I’m behind on Harta!
This one I’m going to talk about is the May issue, so with the August issue already out (and July being the off month), I currently have two issues still to read, the same number that I had before I finished this one. I’d like to get that to zero! I think what happened is that I got behind when I had the month where I was busy with a lot of family events, and didn’t end up recovering pace smoothly.
Recently, I’ve been instead focusing on putting together this notion site, where I’ve uploaded all of the media notes I’ve accumulated over many years, along with the whole backlog system I use to try to pick the next thing for myself. If anyone is interested in these posts, you might be interested in that, at least since I know at least one or two people in this thread survive on ogling what other people are reading! Technically that information for me is on that site, albeit in a jargon-heavy, probably poorly explained sort of way. It’ll probably be the closest I get to having a bookmeter at least…
Anway I’m hoping with that all at least basically put together, maintaining it will help me keep abreast of things more easily and maybe encourage me to share things a bit wider or write a little more ambitiously. (I’ve been thinking of maybe sharing in some kind of blog-like format on there either these Harta notes or some other kind of ‘what’s in harta’ English language rundown, since I know at least one person who would be interested in that)
And hopefully it’ll free up some attention for reading, since I’ve been neglecting the book clubs as well!!
Anyway, might as well do one of those Harta recaps! Though I confess I read this so disjointedly I’m having to refresh my memory more than usual…
ハルタ １０４号
The 新連載 this week is 「Servant Beasts」by 森野鈴鹿 about a plucky naive chimera/dog boy ending up in the servitude of a bone witch. The protagonist seems endearing and I like the bone magic a lot so far. I could see this being really exactly up someone out there’s alley.
Something I remember noticing around when I fell behind is that reading in a magazine form does make it very easy to end up anxiously awaiting the last page of a story to see if there’s a regular つづく notice or else a series is coming to an end – both for series that I desparately don’t want to end (looking at you いやはや、熱海くん), and for series that I kinda do want to end out of curiosity to see what might replace it (not to mention series that I wouldn’t normally want to end but have been building steadily to a clear satisfying conclusion for a while now, like one series getting an anime adaptation in the winter that I could mention…). It’s not a good habit, since it distracts from the story. I feel like I exorcised it a bit just by noticing I was doing it, but it’s something I’ll need to be careful of.
Oh! Something else I forgot to mention that has also been a bit of a burden on my catching up is… the Harta Alternative site has still been going with updated chapters! Unfortunately, the main serialized stories now have only the first chapter and the last chapter available on the site, so it’s confirmed that they’re only up there for a limited time, but I’ve been reading along and enjoying them – it just hampered catching up since it was an added amount of reading I felt I should get to each week before picking back up where I was in the actual magazine.
One nice addition on there is a 読切 from the author of the Harta zombie series I like a lot, What Six Survivors Told. It’s about sports!
Flipping through the main magazine, I think the things I remember most about this issue are recently debuted series showing their cards more. I’ll try to make sure as I catch up I pay enough attention to still track each of them and hopefully find some new standouts.
Other manga:
鋼の錬金術師 （5-13）
I’ve still been reading FullMetal Alchemist! At varying speeds. I’m enjoying it! But I don’t have very much to say about it.
It’s interesting how… it feels like there’s various threads, and various groups of characters, and sometimes it feels like one thread is serious enough to like, take over the main thrust of the story, but it usually reverts back and cools back down again or pivots to something else. My favorite elements so far are the body horror parts, so I especially liked for example, Lust blorping around the philosopher’s stone, or their having to deal with the monster inside Gluttony, etc.
The bond between the brothers (and the rest of the cast) is definitely also a strong point.
I also really appreciate how many fun extras and assistant-thanks Arakawa puts in. One bit of that that’s especially charming (although I learned the hard way to only look at it after finishing the volume) is the little doodle of the characters who died in the volume floating up to the sky on the spine under the covers. Pretty soon I’ll have to switch to digital editions, and I hope they include those in the scans.
こどものおもちゃ （１）
I got a handful of volumes for this for free amid a bunch of untranslated manga that came into the library-affiliated used book store I was volunteering at at the time, which the supervisor let me take all of (FullMetal Alchemist was also in that batch, come to think of it). It ended up first in a gang of five centered around making a dent on that free manga, and I was a little unenthusiastic about trying it for a long time since I didn’t know anything about it at all. Eventually though, I heard about Discotek’s releases of the anime based on this (as “Kodocha”) and that seemed like enough of an impact at least to be curious, and so eventually it came up in one of the slots in my backlog system, and I’ve started to slowly read through it.
