This year, I continued to live in Hachiōji and commute into Chiba Prefecture to teach mainly high school for the same organization as last year. I have now completed the second trimester of my second school year there. Well, I almost did, and then I tested COVID-19-positive on December 13, so some of my lessons have been rescheduled in the third trimester. I managed to save a little bit of money this year (in the thousands, but not the ten thousands).
I got another one-year Instructor visa extension, and for the third year in a row, my income has been above minimum wage, but (far) below the threshold necessary to apply for permanent residency, even though I have lived here for eleven and a half years, now... The yen crashed to around ¥152 this year. An assassin killed Prime Minister Abe this year, and although at first, many people thought the assassin was a madman, it later turned out that he was at least right about one thing: massive Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) corruption with the Moonies. Inflation is at a 40-year high while wages drop, and the birthrate sags even more. The Japanese then proceed to scapegoat foreigners for the problems the Japanese created. Things are really looking bleak in Japan these days. I am increasingly scratching my head, trying to figure out if there are any reasons to stay.
I climbed a mountain in Chiba (Nokogiriyama) this year with Svenja. Before that, we had also climbed Mt. Kagenobu on the Tokyo/Kanagawa Prefecture border. This means I have now climbed nine mountains in the Kantō Region. My goal is ten. We did not see much interesting wildlife beyond the standard Japanese rat snakes and macaques. I did see a kingfisher at the Asa River, though, a beautiful bird.
By far my biggest gaming achievement this year was playing through all of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years on my Kindle Fire 7 tablet. I had played through original FF4 five times, but never before had I played through FF4: TAY. I also beat two games from my childhood for the first time: Crayon Shin-Chan: "Ora to Shiro wa Otomodachi Dayo" (Crayon Shin-Chan: "Me and Shiro [Shinnosuke's dog] Are Friends!") on my Super Game Boy and Operation Neptune for Windows 3.1. Although I have beaten Civ1 many times, this year marked the first time I beat Civ1 on Macintosh, reaching Alpha Centauri from just one city!
I read many books this year. I read I'm not fine, thank you. And you? (a horrible and stupid book), Michael Crichton's Travels, Comet in Moominland, Dune, The Reason I Jump, Chicken Soup for the Soup, THE SECRET HIDE-OUT, Poor Richard's Retirement, Pirate Latitudes, and THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER. I read lots of children's books before bedtime, because I find them comforting after a day in cold, empathy-lacking Tokyo, and they are world-affirming and not too difficult, perfect for the end of the day.
I did not get any new degrees, certificates, or passes on any standardized tests, this year, regrettably. However, I did manage to win the Duolingo Diamond Tournament and earned enough XP to be in the top 1%. I hope to take the Goethe-Institut A2 exam soon.
Oh, and my sister got married; I sat this one out because I was worried about Japan's draconian border restrictions and being unable to reenter Japan. The wedding was a superspreader event, so I made the right call. Anyways, that was this year.
This year, I spent most of the year in Hachiōji (which experienced an alarming number of earthquakes in a short time, four in one day in one case), with some time in Tokushima, Shikoku. I passed the ten-year mark in Japan. Unfortunately, although there was a brief period lasting roughly a couple of weeks during which I theoretically could have applied for permanent residency (my long-term goal in Japan), I did not, because I thought my chances were very, very low and did not want to trouble the person who could one day be my (potential) guarantor with what would probably be a failed application. I could have had a much better chance of applying successfully if certain things had not happened, and I am still unhappy about them. Therefore, it was a tough year filled with introspection. I also only made a little more than 5/6 of my minimum target income, but still managed to save significant money. My visa was renewed, so at least there was that.
As of March, I landed a teaching position in Chiba Prefecture. It has gone well, and I have, as of late December, been offered a second contract. The people that I work with on a daily basis are much more decent human beings, and appreciate my differences much more. I think something like this current situation is a better path for the future.
