Japanese reading report

This week was pretty busy so I wasn’t able to quite meet all of my goals (at least at the time of writing; I’ll probably wrap up another one before the end of the day).

First up, I did finally finish Persona 5: Royal. The post-game content was really really good and I’m happy to report I was able to follow along with all of it (and then later discuss the ending with some friends and make sure I hadn’t missed anything major). Very very happy with the way everything wrapped up; it was down to the wire with a few social links but I did manage to do a 100% coop, all-missions-clear run so I’m satisfied that I saw as much content as possible. On that note, I’m pretty sure that over the course of this game I’ve seen every grammar point I’ve learned to date, plus a bunch of new ones and a ton of new vocabulary. I was especially tickled to see ~わ~わで for the first time in the wild after learning about it ages ago.

I launched immediately into 大図書館の羊飼い, which I’d bought almost a year ago but had dropped pretty quickly due to the immediate onslaught of difficult material. I’ve been holding off on visual novels until I can read them without too much difficulty (and without any kind of external tools, since all my VNs are for Switch and PS Vita). This time around it was much better and I think I’ll stick with it at a leisurely pace.

I read about half of 女神異聞録ペルソナ vol. 2. The characters are great and I really like the art style. Not knowing much about Persona 1 and 2, some of the plot developments so far have been kind of surprising and I can definitely see how this was sort of prior to the series finding what made it distinct from mainline SMT.

Finally, I read all but one page of the allotted chunk of 夜市 from the Wanikani book club. A pretty major development has just taken place and it’s gone into a sort of flashback mode. This upcoming week will wrap up the first story in the book so I’m looking forward to seeing how everything comes together.

Honorable mention: finished the last two sidequests in Persona 5: Scramble, which I had been sitting on for a while (a high-difficulty repeat of the final battle, plus a fight against the Reaper), which unlocked a super cute cutscene with Lavenza and brought the post-game content to a close. Loading this clear save allows for a proper NG+ mode along with a new extreme difficulty, which I briefly tried only to die in two hits in the pregame sample battle. I’ll probably go back to it in the future but for now I’m calling it quits.