It’s fun! It’s got a manic, silly energy. It’s about elementary school students, and I think that vibe + the irreverence the story and the tone show are true to that experience in a way. Like, everyone’s kind of a mess in a way that I think is true to being a kid. And there’s off the wall elements like the main character’s mom keeping a squirrel in her hair for… fashion (?) reasons.
It’s got those handwritten author asides between chapters that seem relatively common in shojo manga, so I’m glad that I’m at a level where the handwriting doesn’t particularly give me trouble.
I don’t think I’ll mind reading more (although I’m not sure how fast it will go).
And also a novel:
女神転生 : デジタル・デビル・ストーリー
This is the first Digital Devil Story novel, which became the basis for the Famicom game which eventually meandered into spawning like multiple loosely collected still-running RPG series. I’ve played the Famicom game! So I was curious to try the novel, especially since “guy summons demons using a 1980s computer” is a premise that’s very up my alley (although it doesn’t always pan out quite as incredibly as I hope…).
I’ve got this in 3-in-one collected editions, but I decided to log and mark this down after I finished the first of what seems like 3 in the original as-published series. And I continue (now as I write this being halfway or so through the second) to debate internally about whether to stop reading for now at one of those smaller novel breaks, keep reading through to the first trilogy end, or try to read all 9 to eliminate the loose end.
I’ve had this around as a potential “I’d be excited to read this and it would probably go quickly” pick for a long time, and was especially enthused with the beginning when I did read a chunk of it in that capacity, as something fun amid something heavier (maybe Kafka on the Shore?), but that momentum petered out and had to be restarted, and I ended up more mixed on the book than I was hoping once I got farther than that.
It’s kind of a weird book!! The main thing that surprised me is that in the game, I got the impression that Nakajima was a bland protagonist guy, and so I was confused why he would think summoning demons would be a good idea; turns out, it’s because at the start of the book he’s a revenge-minded creep! In the beginning of the book, he much more plays the villain role than I was expecting, intentionally summoning demons to take revenge on some school bullies who had toyed with him, and they meet horrific ends exactly as he intended (it doesn’t pull a lot of punches with the horror elements), and then he runs the school using demon powers for a while.
And what’s wild about that to me is that he still ends up being bland protagonist guy! Once Yumiko the transfer student turns up as a fated love interest, and demons start acting of their own accord, he has what feels to me like a pretty unmotivated face turn, as it turns out he and Yumiko are reincarnations of Izanagi and Izanami.
At that point the book kinda lost me, as it became more about these reincarnated fantasy protagonists fighting demons, while I was still confused at how abruptly the “guy terrorizing school with his computer demons” switched over to that. It’s a lot clearer of course though why this would make a good RPG in that latter half though, especially as Nakajima keeping Cerberus on his little computer and summoning it is pulled over right into the game.
Other elements I remember from the game, like the floating city (?) have not showed up so I’m still curious if they will in the next two novels.
So, not the slam dunk I was hoping for, and I’m having trouble staying grounded and motivated to read amid the strange blend of tones, but I’ll probably finish at least the second one soon.
And a couple of games:
ピクミン
This is Pikmin! I ended up really having a blast with it and it was exactly what I needed at the time – I actually played the entire game in one sitting on a lazy Sunday.
I had had Pikmin 3 in a gang of five in my backlog system for a long time, as Pikmin since college has been in the back of my mind as a “I liked that as a kid but never understood it well enough to get far – I bet I might be super into it now as an adult” possibility and I’d bought Pikmin 3 at some point to that end but just never got around to it. And anyway, when that came up as ‘blessed’ in my backlog system, on the spur of the moment and amid people talking positively about Pikmin 4 a lot, I decided to start from the beginning with Pikmin 1.
And I’m glad I did! The one time I booted up Pikmin 3, I felt some trepidation, whereas with this it was the right mix of familiar and novel that I immediately felt at home and was sucked in, eager to experience more.
And yep! It turns out Pikmin is indeed, really really fun and exactly the kind of thing I would enjoy rediscovering as I hoped/suspected. Running around flinging those little guys is just… fun. And getting more stuff and generating more pikmin is a fun feedback loop that means there’s always a little victory around the corner, with the short scale of the days meaning that it’s never too demanding to make a voyage out to grab a new ship piece. I admire the design going into that a lot – to make this unusual new thing, and scale the game right at the level that can be pulled in the system with aplomb.
