Here we are for our second installment of Weekly Ramblings. I’ve been back studying for a week now, so it may be a little hard to get any sort of thoughts flowing, creative or otherwise, but i’ll try my best!
This week I heard the unfortunate news that the parent company of Video Game developer Atlus is in some real trouble. I’m not going to go into the details here (mostly because I don’t know them), but Atlus is one of the companies that consistently releases good games, even if they’re not as well known as some others. For starters, Atlus brought us the Shin Megami Tensei series, which includes the Persona games. I haven’t really played many of them (though the end of Persona 3 is finally in sight!), but from what I hear they’re generally pretty well done.
What I have played, however, are Dark Souls and Catherine, both of which are games that I would happily recommend. Catherine is a puzzle game with a twist and a very interesting plot (and if you do play it I recommend going for the evil ending – trust me), while Dark Souls is often said to be one of the hardest games of all time. Unfortunately, while it is definitely hard, Dark Souls is also very inconvenient (a differentiation explored by Kai over on his blog Deluscar), meaning a lot of people just don’t give it a chance which is a shame because I absolutely loved playing through Dark Souls; it has some of the most amazing environments i’ve ever seen in a game. If you’re looking to try it though, I would advise using a walkthrough (like I did) to bypass the details that make playing unnecessarily tough, so you can get straight to the good stuff!
As a final note i’m going to point out a couple of sites i’ve found recently that seem fairly interesting. Since I discovered just how much Japanese goodness (read: Untranslated VNs) we miss out on here in the western world, i’ve played around with the idea of trying to learn Japanese myself. Of course, the 2000+ Kanji and other other characters I would need to learn are a little off-putting >.< Still, here are a couple of websites that i’m going to test out that look pretty useful.
Memrise.com likens learning to looking after a garden. When you learn a new word you are planting a seed, and that seed needs to be watered (read: practiced). To help you do that Memrise reminds you when you need to go back and re-attempt quizzes. It’s nice and user-friendly, too!
Livemocha.com is another cool site, though I didn’t try it out quite as much. On this site you buy language courses using credits that you gain by completing courses you already own and by helping others learn your language, so it has the potential to be very social.
Because of last week I now have to end every Rambling with a quote, so here you go!
“The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.” – Sharin no Kuni (Visual Novel by Akabei Soft2), though actual quote is from Walter J. Lippmann
The Geek Clinic 
I played Catherine going for the evil ending too, lol. At first I went with the law ending but decided that the ending will probably be pretty bland or normal, then I went with the evil one, those pictures I get on the phone are a treat too xD I haven’t got back into my Japanese-learning for a while but will definitely look into those two sites you mentioned if I’m really going to get back to it.
I looked up all of the endings after finishing it the first time and I was shocked at how different they were. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the game nearly as much if I had gotten the Law ending.