Japanese Reading Report: 15 December 2024

This week was fairly standard in terms of reading. I'm still trucking through 痴人の愛 and MONSTER, finished watching エロマンガ先生, and started 妹さえいればいい。in addition to my normal weekly viewing of ダンダダン.
I also started playing ドラゴンクエスト３リメイク.

I feel pretty bad about my last few reports, mostly because they've been written and posted pretty hastily. Since I'm away on holidays I haven't really had much time to draft my thoughts and I regret that it's damaged the quality of my reports during this time. Even though the reports are purely for my own satisfaction, I imagine some hypothetical professional reading these to gauge what kind of person I am, and I wish I put a better foot forward. All that to say I'm sorry to only do the bare minimum the last few weeks, and I'm sorry that the last few weeks have lacked hoverable text.

痴人の愛

I read this on pace this week. It was another week where 君子 suffers but doesn't make it easy to sympathise with his suffering.

After finding ナオミ hanging out with other guys on the beach in 鎌倉, 君子 decides to do some snooping at their home in 大森 (oomori) instead of going to work one day. He goes to see if ナオミ had kept any incriminating letters, but he finds 浜田 waiting inside the house instead.
After a brief discussion we find out that 浜田 was regularly meeting ナオミ at her home, and that she was also fooling around with 熊谷. There is a kind of brothership moment here. 君子 and 浜田 both decide that ナオミ is playing all of them, but when 君子 confronts ナオミ she just says it won't happen again. They make up again.

As an attempt to solve this problem for himself, 君子 suggests to ナオミ that they should have a child. She rejects this idea and says that he promised her when he first took her home with him that she could be free to be a child for as long as she wanted. They sort of make up once again...

Well the making up doesn't last too long. On another day that 君子 is feeling suspicious, he follows ナオミ when she leaves the house on a day he's meant to be at work. He sees her visit 熊谷 and decides that enough is enough. He screams at her to leave and never come back. She packs up some of her things and leaves. The following chapter is a sort of, "What have I done?" soliloquy which ends in him once again deciding that he can't live without ナオミ. He waits and waits but never gets any correspondence from her. He goes to meet her family but they say she hasn't been there for a while. So he decides to call up 浜田, remembering that he promised to help him out. 浜田 says, "I saw her just the other day." And as it turns out she's been regularly going to the dance hall. Not only that, she's been going to the dance hall with Westerners, wearing Western clothes that she didn't have before. Apparently she's living her best life without 君子.

ＭＯＮＳＴＥＲ

Volume 4 continued on. The story jumped between Nina, Deiter, and Tenma's stories as we see the Neo-nazi plot to kill the Turkish village in Frankfurt progress. I enjoyed the three-character plot progression, and it was nice to see it all come together as each character showed up at key places to save the day, but some moments were a bit too coincidental, and some characters intersected and separated in such a short time that it felt almost like they didn't have to meet to progress the story.

Volume 5 introduces a criminal psychologist who knew Tenma in his university years. The psychologist, ironically, deals with a lot of anxiety and insecurity about how others perceive him. He cheated on one of their exams and remembered Tenma looking at him during the test, and lived the rest of his life wondering if Tenma secretly thought less of him for it. Of course Tenma is the perfect guy and admits, in a moment of vulnerability, that he was also cheating in that exam (perfect in his imperfection).
The second half of the volume focused on one of the two corrupt police officers from earlier in the story. Nina has been observing him in his villa in France. He had hired a private investigator to look into the death of his ex partner, but the investigator is killed by his "bodyguard". As it turns out, his "witness protection" lifestyle with a new wife and kid was more to protect the corrupt system more than this guy, and he is intimidated into silence. However, when Nina gets captured he decides that he has to be a hero and he takes a bullet to the stomach to save her. It was a pretty nice mini story.
Finally there are two chapters about Lunge, the BKA officer. After a murder where two parents are stabbed to death by someone in their house, Lunge uses this opportunity to connect it to Johan's serial killings in order to lure Tenma into investigating. Tenma takes the bait and Junge shows up to confront Tenma again. However he doesn't account for the fact that the real murderer in this case, the son of the two parents, became paranoid that he was found out, followed Lunge to the scene, and stabs him as he's chasing Tenma. A very exciting cliffhanger for the volume.

Volume 6 resolves the cliffhanger in a fairly satisfying way that made me like Lunge and Tenma even more. Lunge's conviction that Tenma is truly responsible for the serial murders has made me start to question if there's a chance he could be right.
There have also been some chapters in this volume reintroducing Eva and her struggles. She met the villain from a vignette in volume 5, Roberto, and their stories are now folding together since she has information that he values and he has information that she values. I haven't finished this volume yet so I'll just have to see where it goes.

