Japanese Reading Report: 30 November 2025

Veil

Last week I started my French immersion, and sadly it's already been parked on the side of the road since my week was completely swallowed up by work. I managed to fit in some more Fata Morgana, but Une Femme will have to wait for next week.

ファタモルガーナの館

I finally made some progress by squeezing out as much time as I could manage in the first half of the week. I finished the story of the first key bearer and started to make moves to convince the second to open his heart, which so far is stalled in a "girls talk" slumber party with the three significant women of the first three doors (excluding White Haired Girl). I'm still really enjoying the game, but every day I wonder where people find the time to play such long games, aha...

ワンピース

So I finished the Crocodile arc and I'm one or two episodes from the end of Alabaster as a whole. I really liked the final fight with Crocodile, and I especially enjoyed seeing Vivi's story to the end (though I thought the very end/farewell was a bit uninteresting). A surprisingly good moment for me was when Bon Clay temporarily joined the crew and then sacrificed himself to get the Strawhats to safety. The flexibility of villain characters is definitely a strength of the series.

「選択肢」の選択史

This week I finished reading the sections about 凍京NECRO, the VN where the heroes "can't die". To be honest the final explanation of how death was handled felt a little bit disappointing. Basically, deaths force the player onto a "bad end", but provide information/resources that eventually give the player enough to obtain the true ending. It's possible the game is more interesting than that, but that's how I understood it.

I also read part-way through a chapter on みにくいモジカの子. Out of all the games in this book, this and 君と彼女と彼女の恋 are probably the most compelling to me. This game is an adult romance game where you play as a character who can read the hearts of others as words. Unfortunately, your character is also extremely unattractive, so most of the hearts he reads are people commenting on his appearance. The biggest challenge Vio wanted to address was not splitting the player's attention between the MC's view of the world and the dialogue. They solved the issue in a visually appealing way where dialogue displays near the middle of the screen with other text (the special words the MC sees) as floating characters within the environment. The screenshots had a very kinetic feeling, and I think Vio makes a great point about how traditional VN formats create a bothersome moment where, after advancing dialogue, the player's attention is split between expressions and text.
There was also a section about how, because the text the MC sees diegetically has a spacial value, some of it can't be seen if he isn't looking directly at people. The game apparently has the MC looking at feet a lot because he's afraid to see what people really think of him, but its a foil to his entire ability in the first place. It really sounds like a great game and I'd like to play it some time.

Veil

Not too much to say about volume 4, but it was cute again. There was one chapter that involved the man searching for his lighter that was particularly moving.