centred on exposition is just people telling you "I was doing this the whole time." or "This event happened once before." then going into extensive detail on it. Which is fine honestly, but it will let those things build up then drop them on you all at once and then you spend 2 hours having to talk to people over and over while you already know something huge is just around the corner.

Still though, I enjoyed the Cold Steel games a lot. It felt very "Shounen manga"-esque to me. I've been told that Reverie is when the series starts returning to its peaks again like in the Sky and Crossbell games so I'm really looking forward to what's in store. I am going to try rushing through the game on weekends though. I'm hoping to be done with Reverie by the 11th of February so I can play Yakuza Kiwami 3 on release, and after that I'm hoping to be done that just in time for Resident Evil 9's release... It's going to be a pretty stacked February I think, but a good one. I'm expecting Kiwami 3 to have some disappointing factors like the redesign of Rikiya, and the removal of Revelations. I think the combat will still be really fun, and I don't think any substories they add can be any worse than the ones in the original Yakuza 3. I've also gotten way more comfortable with playing games in Japanese now, able to play long sessions without having to give my brain some time to relax. I think I should be able to either finish it, or just make some really substantial progress in Kiwami 3 before RE9 comes out, especially since I'll be starting K3 on a 4-day weekend.

After those games I don't really have any plans set in stone though. I'm planning on focusing more on playing games in Japanese and watching more anime without subtitles, but I might just pick what I play based on vibes. I still want to continue Assassin's Creed Shadows, but I've also got other RPG's I want to play. I've been waiting a few years to sink my teeth into One Piece Odyssey, but I've also got Magical Girl With Trials, Rain Code, Hundred Line... I've got a pretty long list actually, I even set up secondary Backloggd and Anilist profiles just to kind of keep track of it.

The secondary Backloggd and Anilist profiles are also so I can journal my practice sessions. I didn't get anywhere near as much Japanese practice in 2025 as I intended, so having an active journal to keep track of what I've played/watched/read is to give myself some form of accountability. It's also a motivator that gives me some visible, tangible metric for how much I've practised. 

Well, I think the on-call issues are pretty much resolved for now. I'll get back to Trails right away, but it was a nice and kind of convenient excuse to type some stuff up. 

Just talking about the weekend I guess

 Well, I intended to post yesterday and the day before but never got around to it. I just kind of got too invested in Yakuza Kiwami 2 because I wanted to finish it this weekend. I ended up getting it all done. Finished the completion list, all the side content, unlocked all the skills etc. then did a playthrough on Legend difficulty before doing the Majima story. Ended up having a really good time with the game, actually enjoyed it more this time than when I first played it. It also felt pretty good to get all the Bouncer Missions done since last time I played it I didn't have the patience to go through 78 missions that all have similar gameplay. I used the post-game weapons you can buy in-game for them though, one essentially being a beam katana or light saber. Most people would make an association to Star Wars with it, but if anything it just makes me think of No More Heroes instead. 

Anyway, with Kiwami 2 I felt I understood a very good amount of the Japanese, it was a very enriching experience, and I'm excited to play Kiwami 3 soon too. Before that I'm going to be playing Trails into Reverie (in English) though since I'm planning on catching up on that series of games this year. I've been looking forward to Reverie, since I've heard the story starts getting very good again. I enjoyed the Cold Steel games, but they really had some major pacing issues and dragged on for way longer than necessary. Still, a lot of characters were really good when they finally got developed.

This weekend I also played Golf With Your Friends for the first time. Originally I bought it nearly a decade ago to play it with my friends at that time, but unfortunately I had to move back in with my parents and didn't have internet right around that time and never got the chance. It ended up being a pretty good time and felt really nice to dive into it after so long. I was also pleasantly surprised by how decent I ended up being at the game. After a couple games of performing poorly I adjusted and started performing well consistently. I'm hoping I'll be able to play it again at some point in the future, but with my group of friends, it's pretty rare we end up playing the same game a second time... 

I've considered branching out and meeting more people so I can start playing games with others again but I always end up being hesitant to. I've had some pretty awful friendships in the past, so I've developed some pretty nasty trust issues with people and it makes it really hard to build lasting connections. In fact the last time I met someone myself and became friends with them was around 6 years ago now, and I'm no longer even friends with them anymore... I've tried talking to others, but typically the people I meet end up having something about them that just gives me an instant ick. Some are things I think I should probably just get over and deal with, but some of them I think are really justified. I remember at one point meeting a few people, befriending them, and one of them started to play Final Fantasy XIV. I got really excited because I've put about a thousand hours into it now, but I don't have any friends who actively play the game anymore, so I put that entire time into the game solo. Unfortunately the person saw the Lalafells and started getting really weird and creepy about them. Said some horridly disgusting stuff, and I noped the hell out of that friendship as soon as I could. Whenever I remember that it makes me uncomfortable, definitely one of the justified "ick" moments I felt I think.