This year, I saw lots of interesting wildlife ranging from a stingray swimming in a river, to jellyfish, to a baby wild boar piglet lying exhausted in the grass after a rainstorm. I hiked five mountains: Mt. Bizan (Tokushima), Mt. Nenogongen (in Saitama), Mt. Konpira, Mt. Hinode, and Mt. Mitake (the latter three are all in Tokyo). I did most of these with Svenja and Diana, two ladies who live in Tokyo, who are both French-American dual citizens.
I read lots of books. I read Fight Club, Hillbilly Elegy, FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING, and Hans Andersen Fairy Tales Second Series. The last book on that list is a tangential part of a secret topic that I am currently studying (and by the way, I racked up over 1,000 karma on reddit researching that topic this year). I pre-ordered ABBA's "Voyage" and listened to the whole thing on its release date, after picking it up from Tower Records; honestly, I never thought I would have the opportunity to do that. I also beat numerous video games: Castle of the Winds II: Lifthransir's Bane, Sid Meier's Civilization III: Complete (on Chieftain, by having the highest Civilization Score), Pokémon Snap, and re-beating Treasure Mountain! (Version 2.0.1 this time, for Windows 3.1, this time with 640x480 graphics). The most significant gaming accomplishment was beating Super Mario Bros. (first on my restored Famicom, then on the Super Famicom through Super Mario Collection). That took practice, practice, practice over a period of months! I even kept a spreadsheet and graph so I could measure small amounts of improvement over time. Eventually, I got good enough that I could beat the Famicom version ten times in a row!
In terms of study and personal projects (beyond the reddit thing I mentioned earlier), I won Diamond League again on Duolingo for German. I also finished first, with 10000 XP, in the post-Diamond-League Diamond Tournament. Programming-wise, I created a version of Conway's Game of Life in JavaScript and uploaded it to my programming website.
Anyhow, I hope 2022 goes better. I am still figuring things out.
Nor did I ever catch it, to my knowledge. This update is just to tell anyone who might still read this site that I'm still alive, and no, this website isn't dead. I'm living in Shikoku, now. Allow me to summarize my year. The coronavirus situation caused my work situation to be very unstable, but I still met a certain undisclosed minimum economic baseline level and did save a little bit of money (I also got into the stock market for the first time in March after it crashed, which was great timing, and I've already made thousands of dollars on it). I also did lots of retro gaming this year, acquiring a Super Famicom, a Game Boy, a Game Boy Color, and a Famicom. I beat, for the first time, the following games: Gnat Attack (Mario Paint) on Super Famicom, Civilization II in German on Windows 3.1 (and playing only on 1x1 islands, at that), Dr. Mario on Game Boy, Depression Quest on the Web browser (to better understand Gamergate), Final Fantasy VI (started last year, but did the entire World of Ruin this year), and the 1988 Bullet-Proof Software version of Tetris for Famicom. All this work, dashing around for work, and gaming left little time for study, although I did start using Duolingo, racked up over 40,000 XP, and got the Diamond Badge (all for German). I also stayed in shape through walking and jogging extensively. Still, it was not a very good year overall (some tragic things happened). I wonder if 2020 was God's way of punishing me for ringing in the new year at the Shintō Meiji Shrine (a pagan shrine)...
Achievement Unlocked: Photographing a Live Wild Tanuki
Playtime: 7 years, 11 months, and 17 days
(photographed within the past two hours, when it was still February 19)
It is called the "Japanese raccoon dog" in English, but it is neither a type of raccoon, nor a dog. It's a whole different type of mammal.
It was traveling with its mate—and within a week of Valentine's Day! That's how I was able to photograph it. Normally tanuki run away at the first sight of a human, but this one was cautiously waiting until I left because its mate had already crossed the street and it didn't want to get separated.
This is not the first time I have photographed a wild tanuki, just the first time I have photographed a live one. On November 1, 2017, I snapped this photo when I was out for a jog:
Click on the photo to see it at full resolution.
I think it had been hit by a car.
Oh, and just an update on my life: on July 4 of last year, I got my first three-year visa extension. Which I mention now because I hadn't made any website updates since then, until now.