ドラゴンクエスト３リメイク

I've played Dragon Quest 3 before, and my history with Dragon Quest as a series runs quite deep (perhaps one day I'll list my achievements and history with the series). I wasn't super excited to play this game since the HD-2D art style doesn't really appeal to me but, after seeing enough of it on YouTube and other social media, the itch got to me and I decided I wanted to play it.

I made my party: Myself (of course), a 魔物使い (because it's a new class), a 商人 (for fun), and a 盗賊 (for fun and to look for every item on every map). I had two goals with my party: I wanted to play without any dedicated healers and rely a bit more on healing items, and I wanted to try out the new 魔物使い class. Unfortunately it seems that the new class is overtuned and is capable of dealing way too much damage and providing decent healing. I was expecting the class to be a bit less overpowered, more like a Final Fantasy Blue Mage. I'm also playing on the highest difficulty setting but not seeing much in the way of challenge at this point.

I think my grievance with the difficulty mostly has to do with my expectations. Dragon Quest 11's 縛りプレイ (Draconic Mode) options were super fun to work with, and the combination of "strong enemies" and "no exp for low-level enemies" made for a really nice challenge that prevented grinding. Dragon Quest X Offline also had some 縛りプレイ options which, despite that game's other shortcomings, gave it some freshness that couldn't be found in the MMO version of the game. Unfortunately DQ3 Remake only has three difficulty options, one which is just the default game difficulty, one which is a simple mode without deaths, and the "hard mode" which is just a number adjustment rather than anything complicated. Ah well...

As far as language is concerned, I think the "type" (ルックスＡ／ルックスＢ) thing is actually worth commenting on. I'm aware it was the minor battleground for online politics, unfortunately.
I think there is space for giving games more options and more diversity, however the change from choosing gender to choosing "type" just hasn't been implemented well in this game at all. My ルックスＢ main character is frequently referred to as おねえさん, had her gender discussed at length at the end of the ロマリア story and then spent a good 15 minutes running around the city as a 女王 (by both village dialogue and system text), and, tragically, was denied the opportunity to receive puff puff simply because of her "type". The game is simply a gendered experience, and I think it's gendered for the better (the writing is funny, as one should expect from any Dragon Quest game), but the "type" is not well integrated into the writing. I honestly think the game should have either rejected the "type" change or leaned harder into it and incorporated a two-stage gender selector where you choose visual looks and gender, and the writing reflects that second choice while ignoring the first. I suggest it partially because I think the current implementation serves no one. For people who prefer a "gender" selection, the "types" option is just obnoxious, and for people who want to choose a "type" and see themselves reflected without a sensation of gender, I think they will find themselves confronted by a lot of dialogue that does not see them as neutrally as they see themselves.

Anyway, I've finished the ロマリア section and I'm working through the desert right now.

ダンダダン

An okay episode that unfortunately highlights the one thing I don't really like about ダンダダン. The romance between Okarun and Momo is generally really good, but whenever the two of them fail to communicate and get stuck in their own heads it can be a bit frustrating.

Otherwise, the model human moment was very cute and once again amusing if only for the fact that he is an unexpected party member introduced as a problem at first.

エロマンガ先生

If I had a year-end wrap up that talked about the greatest disappointments in media, this would easily win it for me. It failed to meet any of my expectations, which doesn't necessarily mean it failed at its own goals but... well, this is about me at the end of the day.

The romantic tension between Sagiri and the MC is never resolved, and none of the tertiary characters break out of their paper-thin personalities. In its favour, I think the art is quite good, and I thought the MC was pretty admirable in his efforts to help Sagiri out at times. The second-to-last episode exploring both of their origin stories was pretty good.

妹さえいればいい。

If I had a year-end wrap up that talked about the greatest surprises in media, this would easily... wait a second, I did this already. Everything I had heard or seen about this series made me think it would be hot garbage, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was actually not too bad.

Like エロマンガ先生, this series is about a character who is an author, however this series makes the MC pretty average at what he does, and his relationship with the other author characters was both more interesting and more relatable. His male peer, Haruto, was surprisingly deep. The anime adaptation of his light novel was hyped through the series, and when it finally came out and flopped it was genuinely painful to watch. Later, when he attempts to get closer to a female friend in their friend group only to find out that she has a one-directional crush on the MC, but Haruto absorbs the heartbreak in a really mature way that really expresses his personality and inner struggle.

I think the female characters within the show are given a shorter stick and sort of boil down to be a little bit cliched, but they were still so much more interesting than エロマンガ先生's cast.

Several episodes feature characters playing real board games or other table-top games and that enabled some interesting visual design and storytelling. The actual main plot was kind of thin, but the episodes were each pretty good by themselves, so I didn't mind too much. Ultimately it wasn't the most amazing show or anything, but it's quite genre savvy and worth trying out (just be patient with the first 120 seconds or so of the first episode...)