Japanese Reading Report: 06 July 2025

Following from last week, this week was pretty linearly focused. I did almost no audio immersion and didn't even read much of my novel, favouring my time towards 空の軌跡FC.

感じない男

So I only read a handful of pages of this in the week. I feel bad to go cold on it so quickly. It's not that I lost interest in the book (I still find the content quite compelling), I just realised that the pace I was reading was at odds with my goal for the year, which puts more weight on JRPGs and less on conventional media (books and manga in particular). I found myself still spending more time with this book than Trails last week and I had a small panic that I might not be able to meet my goal for games by the end of the year, so I decided to really push gaming, resulting in the pitiful pagecount you see above.

The content I read was mostly just finishing off the chapter from last week, but I also read the start of the following chapter which asks the question, "Why are men turned on by (schoolgirl) uniforms?" Unfortunately I don't have the answer yet, so stay tuned.

英雄伝説　空の軌跡ＦＣ

Given all the excuses and lack of progress elsewhere I bet you're really hoping for a great big status report. Unfortunately even trying to give every spare moment up to this game, I feel like I move through the story at a glacial pace.

I finished the chapter I was on last week. I was fairly close to the end of the chapter just as I suspected. After a short stay at a local jail, partying up once again with Olivert, and gaining our bearings, we followed some leads and ended up storming a sky pirate fortress in a mistfallen valley. The sky pirates have shown up in two events at this point (the first being the end of the last chapter), and I really like the dynamic of the brother and sister pair. This time we were also introduced to their not-quite-as-likeable older brother. His greedy plans get everyone into trouble, but there's clearly something bigger going on that even he's not privy to. Anyway, we cleared up that problem and became the heroes of Bose. Unfortunately, despite saving the day, it turns out Estelle and Joshua's dad wasn't even amongst the sky pirate captives. Oh well.

At the end of the chapter Scherazard and Olivert decided to head back to Rolent, the starting city, and Estelle and Joshua decided to continue their journey along the west coast down to Ruan.

On the way to Ruan we met with some new characters. A new girl, Kloe, is a student at the nearby academy, and she gives us a short tour of the City of Ruan. We signed up for the Bracers Guild in the city, learned about the fancy drawbridge in the city, and learned a bit more about the history of the world before the current era of (sort of) peace. The game definitely suffers from the common RPG problem of "this many people could not provide a thriving system how you describe it", but overall I like how the different cities provide different functions for the overall nation. Ruan, as a port city, used to be a big deal for trade in Liberl but, like many other things all over the kingdom, airships have disrupted the "old way" and driven value out of small towns and into large cities.

Estelle is still great. Joshua could be better. I keep opening boxes with monsters in them without thinking, but none of the monster boxes have been as scary as the first two in the game.