I've been living in Asia for 17 years as of today. I'm 31, so that's about 54% of my life.
I don't know the exact dates for the five years when I was a kid. I don't know what specific date I moved to South Korea in 1988. I don't know what specific date it was when my family moved to Hong Kong in 1998. I don't know the end dates, either. However, one date sticks very clearly in my mind: June 19, 2006. That's when I arrived in Seoul for my second stint there. I timed it so I'd arrive about a week before Yonsei University Korean Language Institute classes started on 6/25/2006 (which was, coincidentally, the one-year anniversary of graduating from Robinson Secondary School—yes, I took nearly a year off—I say "nearly" because due to the time difference, I started studying at YSKLI a matter of hours less than 365 days after graduating from RHS). That was 12 years ago. 12 + 5 = 17
This is a personal "holiday" for me—more significant than many "real" holidays. The past 12 years have been a mixture of wheat and tares.
The wheat: I finished two associate's degrees and two bachelor's degrees, became "advanced" or "intermediate" in Korean and Japanese, respectively (although I doubt those labels), have spent eight years teaching English and building a potential career in TEFL, and bought (and own outright) a condo in Tokyo.
The tares: Asia doesn't give a shit if I've lived here 17 years or not. I'm still on one-year Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services extensions. Any guy or gal who had never set foot in Asia before could easily find a job at Interac or whatever and be on the same Status of Residence and the same Period of Stay as me within a few months—they might even get three years instead of one year. That's extremely frustrating. It's a real slap in the face from Japanese immigration. I realize they don't care about my prior time in Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, but what about my 7+ years in Japan?
I don't know if there's anything to celebrate. I'm playing a long game here—until I've lived in Japan for about 10 years (the amount of time it takes to get permanent residence and qualify for the Japanese National (old age) Pension, I'll probably have little to show my for time in East Asia.
I've been working on a container garden on the balcony of my condo since April. I started most of the plants in yogurt containers and didn't re-pot them until relatively late, so I think that's why most of them are still so small.
Basil: It looks like two plants, but if you look closely, there's another tiny seedling on the left where a previous basil plant died (a minority of my plants die during re-potting) and I decided to try planting another seed. I'm growing these so I can make my own basil oil, like what comes with the margherita pizzas at Don Quijote supermarket. I consider these the most successful plants so far— they are growing lots of foliage, which is what basil is supposed to do.
This is the left side of the garden. In the left planter (into which I have put 28 liters of soil), there are two goya (bitter melon) plants. In the left planter are my four tomato plants. And yes, I know that the goyas and the tomatoes will all eventually need some kind of support, and I've read something about how I should cut runners from certain kinds of plants, so that's another thing on my to-do list, as is fertilizer.
Here's the right side of my garden. Here, in the huge 40-liter pot, I have a persimmon seedling. I got two persimmon seeds out of a persimmon that fell outside my neighbor's fence last year. I forgot about the persimmon and it began to rot in my fridge. Rather than throwing it away, I dug out the seeds; both germinated. The one that did better is in the 40-liter pot.
The one that isn't doing so well is in the yogurt container to the right of the 40-liter pot. Basically it never managed to shed its seed coat. After weeks of waiting, I tried to remove the seed coat without damaging the leaves it hopefully contained. However, the seed coat was so hard, I couldn't break it open, and I accidentally decapitated the plant. Will it survive? I doubt it, but the stem is still very green and clearly photosynthesizing, and a bump has appeared on the stem (perhaps it's trying to create new leaves and they'll come bursting out of the bump any day). We'll see.
On the right are my Korean yellow melons (참외, chamoe, pronounced "cham-we" with a short 'e'), which I waited way too long to re-pot. They're turning yellow, perhaps from lack of nutrients. We'll see if they survive. If they don't, it's cool, because I'm worried they'll crossbreed with the goyas. Finally, on the right, there are the eggplants.
Except for the goyas, everything is either in a planter bought from a popular ¥100 shop, or in a styrofoam crate gotten for free from Ecos (the local supermarket), with holes punched in the bottom.