The atmosphere is also wonderful, and I love Olimar’s endearingly blue collar commentary on the parts you find (which is the main element of the game in terms of reading – I get the impression all that stuff translated just fine, but it was still fun to read it in Japanese), along with the eye towards ecology shown in the end credits (gotta say, “Chappie” is such a better name for those guys than “bulborb”).
The time limit element of the game really loomed over me when I was a kid, but this time around I had absolutely no problem with it, and was completely able to average a rate of more than 1 ship part per day. The game also seems to have some additional leeway baked in, with non-essential parts. I don’t know if on the whole the time limit is a good factor because of that intimidation effect, but as an adult I did like that it set some kind of pace.
There were pretty few challenges that really stressed my pikmin-leading skills, and the yellow pikmin just being about holding bombs definitely made them feel less vital and less fun than the other colors. But what I’ve played of Pikmin 2 so far seems to fix both of those things… I’m definitely trying to avoid the kind of Pikmin fever I had this first day though (although it was fun, and a wholly pleasant memory).
Last note is I remember as a kid once I felt guilty for deleting my sister’s save which was at the last level without asking her to make room on the memory card for something else. Now I feel a little better! It’s not like it’s the epic, incredibly difficult final challenge I pictured at the time! (it’s just a nice, very game-y combination of putting all that you’ve learned to use on a little final challenge) She’d probably have beat it by then if she was gonna, dangit! (but I still should have asked…)
風雨来記4
This is an FMV visual novel I played on the Switch that focuses on vicarious tourism: the idea is you’re a travel writer motorcycling around a particular area and seeing the sights, with real photos from the locations and real video sequences as you travel from place to place. This entry centers around Gifu Prefecture (it sounds like previous entries centered around the more famously tourism-oriented areas of Hokkaido and Okinawa, but I haven’t played those and this is the most recent one).
I enjoyed it! I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect, but I’m always tickled by full-motion live action video in games, and so I was definitely interested. I didn’t know anything in particular about Gifu going in, and I have no specific connection to the place, but it was genuinely fun and relaxing to motor around the place and see some sights.
The game is structured as a succession of 26 or so days leading up to the deadline of a Gifu-themed travel blogging context (I forget the exact number, but the deadline is on the 30th of the month and 1 day a week is a rest day), and it seems like it’s entirely freeform and non-demanding about where you go each day and how much effort you put into the blogging part. The locations to visit are the main draw for sure, as it’s essentially a collection of guided photo tours around various real locations in Gifu, from charming out-of-the-way shrines, to mountain top fortresses, to city train stations, to the famous battlefield of Sekigahara. As the game went on I definitely started skimming these more than I maybe should have, but I did enjoy a lot seeing some of these places and getting some kind of sense for the area (although I wasn’t filled with vigor to make a Gifu trip, so I would probably assume I will never actually visit these places for real – but hey, all the better to get the chance this way, right?). I remember getting a strong impression of Gifu as an extremely green landscape of floodplains surrounded by mountains. I remember liking locations like a little shrine to kappa (with info about how kappa stories are associated with areas with flooding), a temple dedicated to – I wanna say from memory, workers from Satsuma Domain who contributed to a flood prevention public works project, or a tourist town with a lone Charlie Chaplin statue because the mayor was gonna make like a whole movie-themed attraction area but plans fizzled after one statue. It’s a lot of charming detail! And the areas are pretty pleasant to move through – a combination of grid based movement with 360-view photos and higher resolution insert images.
I had a little bit of trouble figuring out exactly what kind of rhythm would work best for the game. The very first day (after the game started out on the right foot in my book by having you visit a public library first off), I used up 100% of my endurance, and visited like, half-a-dozen locations or so (they give you a large amount of endurance). This seemed like it was the wrong call, because there were fewer discrete locations to visit than the number of days, so it seemed like I would quickly exhaust my options. Also – there’s a really annoying rule in the game where when you write a blog post for the contest (which involves picking a topic and a couple of photos, and choosing a couple options of what to write), you’re only allowed to use photos you took in the last 3 days. Since you can only write 1 blog post per night… that meant all the photos I had taken at a few locations that first day were completely useless. I sorta feel like this isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to worry about playing the game, but after this I became very focused on maintaining exactly a 3 day backlog of photos, and always posted the oldest day to the blog at night. This meant I maintained a good rate of 1 location visit per day. This seems like the right rate for the exploration part of the game! I enjoyed the rhythm of clearing days and seeing one thing per day before heading to camp.
