Jakob Konger

If it’s not obvious from some of my other posts, I’ve been learning Japanese. It’s pretty tough. I’ve reached the point where I can read Japanese books fairly well (if very slowly), but whenever I do this–read full books in Japanese–I never know if I’m quite reading everything correctly. I can misread an entire book and not realize it. (Arguably I could do the same in English, but let’s pretend for the moment I’m blissfully unaware of my own limits.) To make up for this worry of mine, I’ve taken up the entirely not at all nerdy or uncool hobby of playing Japanese RPGs in their original Japanese. This is cool and impressive and awesome. This is the first thing I tell strangers about me. The reason I do this is actually pretty simple: RPGs are not only incredibly text heavy–especially JRPGs, which I swear to God never shut up–but also because if I read something incorrectly, the game will give me feedback right away. If I misread what a spell does, for example, I will see my mistake immediately, because the game will react to my input. Yeah, anyways, the point is: I had a lot of difficulty with the end game of one of these JRPGs-Dragon Quest 4 for DS–so I’ve built a page for a few spell translations on my website. You can check them out here. I hope to make a few more of these later, with other games, but I hope at least it might help someone with this game in the future. I know for the fact I’m not the only one uncool/dedicated enough to do this.