The thing with the piece of cardboard over it with the Takara Shōchū logo on it is a small compost bin, where I throw my food scraps (no meat). I didn't think it was composting correctly, but today, I rotated the compost for the first time (after the bin got rained on heavily), and I realized that actually, composting was taking place very efficiently and I just hadn't been seeing it because I was only looking at the freshest top layer.
I also tried growing shiitake mushrooms using a Don Quijote grow kit, but it failed spectacularly. At first, it looked like the mushrooms were about to pop out of the log, but then the mold overtook the mushrooms.
My PC is back on the Internet! Yahoo! Yes, that's right, my PC had been offline since April, because all of my telecommunications these days are through an iPhone (including tethering my Intel Core i7 to my iPhone), and my iPhone's battery died permanently. I had been using an iPhone 5 since May 1, 2016, for my Internet and, since May 1, 2017, had gotten all my Internet at home by tethering through that. The iPhone 5 still technically works, except that it has to be connected to a wall charger (not a USB port), or it powers off instantly, and connecting to it with Wi-Fi is extremely unreliable, so basically, my PC was offline from late April until 5/4. I continued to update the offline version of this website, but the online version didn't get synced until a little while ago (so you can go back and read my post on Akalabeth: World of Doom, if you want). Anyhow, I'm really glad to have a shiny new (used) iPhone 6 64 GB, which cost ¥19,224 from Geo Amusement Developer (which was cheaper than the other place I looked, HardOff).
Yesterday, I finished memorizing the Elder Futhark. What is the Elder Futhark? Well, it's the system of 24 runes used by ancient Proto-Germanic and Old Norse speakers to write their languages. Why would I learn such an archaic writing system?
The answer: to explore my Germanic heritage and enhance my teaching: as a native English-speaking English teacher of mostly German/Norwegian ethnicity who was born in the Netherlands, these runes are a key to understanding my Germanic heritage—English, German, the Scandinavian languages, and Dutch were all at one time or another written in runes. Studying not only how to read and write them, but also each letter's meaning is a very enlightening experience, as I will explain later in this post.
Here is an example of the Anki system I created so I could memorize the Elder Futhark and maintain it over the long term (not just forget it in a day or two). My tablet has no runic support, so I hand-drew each of the 24 runes and scanned them in, then added them to 24 cards in the Runes_1, Runes_2, and Runes_3 tags in the Miscellaneous Anki deck. To make the cards more visually appealing, I drew three runestones, which you can see at the top of each card—a runestone in the forest, a runestone in front of a hill, and a runestone in the tundra. This makes the cards less boring to look at. Then, to enhance the educational experience, I added not only the sound and appearance of each rune to the card, but the name in Proto-Germanic or Old Norse, and in cases with an animal or plant or something mythical (gods, giants, etc.), a picture, following each picture's licensing requirements (if there is no one cited, it means it's public domain). That helped me to better understand who "Tyr" or "Ing" were, or what the "aurochs" is (because they went extinct in the 1600s—by the way, it's basically a gigantic cow that used to roam wild in Europe, Asia, and Africa before being hunted to extinction).
By the way, I also learned the Greek letters more or less the same way last month. Lately, I've been trying to learn various what I like to call "micro-skills." What I mean is, most of the things I traditionally think of as "skills" (such as Japanese or information technology) take hundreds of hours to even reach a "beginner" level, and thousands of hours to master them (and not everybody even can master them). Micro-skills, on the other hand, typically take less than 100 hours to learn. I'm getting bored from the macro-skills and yearning for things that, knowledge-wise, are "get-rich-quick," so I've been working on easy things like the Greek and runic alphabets, lately, and will probably continue to learn more of these easy-to-learn micro-skills.
From a linguistics perspective, it was highly enlightening because of the close resemblance of many proto-Germanic/Old Norse words to modern English. For example, the rune "mannaz" means "man" in modern English, and the rune "nauþiz," means "need"—like English, it starts with an 'n' and contains a sound similar to a 'd' (the þ is pronounced /ð/, similar to a 'd' and indistinguishable to some individuals) and like German ("brauchen"), it has an "au."
