Final Fantasy: Lost in Japanese

The Goal
Play all the Final Fantasy games, in order.

The Catch
I’m going to play them in Japanese.

The Odds of me Finishing This
Slim

Background
I work with Japanese a bit, and speak the language fairly well. I used to read the language decently (to the point where I could read some Japanese novels), but with family demands and a work life that has left me with little time to read/write Japanese, my reading skills have atrophied over the past ten years. Now that things have settled down a bit, I’m trying to improve my Japanese reading and writing again. As part of this, I’ve been attempting to play some games in Japanese. Somewhere in here I got the ambitious and ridiculous idea of playing all the Final Fantasy games in their original Japanese. I’ve never played even one of them in any language, and have always wanted to give this a shot.

Why the Slim Odds?
At the moment, I can probably read Japanese RPG game text at about a 70% level of understanding. This is borderline for novels, but in a game it leaves you susceptible to what I call “Missing the Critical Hint”. You know, this is the one line from one character that clues you in to traveling west for 3 days to a deserted cave to look for a dead squirrel hidden inside a robot. If you miss this hint, you end up what I call “Cluelessly Lost” (CL, for short). Actually, I should come up with a more accurate name for it, because theoretically you must have a destination to be able to get lost, and when you Miss the Critical Hint you no longer have any idea where you should be going, forget about getting lost on the way there.

My general strategy when this happens is to do what I call “Wander Around in Circles”. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the best method of completing Japanese RPGs. The reason is that Wandering Around in Circles quickly segues to the next stage, what I call “Getting Really Bored”. And this quickly results in yet another problem, which I call “Falling Asleep”.

But it doesn’t end there. Falling asleep leads to all sorts of other annoying conditions like “Waking Up With a Dead Party”, “Burning Out Your GBA Battery and Losing All Your Progress”, and “Waking up with your Party in the Middle of an Endless Ocean and Having No Idea How you Got There”. This last one usually stems from falling asleep with a button mashed down and having your party sail for a few hours in a random direction. Anyway, the result of all this hocus pocus is that it takes me about as long to complete a Japanese RPG as it takes someone to complete college, both in terms of calendar days and hours spent playing. And now we’ve come full circle and you know why the chances I’ll ever complete this are slim.

Not to be too heavy with the negative waves, I do want to tell you that there is an upside to my highly advanced strategy of beating Japanese RPGs: My characters tend to get pretty powerful from Wandering Around in Circles and Killing Everything, and when I finally stumble onto that squirrel in that cave a billion miles away, my party is uber buffed and about 20 levels higher than what they should be at that point in the game. It can be rewarding to kill bosses with one shot.

But anyway, I’m losing my focus, which happens a lot since I started playing Japanese RPGs. Time to get started on this adventure.

Actually, we’re not quite ready to start yet, but we’re getting there…