Unfortunately, it seems like this isn’t the right strategy for the blog contest part of the game (my blog did pretty badly! And I ended up middling in the rankings – I’m not 100% sure if choosing old topics hurt me, or if I picked the wrong photos to pair with the comments I chose, or what. I found it strange and oddly demoralizing that even in a visual novel they didn’t feel the need to juice the number of blog visitors out of realistic proportion for a niche travel blog, and so my posts got anywhere from like 3 to maybe like 100 readers), and it also didn’t work for the other part of the game I haven’t mentioned: the hanging out with anime ladies. It doesn’t seem like it’s full-on a dating sim, but you do meet a few anime girls, and they seem to just sort of independently wander around Gifu, meaning you just have to run into them by chance if you want to talk to them (or I assume, look up a guide). This meant I just ran into them a few times – the bookish one by the kappa shrine, and the motorcyclist one at Sekigahara and at a castle or something. Just having like, some other character to interact with as opposed to traveling everywhere alone, made these some of the more enjoyable segments in the game when they happened. But it seems like the photos from those occasions has an even harsher expiration date, or something? I could swear that what happened each time is I could write about that day’s thing with the anime girl, or the older material, and since I was so bent on not wasting photos, I always went with the older material, and I’m 80% sure then the next day the chance to write about the day with the anime girl was always gone. Weird! This meant that in-universe, my character hung out with them and was like “I’m a writer check out my blog I’ll post pictures” let them model for him, and then pointedly only talked about unrelated travels and never posted any of those pictures. This is very funny to me.
It does seem like at least some or all of the locations have multiple different unique day trips to do there. So I think maybe what you’re ‘supposed’ to do / what I would do if I were doing it over, is use up your endurance doing a few things each day and then just pick one of them to write (preferably one where you managed to run into one of the characters) and always write about the freshest material that happened that day. I suppose that would be the most in line with what a travel writer would be trying to do! That said – it’s definitely not the kind of game that demands to be min maxed. I get the impression you could completely blow off writing any posts at all if you wanted to.
Anyway, for as fresh and fun as the FMV tourism can be, there are some definite drawbacks. For one: the 360 video views of Gifu while driving around are cool (and it’s neat that that kind of thing is possible in a game at all), but the resolution on the video is… quite bad. I have to imagine it’s a more or less necessary compromise, but it really is unfortunate since it reduces the feeling of being there significantly. For language fun too – the resolution is too low to even read hardly any shop signs! Boo!
My other major complaint is with the camping at night – it’s always the same campsite and the same photos of the same morning routine and everything, every single day. The character TALKS about the food he eats, but you never see any pictures of it at all, and I honestly kind of hated that. Maybe it’s just since I don’t really have an interest in camping, but I would have much preferred a tourism game with an outlet for like, experiencing the local food specialties in any kind of way, or inns or hotels. The lack of food of any kind I think keeps this from displacing the Yakuza series in my vicarious tourism grand standings – those games might just have pictures and descriptions of food, but it’s definitely something!
Also – less a complaint really but worth noting: there really isn’t any kind of over-arching plot to speak of as far as I can tell other than the loose contest thing. Don’t expect drama to suddenly flare up. Most of the character development unfortunately mostly comes in the form of references to past Hokkaido trips and so on that I strongly assumed were references to the previous games and did not feel like I could meaningfully engage with.
In any case – I enjoyed my (fairly short? <10 hours probably?) time playing through the game. It really was pleasant wandering around Gifu, and if that sounds interesting to you I’d recommend the game. It’s also 100% exactly the kind of game that strongly benefits from playing it in Japanese as a language learner just since that enhances the fun of the vicarious travel. I just got a little too tripped up in trying to game the system and a little too tired of the loop and ended up skimming through the later parts more than I would have liked. I’m definitely interested in the past games in the series, although I’m also not rushing out to track them down ASAP.
Worth noting also that I’m glad I played it after travel restrictions were lifted – it would have been a bit too bittersweet last year or the year before when I was periodically feeling flare-ups of wanting to travel but not being able to…
Language note: I didn’t have any trouble, but I wouldn’t exactlycall it easy reading, since there’s lots of text about lots of unfamiliar locations and history and stuff. Only the conversation parts have voice acting. Obviously no pressure or time constraints though – it could totally be an especially fun one to very slowly take your time with and pick through.