It is difficult to write modern English words in the Elder Futhark because of the controversy of whether to write them phonetically, or whether to write them preserving the English spelling conventions. For example, if I want to write "computer," should I write the runes for "komputer" (close to the modern English spelling), or should I write "kompjuter" (pronounced "kompyuter") because that's actually closer to the Modern English pronunciation even though it violates the spelling conventions?
However, it is generally quite easy to write Japanese in the Elder Futhark, so for both of the English lessons that I taught on 5/4, I dazzled my students by writing their names in runes! It is necessary to take a few liberties like simplifying chi/tsu to ti/tu, but that simplification is sometimes done in Nihonshiki Romanization using the Roman alphabet, as well.
Now, this post is probably long-winded and boring and congratulations to anyone who has gotten this far, but let me just say—after researching them intensively over the past couple of days, I've realized that I'm one of the more "normal" rune learners out there! I actually came across a YouTube video by this guy who talked about how he made his own rune stones for magic purposes, with his own blood!
As for other news, while at Geo Amusement Developer, I saw a PlayStation 3 for the incredibly low price of only ¥3,568. They told me it was because the USB port was busted. Well, I took it home, and I discovered, their diagnostics were incorrect—the USB port is fine. It's the controller that's busted. So I just hooked up an original PSOne Dual Shock controller using a USB adapter and was using my PS3 in no time!
I managed to link it to the PlayStation Network account I had back in Taiwan, ~8 years ago, the same one I used to get and beat Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy II, Ape Escape, Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon, and Aquanaut's Holiday: Memories of Summer 1996. I had previously tried to link my PSP systems to that account, but it had failed—so this time, I lied when I set up the system and input "Taiwan" instead of "Japan" and it worked. I was able to download all my old games from Taiwan! Even my FF13 achievements (37%) were still there, and my Ape Escape icon for my PSN account!
Last piece of news: I discovered this place called "Eol-jjang" in downtown Hachiōji that only sets up shop a few days a month. They sell various Korean goods. They also offer cooking classes, and the best part is that they offer ¥500 Korean "nandemo kaiwa" ("conversation [about] anything") classes! That's an unbelievably cheap way to maintain my Korean that has gotten rusty because I haven't lived in Korea in over eight years. I already went to one, and it was nice—just sitting and chatting with the shopkeeper—really nice lady. If she's only making ¥1,000 per hour, how can this be worthwhile for her? I mean, that's just barely more than minimum wage here. I think the answer is that she's already sitting at the shop anyway, often without customers for long stretches of time—so she might as well be making an extra ¥500 per half hour while she's doing it, right?
And that's the end of my long-winded post. Congratulations if you got this far! I don't really write for other people so much as just myself, so I'm not really that concerned with making particularly entertaining posts.
Today, I beat Akalabeth: World of Doom, an ancient CRPG (computer role-playing game) from 1979. I played it mainly for historical purposes to see how Dungeon & Dragons and CRPGs and then Japanese console RPGs like Dragon Quest were linked, but I discovered that it was actually kind of fun. It was programmed by Richard Garriott (who calls himself "Lord British") when he was still in high school, on his school's computer(s) and then at home on his Apple II that his parents bought him. His boss at his part-time job encouraged him to sell the game, so he had his mom illustrate the instruction manual, and they packaged the game in Ziploc bags. Eventually, a publisher picked up the game and he made approximately $150,000 off of it. He reckoned that he spent about 100 hours creating the game, so this was a pretty good return. At the time, Akalabeth was not called "Ultima," but later, it was retroactively named "Ultima 0," which places it in one of the most famous RPG series ever, the inspiration for Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. By the way, I agree with it being called "Ultima 0," and do not think this is just convenient backdating, because the game is extremely similar to Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (which I played all the way through in middle school, back in Hong Kong).
