So, I was looking for info about Imaginary Fest, the game adaption of A Certain Magical Index Light Novel/Anime for Smartphones. I heard about it for a while before but I didn't look it up, it's a Gacha game, how good it could be anyway?
Then I stumbled upon this video: Accelerator Meeting Saten in IF! (Random Translations) Not only the scene has the original voice actors in it, the scene is top quality and offers new insight on the characters involved. True, it's a filler/non-canon, but it's the type I seek of non-canon content! Any character from Index's main story meeting with Saten is a big thing for me, even if it's not canon. (As long as they stay in-character.)
Imaginary Fest is only in Japanese and a VPN is needed to play it outside Japan. I knew my mobile wouldn't be able to run it anyway, and I could emulate it on PC but I doubt it would work on my emulator. (It seems to need steep system requirements.)
Then, I had this interesting idea: Find a Let's Play for the game!
Searching for the game in English didn't provide me with any Streamer/LPer for the game, so I searched for Japanese Let's Plays on YouTube: The name of the series "とある魔術の禁書目録" + The name of the game "幻想収束" (It reads Imaginary Fest even though the Kanji says something else) + "実況" which is the Japanese equivalent of Let's Play.
TST's first set of Gacha characters...Notice the Queen's popularity?
I only found one Let's Player of the game who played the game for months and keeps updating it until now. The Stationary Turtle is a small Japanese YouTuber, whose channel only appeared to me because my search was very specific. His stuff is only in Japanese and my understanding of the language is... modest at best. Watching it was a challenge.
It's funny how human mind works...
I could understand maybe %5 of what the LPer is saying, but I could understand %60 of the game's gameplay and story. It's not a bad percentage! Mostly because I both understand how Gacha games work, and read the original material and know more than a few scenes by heart by now.
Imagine Breaker will work in 3, 2, 1 and... !!
It's not like I'm watching with Zero Japanese knowledge. On one hand, I can barely translate basic sentences and I know less than 150 Kanji. On the other, I can read all Kana characters and I know many random words.
I watched +3000 episodes of anime so I'm already familiar with the language. I'm not sure about what the words really mean, I don't know how most of them are written, but I can form a vague idea on what's being said when I hear something in Japanese. Especially when it's about a story with hundreds of English loan words like A Certain Magical Index!
Something about a break-point, whatever~ I do appreciate tutorial Komoe-sensei~
I watched up to the third episode, and I learned more than a few new words from the experience. I re-applied many things I learned through the last 7 years, (I didn't learn Japanese in any formal way, just some trivia over the months.)
You can imagine how happy I was, every time I assume the meaning of something and it turns out right. To memorize the character names in Kanji. (Currently, only Kamijou Touma but I really wana memorize Misaka's name!)
Imaginary Fest is something I want to play myself, not because it's good, but because I need more #Index/#Railgun in my life!
Finally, The Stationary Turtle repeats many phrases, like every minute! I had to look them up to learn them and now I can proudly say I'll never need to look up 中々 and 難しい again! Probably... I think?
This was my experience with watching a Let's Play in Japanese for more than 2 hours with more focus than I usually watch things. I learned so much and I believe I'll be able to speak Japanese if I continued to learn this way reguraly for a year~
As for the game itself, I'll probably write about it in the future, so stay tuned!
What are your thoughts...?
Have to mention that the game is called Index IF, and it features many 'what if?' scenarios! Brilliant!!