I much preferred “Michel Thomas” Japanese. It has a focus on building up sentence patterns that I found more useful than Pimsleur’s repetitive approach.
You are also in a pretend ‘class’ with a good student and a ‘bad’ student - the bad once makes a lot of the same mistakes as you do which is kind of encouraging.
After a while I made a point to repeat everything back in plain form instead of ます though.
As an alternative I think the author of the course - Helen Gilhooly, went on to do teaching material of her own.