Here are some screenshots. They are: fighting the final boss (Balrog, on Level 9), traversing the overworld to Lord British's castle (Britannia, where a MIDI for "Rule Britannia" is played), and finally, the ending: reporting to Lord British after defeating the Balrog:
I played with the seed value 31. In order to avoid getting lost in the dungeon and getting pummeled by enemies, or getting lost on the overworld and running out of food, I drew several maps. Download the high-resolution versions here. Here are the low-resolution versions:
The game is available for free (legally) from Good Old Games. Just Google search that. There are three different versions: Linux, Mac, and Windows. They are all basically just the same DOS port running in DOSBox for each platform. I really wanted to use the Windows version so I could install it in DOSBox in my DOS folder (basically, my neo-Windows 3.1 virtual PC where I do most of my retro-gaming these days), but the Windows version would not install properly on Wine, so instead, I installed the Linux version, and just copied the necessary files into my DOS folder.
I played a very easy version of the game: a difficulty level of 1 and getting lucky with the Magic Amulet so I turned into a powerful Lizard Man. It would have been much harder if I had played on the original Apple II with no saving, on a higher difficulty level, and without using the Magic Amulet. Do I think I could beat it on higher settings? Of course, but that would be a waste of time, because I was mainly just enjoying the game for historical purposes. Things might be different if I actually lived in 1979/1980 when the game was still new and there were not so many CRPGs worth playing, yet.
One of my life goals is to write a walkthrough for a game that does not have a walkthrough in English, yet. Akalabeth already has several walkthroughs, but it has crossed my mind that maybe I should write a walkthrough about it just to get some practice at writing walkthroughs before I write a walkthrough for an obscure Japanese or Korean game.
At some point, I would like to try the original Dungeons & Dragons for historical purposes, as well, and see how similar that is to Akalabeth and Ultima I. I do not want to become a D&D fan, it's just about understanding the history of the RPGs I now enjoy.
Tonight, I beat Final Fantasy Adventure (FFA), a Game Boy game, for the first time. I've been playing this game on and off for over 19 years.
In FFA, you control a character who aspires to become a "gemma knight," a protector of the "gemma buds" of the Mana Tree. In an amazing coincidence, my company here in Tokyo hired an accountant named Ms. Gemma this year.
Disclaimer: This post is going to be extremely long-winded and boring to most people except me, and maybe a few of my close friends from back in the day at Hong Kong International School (HKIS). You don't have to read anything that you don't want to, so don't complain to me about that. This website barely generates any ad revenue, so basically it's just for me, so I write whatever kind of drivel I feel like writing. :-)
Legal and technical note: I own the original FFA cartridge. It's in my closet; it was one of a few games I brought with me from America to Korea on June 18/19, 2006. However, I played the game using an emulator on my PC (the Intel Core i7 I built in 2013) because I hate how volatile on-cartridge battery-backed RAM saves are. I prefer to have the save file as a file on my computer that can be backed up. I used NO$GMB on DOSBox because I couldn't find any good emulators that run on Linux natively. How about that, playing all the way through a game on an emulator-within-an-emulator? :-) Anyhow, it's not illegal and it's not piracy, because I own the original game cartridge.
The Ending
I chose Char for my main character's name, for obvious reasons. No, Jane is not named after my aunt, nor my classmate from university. I just picked it because it's the first name for "Jane Doe."
The Three Final Boss Fights Including Cutscenes
→ 
→ 
→ 
→ 
Julius, Bad Mana, and the Bad Mana Tree
Interestingly, the Excalibur Sword, despite supposedly being a requirement for a gemma knight to defeat the bad guys, is actually not necessary at all. I used only the Blood Sword in all three of the final fights. I needed to use many Elixirs to heal myself and Cure spells when those ran out, but I got through it. Ironically, many ordinary enemies in this game can't be damaged with the Blood Sword—I guess the final boss is weaker than they are?
Glitches
In the final dungeon, the protagonist can walk up to the point where he's hovering in the air. Is that a game glitch, or an emulation glitch? The emulator seems extremely good, so I think the latter (this game is known to be buggy, for example warping the character around the world is a glitch that happens even on Game Boy hardware). The second glitch has the main character appear above the leaves in the primeval forest even when he's supposed to be standing on the ground.
