I recently installed Jitai and am loving it so far. I installed all the recommended fonts, including Armed Banana (per the author’s recommendation), and holy heck it’s killing me trying to decipher some of these kanji. I’m hovering over more than half of them just to be able to read them. I’m considering dropping the font from my lineup, so I’m curious to know some good reasons for keeping it. Would one see (hand)writing similar to this as a visitor to Japan (on signs, merchandise, etc)? Or is this font more for fun and not really practice? Genuinely curious - I’m willing to go through the pain if it’ll help me abroad.
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I don’t think it’s valuable. You’ll see plenty of handwritten Japanese for practice if you read manga. From the few series I’ve read, the handwritten parts are almost never as bad as Armed Banana. Can’t speak to real life handwriting.
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I don’t know if it’s necessarily something you need to practice, but it does come up in manga, as seanblue mentioned.
I flipped through a couple pages in a gag manga I have scans for and found this, which sort of looks like Armed Banana (I love that it’s called that, might just steal this font too). Not a difficult one, but it does come up.
Here’s another one from the same manga.
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I felt the same about Armed Banana. I actually could usually recognize it, but it took more time, and it was just annoying, and i had to hover over it to check the proper form.
As sean said, handwriting will almost never be as bad as this. And what’s worse, i think ArmedBanana often doesn’t even make sense from a handwriting perspective, because the strokes don’t seem to be nearly in the correct order or shape.
It’s great to practice with handwriting fonts, and ArmedBanana can be a fun challenge, but there should be more useful ones than ArmedBanana.
I guess it depends on what you want to use Japanese for. I don’t read any manga at all, but there are tons of stylized storefronts and signs in Japan. I think it’s really useful for seeing just how far certain parts of kanji can be distorted, and in which ways.
On top of being able to mouseover to see the default font though, I think hitting “enter” with an empty answer field will also swap you back to the default font (after which, you can mouseover again to switch back).
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I think that’s actually a bug. 
That state only happens after you answer, but I think it was intended to only happen after your answer gets submitted (not when it gets rejected for being blank or having invalid characters).
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may be a useful bug though, because hovering and de-hovering is annoying ^^
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