Reading Report: 11 January 2026

ジャイアントロボ

ファタモルガーナの館外伝

Trucking along with Fata Morgana Prequel. I played about 4 hours total. Two years passed and Morgana has settled into life in the village a bit more. We learn that she has a beautiful singing voice but she doesn't like to be a public spectacle and she also sees her life in this village as transient so she doesn't put much effort into learning people's names or developing attachments. Despite that, she and Jacopo have gotten a bit closer and their chemistry is pretty nice.

A new girl, Jeren, comes to work at the brothel. She's is... a LOT. A real ball of energy and overly friendly with everyone. At first she rubs everyone the wrong way, but after a month of being there she becomes a fan favourite from clients and also somewhat friendly with the rest of the workers and the village at large. Through the story we find that Jeren has a similar history to Morgana, being sold into slavery at a young age. With that in mind, her upbeat personality really stands out from Morgana's depression. Similar to Michel in the base game, Jeren feels like a reflection of Morgana to show how different people respond to extreme stress.

走れメロス

Continuing to read this book. Continued and finished one story and then read two shorter stories before getting to a longer one.
畜犬談
I finished this story. I didn't really discuss the details of the story last week because I had just begun it, but basically it's about a guy who claims to fear and hate dogs but dogs seem to love him. He begrudgingly takes in a stray puppy with plans to ditch it eventually. After it gets sick, he and his wife agree to get rid of it, but at the critical moment the man decides he has grown attached to the dog and he's going to keep it around. I really enjoyed the writing in this story.

葉桜と魔笛
A short story told by a woman about her relationship with her sister before she died. Her sister is very unwell and they're aware that she doesn't have much time to live. The writer discovers that her sister has been exchanging love letters with a mysterious man, but he stopped writing to her when he found out she was sick. The writer decides to fabricate a letter in the man's voice apologising for being a coward, giving an excuse for his behaviour, and promising to come by every night to play a flute to show his love. The sister recognises that the writer made it up to make her feel better, but during their conversation the sound of a flute plays outside. It was sort of a poetic, sweet last moment for the two sisters. I liked it.

黄金風景
I honestly didn't get much out of this story. It was the shortest of the ones I read this week. It's basically about a person who, when they were younger, bullied and beat (maybe?) their personal servant because they hated how slow she was at tasks. Then there's a time skip and the servant is doing pretty well and has a family and the writer is like, "Damn, I guess I lost". Or something(!?) I should probably re-read it some time.

駈込み訴え
I'm pleased that this story is in the book because it was the one that made me give Dazai a chance in the first place. I'm only early on in the story, but just like some of his other works, it's basically one uninterrupted thought that swaps between "I hate that Jesus guy we need to end his life" and "I love that Jesus guy why won't he love me and me alone???" I'm not a religious person but I think Judas as portrayed in this story is pretty compelling as a tragic guy.

ジャイアントロボ

I decided to try out this old tokusatsu series. Think about something like Godzilla or Ultraman. I have to say, it was kind of a slog and nowhere near as enjoyable as the 90s anime. The character variety was not there at all - everyone is just a "secret agent" type with slightly different coats of paint. Giant Robo is sort of just a guy in a suit... he punches, he can fire beams out of his eyes, and later on he can use a flaming cross for some reason. Daisaku is maybe the closest character to the anime. He's a young boy who becomes bonded to Giant Robo and they have some nice moments together.

There isn't much else to mention. The kaijus were okay. At one point there is a "mirror match" with another robot called Calamity, but maybe because of budget issues they don't even have them fight - in fact Calamity doesn't even move, it just reflects Giant Robo's attack back at him once.

ドラゴンクエストVIIエデンの戦士たち Reimagined

The demo for this came out during the week and I thought it was as good a time as any to try it out. I played up to the final dungeon of the first proper island.

I've played a bit of the 3DS remake in Japanese (up to the island with the volcano) and I also beat the game in English years ago. The Switch remake mostly seems pretty good. The prologue island has been smoothed out even more (for better or worse). The music and graphics are quite good (except Kiefer is extremely ugly for some reason). The voice acting is pretty good, though not even every scene is voiced which is sort of a disappointment. As far as gameplay, the difficulty slider stuff is pretty cool but a few things annoy me: fully healing after levelling up sort of breaks a bit of the tension of dungeon crawling, plus you start with the Zoom spell for 0MP and it can be used seemingly anywhere, including in dungeons, so there's basically no risk of a resource drain and party wipe. And lastly, not having personal inventories means anyone can pull from the infinitely-large party bag which takes the planning out of hard encounters.
I know a lot of these are probably minor, and the game still seems like a bit of a challenge. There was an optional overworld boss fight that I challenged at a very low level and actually managed to scrape enough resources to beat it. It was really rewarding to get that win.

ドラゴンクエストＩＶ導かれし者たち

I played this up to the part in Arina's story where she's rescuing another girl impersonating her. Last week I noted how I was squeezing dialogue out of Hoimin as Ryan. This week felt like a real feast reading the reactions of Clift, Brai, and Arina to several towns, NPCs, and story moments. Some of the things they had to say were worthy of those "VG Advice" channels. Very funny and worthwhile.

(This is my bad for ordering the games wrong...) Speaking of party chat, DQ7 Reimagined claims to have brought back the party chat feature, but because 90% of dialogue is a single party member saying "I think we should go here", it actively discourages experimenting with the feature even though I was able to squeeze out one or two funny lines... why are modern games so obsessed with pointing you at your exact next destination..?