I first got it for my original Game Boy for my birthday on October 24, 1998, when I was a 6th grader at HKIS. I asked for it because I didn't have any Final Fantasy games, and I really wanted one. My friends were really into Final Fantasy games back then. I was not really into them yet, but I had just beaten Zelda: Link's Awakening over the summer just after arriving in Hong Kong, before starting 6th grade, and I thought that FFA, with its Zelda-like gameplay, would ease me into the Final Fantasy series. The concept of choosing attacks, spells, etc. from a menu seemed too alien to me, so FFA looked appealing with its Zelda-like action RPG-style gameplay.
Well, as fate would have it, on the same 12th birthday on which I received FFA, I got Final Fantasy VII, and guess which one I spent most of my time playing. FFA is a good game and all, but FF7 was generally just better—and my friends either played it too, or at least had played it recently, so there was a social rather than solitary element, which could not be said about FFA. I stopped and restarted FFA numerous times over the years. Although I finished FF7 in 7th grade (1999-2000, at HKIS), I didn't complete FFA until tonight.
What was my impetus to finally finish it? Well, the answer is that on October 5 of last year, I bought a Super Famicom Classic Mini from Geo Amusement Developer, and one of the bundled games is Secret of Mana (SoM), which is actually the sequel to FFA. SoM is a well-renowned game that I definitely plan to play through in my lifetime; I first played it in 1999 at a friend's home, and my first girlfriend, back in high school loved it and beat it on an emulator on her Pentium 3. Last I checked, which was a couple of years ago, that ex-girlfriend had become a stripper near Las Vegas, but I digress. Anyhow, I figured "I should play through SoM while it's still topical" (so within one year of the release of the Super Famicom Classic Mini), "and in order to understand the background of SoM, I should play through FFA first."
The original plan was to take my five-day New Year's vacation from my job to play through it. According to HowLongToBeat.com, it takes 14 hours to play it as a "Completionist," so I figured that if I played, ah, maybe about five hours a day, or maybe a little bit more, I could beat it. Well, as always, the HowLongToBeat.com estimate was too low (I think lots of people just submit an absurdly low time to brag—that's what "hardcore" gamers are like). Note to self: always double the HowLongToBeat.com time and use that as a guide for how long it'll take me to beat it, because I'm a mere mortal.
Well, it ended up taking much longer than that to beat. I signed up for the Kanji Kentei on January 5, at which point I barely played at all.
Had I played it the same way I used to play games in the past, I probably would've stopped and never finished it, but this time, I had two new strategies that helped me get back to it and finish it. First of all, there's the sort of "deadline" of October 5, 2018 to finish SoM while it's still on people's minds (because until then, the Super Famicom Classic Mini is still in its first year), which in turn motivated me to finish FFA. Second of all, I was very careful to log the major parts of the game, especially the plot, in a text file, so that if I went, say, a month without playing it, I could just read the text file and remember what I had to do next and the story. This worked extremely well and I plan to do it this way again in the future.
Which game will I work on, next? I'm not 100% sure, but I have a pretty good idea. To keep things fresh, I should probably play through a game that is dissimilar to FFA, i.e. not an RPG, in color, and not 8-bit. I think Kirby Superstar fits this bill. Beating all the included mini-games in that one has been on my gaming backlog since the summer of 1997 when I first played it on my cousin's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) at Sandbridge Beach. After that, then what?
Dragon Quest XI? It will be released on September 4, 2018 in English, so I have just under five months if I want to beat it before it comes out in English, which would be cool. Beating a Dragon Quest game in Japanese before it comes out in English, while living in Japan—that'd be a great Japan memory. However, according to HowLongToBeat.com, it takes an absurd 87 and a half hours to beat, and I can probably double that time to 175 hours, so I don't think beating that by then is realistic.
