Japanese Reading Report: 23 November 2025

Veil

ファタモルガーナの館

Oops I wasn't able to put much energy into the game again... The work week was just too unpredictable so I didn't bring my Switch into work, so I ended up missing every opportunity to fit it in aside from early in the week for the smallest amount of time.

I'm still resolving the first key holder's story. Hopefully I can do some catch up this week, though that may be difficult since work will be even more chaotic until my next report (which may even be posted late because of said chaos).

ワンピース

I haven't watched this for years, but all my currently watching shows are on the weekly drip feed, which I just don't enjoy much, so I decided to resume watching it. Episode 105 was my wall last time. I think I was just getting fed up with Luffy's personality and the desert environment was so drab. Getting over 105 again was difficult, but I managed it. Most of the following episodes were actually pretty good, which made me wonder why I didn't just tank it last time. In particular, I really liked the episodes where Usopp and Chopper fought the baseball and mole duo, and I also enjoyed Nami's fight with the spike woman. It was also very satisfying to see Luffy finally get a hit on Crocodile.

「選択肢」の選択史

I read all the way through the longest chapter of the book (I think) about 君と彼女と彼女の恋. I'd actually heard of this game after I played Doki Doki Literature Club, but I didn't know it was quite so similar. Not only is the game "meta", it's also very interested in telling its meta narrative through save data and routes. To be honest, it sounds like a more fully developed concept compared to DDLC, which I found a little bit thin towards the end.
The most interesting part of Vio's description of the game is how they decided to make the MC unaware of any shenanigans (not unlike DDLC). Vio explained that by giving meta awareness to the heroine and player (who can't help but have it), it places both on equal footing without the MC "getting in the way".

The rest of the chapter was honestly fairly dry, discussing how they managed save systems and how they designed the gallery to dissuade completionist thinking. The ways they designed around those were cool, but you can just read the book (or play the game) if you want to know best practices!

I also started a chapter about a game where you're an undead guy, and the question was raised (though not yet answered) of "how do you tell a story where death doesn't end a route?" I'm curious to see what their solution was.

Veil

The third volume didn't really depart much from the first two, though it was still entertaining. Watching the woman in this series interact with the world is interesting, and I find the black panels (presumably what she "sees") pretty impactful. There was a chapter where she held a balloon, one where she played rock paper scissors, and on top of that she's always dressed very fashionably. It makes me wonder how blind people enjoy those things (which isn't to say I'm incredulous, just that it makes me more curious).

Une Femme

Because despite my constant complaining that I have no time for things, I've decided it might be nice to learn one more language. In this case, French. Hopefully an interesting thing about this is that it will give loyal readers a better idea of how my language learning actually goes from start to "finish" (I'm not sure language learning ever really ends but I digress). Case in point, after some fumbling with a few different pieces of media I decided to read this book, Une Femme by Annie Ernaux, and after four or so days of owning the book I've read and understood just the first page.

The book is apparently an autobiography (I can't tell this from anything I've read but I guess it's explained somewhere, maybe the blurb?). So far I've read about the death of Annie's mother on April 7th and I think a visual description of what her mother looked like after her death.

The biggest challenges so far are: French conjugation seems so cooked compared to Japanese, and there are so many false friends. Perhaps because of how conjugation works, I feel like half the words I look up on WordReference (a recommended Fr-En dictionary) have some issue... I'm planning to figure out some more grammar eventually, but so far it's certainly going.