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July 10
Final Fantasy 7: 2 h.
Week 2 completed
Work done:
Video games
Final Fantasy 7 -> 6 h 30 min.
Total reading time: 6 h 30 min.
This post was supposed to be written yesterday but it was very late and there was no way I was writing a week conclusion post that late.
So I finished FF7 yesterday finally after I started it last challenge. The total gameplay time was around 62h, which feels okay, considering that the game under native language conditions is about 35 hours ish. I don’t know, I took my time with some things, but I also didn’t go for full completion at all. I missed quite a few items here and there but I didn’t want to spend time on that on this “first” playthrough, especially being a game that you can really miss things forever if you don’t know them or don’t use a guide, which I didn’t want to do because of spoilers.
Honestly that was pretty awesome. I thought it was going to be harder in terms of language but to my surprise the language is very consistent throughout the whole game. The grammar is not hard at all, I don’t think I have encountered anything that made me think super hard. Vocabulary wise I think it was alright too, leaning on the easier side; there has been quite a few lookups but much less than what I expected, or rather, less frequent and more distributed in different paragraphs (i.e. only one unknown word). Vocabulary wise it also depends on what your starting point is, I think it’s a great game for intermediate onwards.
There were two characters that were hard to understand: one speaking in a super rough way with tons of contractions and constant じゃねえか type of speech (Cid), and another one in full kansai-ben (Cait-Sith). Seriously, I think I’ve learned how kansai-ben can be and not just your usual へん instead of ない in negative verbs or the like. Not always, but I’ve had serious problems understanding it at times 
. Really took some getting used to, especially written, with no voice and with very few kanji, and then on top of the character’s quirky traits. I was not prepared. But it was only this one character, and actually made them super interesting. I love how the way of speaking really affects the perception of one character, it has to be one of the things I like the most about Japanese, that there are tons of ways of playing with formality and ways of speaking, and all of them give a different vibe.
But anyways, overall a great experience. I will definitely play the game again some time soon. There’s a lot to it and it’s the typical “you understand more the second time” type of work. It’s crazy how a game from more than 20 years ago, with the limitations of back then, completely laughs at so many games made today. The cutscenes are impressive even with their old graphics, and the story is very well developed. Many people like FF6 more than 7 and that’s even older, so makes you think how the video game industry developed over time: some things for the better, some things for the worse. I will eventually try to play every main-line Final Fantasy out of pure love for FF14 (which builds its world out of many things from other FF games). That’s a long term goal though, because money.
Now that I’ve finished FF7 I can finally start the remake so I’ll ask my brother for that. Next thing I’m also playing is Chrono Trigger, which I ended up buying on the steam summer sales. Might start it later or tomorrow.
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July 10
I’m a bit worried I’ll get behind with my goals but I hope I can at least keep up with the challenge. We’ll see.
Based on what you’ve said it seems like it might be doable at my level (except probably 
I wish it did because even though I like playing on the Switch, I don’t think I enjoy studying Japanese with it, what with the constant back-and-forth between the Switch and the PC whenever I want to look something up. For Japanese I really prefer PC, but it is what it is. It’s weird because some FF have a Japanese option on Steam and then some others don’t, like 9, which is very disappointing.
. Other than that, some difficulty might be derived from not having kanji sometimes, I still struggle with that if I don’t know a word, because you don’t know where things start or end occasionally.
). But yes, first time playing in Japanese.
In hindsight, I really should have looked up a guide on how to use these tools, huh. Your explanation makes it sound way more convenient. I love your little DIY solution for the squished katakana problem, too!