Morg Writes Thoughts

I've been toying with the idea of starting a series of blog posts dedicated to reviewing various games I play in Japanese here on this site so... here it is!

The number one goal of these articles is to both share my opinions on the game and provide some specific details on how to approach said games for the purpose of Japanese learning and immersion.

I've done something similar in the past dedicated to Japanese learning beginners, however as I have gotten better at the language, my impressions for what is or is not appropriate for an absolute beginner is not trustworthy anymore.

For this reason, I want to instead take the time to objectively look at various games I play and provide a set of criteria and rules to which score them from the point of view of an intermediate+ level Japanese learner.

I already spend way too much time playing videogames as they account for the majority of my Japanese learning time, so why not share this experience with everyone else too?

Game Review Criterias

I have a small set of rules that I want to keep myself accountable for, and I'll be sharing them here also as a future reminder.

Each review will be divided in two sections, one dedicated to Japanese-specific content, and the other dedicated to more generic game review content

Criteria for the Japanese section of the review

  • Is the game easy to texthook?
  • Is the text pausable or does it autoscroll/autoadvance?
  • How much useful input volume (text/audio) is there compared to raw gameplay sections?
  • Does the game have a text log or similar feature to go back and re-read dialogues?
  • Are there quest markers/is the story goal linear enough that you can progress even without understanding everything?

Criteria for the normal part of the review

These criteria are going to be more loose, but as a general idea I plan to at least touch on some of the more obvious components of a game like graphics and sound.

One thing that I wish a lot of other game reviews had was some focus on the core game loop, as that is usually what makes or breaks a game for me. For this reason, I will add a note on that in my reviews.

I will try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, while acknowledging the fact that what someone considers a spoiler might vary from person to person. I will include some screenshots I take of the games I play, but I will try to make sure there's no spoilers in them.

While I do have a sizable backlog of games I already played that I would like to review, I would prefer to focus on those games that are still fresh in my mind and write a review of them as soon as I finish playing them. For this reason, I don't plan to go back to those older games or have a fixed schedule for my reviews. Looking at my current pace for the year 2023, I seem to be finishing one game per month on average, so maybe that schedule will work, but I can't make any promise on that.

ここまで読んでくれて感謝いたします これからもよろしくお願いいたします

In case people don't know me, I am morg, the owner of the fediverse instances of micro and macro shitpost.blog.

While on micro I am just posting random stuff in a microblogging style, I thought why not have longer posts as proper blog posts on a macro scale as well?

I do often write my own articles on my personal site, especially related to Japanese learning but the way the site is structured I feel doesn't really work well as a shareable blog. The fediverse is much more appropriate for that.

I'm still not sure what I will be writing about, and this is mostly just a first test post, however ideally I would like to write more in-depth reviews of things I do which usually include playing videogames, reading manga, reading light novels, and watching anime. Maybe it will become a review blog, maybe not, who knows?

You can always drop a follow and find out.

よろしくお願いします