Anyway, with that aside... I've been playing Dead By Daylight again recently. I picked it back up in December and started getting really into it again despite only playing solo queue, both as Survivor and Killer. At the moment I'm trying to prestige all my Killers to Prestige 1 just so I can get their perks on everyone. I'll probably do Survivor later, but I'm steadily getting burnt out on the game again. They did just bring back Chaos Shuffle though, which is a mode I absolutely love. I'll probably play a few games of it this week if I end up in the right mood.

I'm probably not going to have a lot of time to game tomorrow evening though. I've got a vet appointment for one of my cats tomorrow morning so I'm going to have to leave work for a bit. I'll probably have to make up the hours afterwards, so when I get back to work I'll have to stay late. On the bright side, I guess that'll be a nice opportunity to read more One Piece when I get home. I didn't end up reading much of it the past couple days because I was focused on Yakuza, but I'm nearing the end of the Alabasta arc. Only about 20 chapters left, so I want to be done that by next week. Maybe even the weekend.

I think this is about as good of a stopping point for today as I can hope for though. I'm just going to take it easy for the rest of the evening. I spent a lot of time this weekend anxious about one of my cats, and I can't do much about it until her appointment tomorrow morning.

First Post... Dang...

 Never expected I'd ever start anything like a blog, and honestly will probably abandon this before long. I felt I needed somewhere I can just get some thoughts out in a semi-public place even if nobody sees them though. Usually I just toss a lot of thoughts out into Discord servers I'm in, but I kind of want to distance myself from that so I don't clutter group chats and whatnot.

 

So, I don't really know why it suddenly struck me that today was the day I'd start, but I've heard keeping some kind of journal is good for your mental health. Personally it just makes me a little nostalgic for when I used to check the FKMTKrazy blog daily for new chapters of Manga. It feels like forever ago now, but I still have it bookmarked as a sort of perpetual reminder of those times.

I'm a little worried I'll just devolve into rambling, but I guess I'll just talk about whay I'm planning for tonight and other stuff. After all, rambling is kind of the point anyway I guess.

Tonight my plans are essentially just to play Yakuza Kiwami 2. I'll probably also end up reading some One Piece. I've been using both as Japanese practice material, and have been super invested in both lately. In Yakuza Kiwami 2, I'm just about done all the side content and will have to move on to the story soon, which is really nice timing since Kiwami 3 comes out soon. With One Piece, I'm nearing the end of the Alabasta arc. I've been chipping away at One Piece for almost 2 years of my Japanese learning now, and it has really shown me how much I've improved over the years. I went from struggling to understand a lot of what was being said and only really following the story based on prior knowledge, to being able to understand about 80-90% of the dialogue in any given chapter. One area I still want to improve with a lot is reading speed though. Currently it takes me around 15 minutes for each chapter I read in Japanese, which is fine I think, but I feel like I get really focused on numbers in a bad way. I'll see that it takes me 15 minutes to read a chapter and think "I can only read 4 chapters an hour..." and get disheartened about making any progress in the series since it's so long. It feels weird because I'm essentially being forced to not speed-read and I enjoy the contents of the story that much more as a result, but a part of my brain is concerned about not being efficient... I think I've gotten better with that kind of thing though. My attention span and focus have been steadily improving lately, and I think studying and language practice have been especially engaging lately.

For studying, my daily SRS studies for Japanese have been steadily dwindling again which is nice. I made the decision in November last year that I would stop adding new vocabulary terms after finishing the N2 vocabulary list of the JLPT and focus more on just immersion. I'm still learning Kanji because I feel you won't fully grasp them until you've written them dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times. But one thing I noticed I was really lacking on is just comprehension. When quizzing, I'd be able to see a word and know what it means and how it's read, what kanji make it up, etc. But... When actual reading a story in Japanese with the same words my brain just couldn't piece it together for some reason. So I decided that I'm just going to go all in on immersion now while adding in a few more kanji here and there.

Today, I'm adding 10 more kanji to my list putting me at 1060 kanji. It's an encouraging feeling to have some of the kanji I got tossed randomly by my SRS app be kanji I actually vaguely recognized but had never written myself. One of which was 曖, which I already knew one of the readings of because I would check the lyrics of some songs. It appears in the word 曖昧 (aimai) which I recognized because of the song 迷子犬と雨のビート by Asian Kung-Fu Generation. It was kind of exhilarating to see. There were a couple other Kanji that popped up today that I saw in Yakuza and in Assassin's Creed Shadows too which is really nice. There are a few kanji I've actually learned the readings of due to voiced dialogue in both games, and it certainly helps reinforce them heavily when I study them.

 I honestly expected I'd run out of things to yap about by now but I can keep going for a while. I'll cut it off for now though, since my lunch break just ended and I have stuff I unfortunately need to get done today. Maybe I'll make another post later, but it honestly does just kind of feel good to talk like this.