SoM? It's a 26-hour game according to HowLongToBeat.com, so again, double that, and it would probably take me ~52 hours. A realistic spring and summer project, but is it too early for another Mana series game?
Final Fantasy VI? It's also bundled on the Super Famicom Classic Mini, so again, it's topical during the first year of that system's release. I've started and restarted this classic so many times, but have never beaten it; I think it's in part that it's a relatively long game, in part that I already know the story, more or less, so motivation is lower, and in part, FF6 snobs constantly putting down one of my favorite games, FF7, and turning me off of FF6, which might actually be a good game sans the snobs! Perhaps I should play through that? 41 hours→82 hours? I could probably complete it by the fall.
Final Fantasy Legend III? No time pressure, but if I beat this one, I'll have finished every single FF for original Game Boy: FF Legends I-III and FFA.
I'm not really sure, yet. I'll have to think about it.
I pretty much played a "Completionist" game. I got all the best armor and the best inventory (which involved killing many ninjas, which in turn often required entering a room, killing one of two ninjas, then re-entering the room to get another ninja to spawn), except that my Key was at 2 and not 4. I didn't go for Level 99, settling for Level 65 instead, which is still pretty high. I had 65,535 Gold Points, the maximum a 16-bit integer allows, which is clearly what they used for the Gold Points variable in the game. This game doesn't have enough stuff to buy.
My Kanji Kentei 3-kyū Certificate
Long time no blog. I've decided to be more active from now on with updating this blog. I made almost zero updates in 2017, and I really felt like something was missing from my life. Over the past week (well, technically slightly more than a week because it's Friday night, now), four major things have happened:
Last Friday, after a two-day ordeal, I finished filing my tax return at the Tachikawa Tax Office, and although the process felt like it caused several new gray hairs and wrinkles to appear on my head and face, respectively, the good news is that I will get over ¥371,000 back—that's over $3,400 at the current exchange rate. This was not a surprise—I knew I had been overpaying, but it's still nice to have confirmation that that money will indeed return to me.
On Saturday, I handed a signed contract to my boss, which he had already signed. I will work there for at least one more year (maybe more, depending on various factors), from April 1, 2018-March 31, 2019.
Yesterday was my 7th Japanniversary. I arrived in Japan at approximately 11:55 AM on March 7, 2011. Basically, I am now less than three years away from being able to apply for permanent residency, out of the ten continous years required.
Today, I got the certificate in the mail that says that I passed Kanji Kentei 3-kyū. It's a test of 1,607 kanji, or all the kanji taught through the end of junior high school.
At the test center, the girls behind and in front of me were 14 years old (I could see their birthdates on their answer sheets before the exam started) and the woman to my right was 19, so although I was still over a decade older than them, it wasn't as embarrassing as taking 7-kyū back in 2011, in which I found myself in a room full of elementary school children. Pretty much everyone there was at least a teenager. The pass rate was only 46.8% and almost all the examinees were Japanese, I believe—as far as I know, I was the only non-Japanese in the room—everyone else had black hair and East Asian features, so I suppose a Chinese or Korean could have slipped in there, for example, but as far as I know, all of them were Japanese.
Now, my kanji is as good as a Japanese freshman in high school! :-) There are actually Japanese people out there who finished junior high school (the highest level of compulsory education in Japan) and opted not to go to high school (which is not required), who have the same kanji level as me. Yes, I'm kind of proud, because it took me less than seven years to achieve what a typical Japanese person takes 15 years to achieve (although it is only fair to note that I have lived in East Asia for over 16 years, so I guess I'm right about where I should be). Should I take the pre-2-kyū next? I passed the 3-kyū with 155/200 (a 15-point margin—the pass mark is 140/200), so it's not inconceivable that with lots of study, I could pass Kanji Kentei Pre-2-kyū, as well. Pre-2 is acceptable even for Japanese adults, so it would be a major, major victory. This one was still a major victory, though, but with only one "major."
This notification says I passed the test. I got the notification at 10:00 AM on 2/26. The test date was 2/4.
This is the paper score report that came in the mail on 3/9. It has my score on it.