I need to keep a guarantee for Charon P5 (his banner is coming soon), but otherwise, I’m throwing all my wishes to Rhiannon. I was very lucky and got her P4 already. I really really want her P5 though… I even have a guarantee now, so if things go extremely well on Charon’s banner, maybe there’s a chance…
| Word | Reading | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| 臂膀 | bì bǎng | arm |
| 翅膀 | chì bǎng | wing |
I’ve decided that I won’t use co-op to build Odette, so I won’t even be able to start building her now, because I haven’t unlocked the domains, I don’t know where her boos is and I haven’t seen trace of her flowers. I kind of find it more fun this way, even though it means I need to wait to play Mizuki stellar swirl.
I bought my new Korean novel, couldn’t resist trying 1939년 명성아파트 by 무경. I still haven’t added it to the DB (too busy playing Genshin!), but I’ll do it tomorrow. I flipped through the first pages, there’s a floor plan and a list of characters saying who lives in which apartment. It will help!
I still haven’t decided which book I’ll read next in Japanese, but I’m leaning more and more toward another Futari Okajima novel.
Odette came home in the first ten-pull! Lucky!! 
No Alyosha, but the free copy is enough for me. It’s probably going to take me the whole version to properly build her, given how slow I’ll probably be in progressing the AQ and exploration, but it’s fine.
Her animations are really sublime, she has to be one the prettiest characters in the game.
The beginning of the AQ is so so good! The story is great (though starting slow), and there were so many things to do! Sharp contrast with the end of Nod-Krai. I loved it! So many new mechanics too in the new region,
The story was very easy so far, it’s probably going to be more difficult as we progress (and even more if the last chapters are only people discussing lore), but for now it really feels good to be able to play in Chinese without problem. Even tutorials were okay.
I did Xiao’s trial and got his echo!!! 
The trial was so so fun, especially the first part. I think it was very well done, the flavour, the fact that we had to use his skill and jump ability, the constant drain and the healing mechanic when killing opponents was really cool. Combat part was so easy though, it’s by far the easiest I’ve done. They also made it easy with the ER thankfully.
I’m really happy I have his echo… but I’m also not super mega fan of how it looks when seeing him from the back, which is like always. Seen from the side it looks great, and I like the effects and the colours, but I really don’t understand how they designed the echos in the first place, it would be better if they were more subtle…
Oh well, still super happy! 
I finished chapter 4, I really didn’t like this one. It has the same flaws as the other (tackling big topics without really committing to them), but the plot of this one was really twisted to the point it really didn’t make any sense. To achieve a goal, a character would choose a solution that doesn’t feel like the better one anyway, and to make this solution happen, would plot something of an insanely large scale that had like one in a million chance to unfold as planned.
And characters are like super heroes, extremely skilled, and they easily gain access to things they should not, things and characters happen when convenient to make the plot progress.
Both these aspects are things I really dislike in fiction, I like realistic plots and characters. As for the setting, again it would be interesting if was more developed, if we spent more time in each country instead of going from to another with each different chapter.
There’s only one chapter left, but it’s still one third of the book… I feel utterly unmotivated, but I don’t want to DNF…
I finally finished studying 幻友绮旅! All new words are in the flashcards. It’s one of the rare events I love enough to study entirely. I did cry at the end again while re-listening to it again.
I didn’t like the Fontinalia festival enough to go through it again, so next study material will probably be the AQ! I’m hoping it’s not going to be too long, but I’ll probably only study passages I like, not the whole thing.
Odette’s demo was sublime… I can’t forgive them for her heels though… especially since she had ballet shoes in her demo, and it looked so perfect.
I love her design but the heels just look so out of place…
I officially haven’t completed my “before Snezhnaya” reading challenge, but 80% is not bad! I’m actually proud of myself, given that the challenge was unrealistic to begin with.
I’ve been hitting my quota of 10 new flashcards per day for 3 days in a row now!
I’m thinking about my next Japanese and Korean books.
For Korean, I’m very tempted to just read another Jeon Gunwoo… But it’s probably better to read something else to change things up. I went through my wish list, and I found a novel I had added there a while ago: 1939년 명성아파트 by 무경. I’m very hesitant because Korean is my weakest reading language, and I’m afraid tackling a historical novel will be too challenging. But at the same time, I’m eager to read fiction set during the Japanese Occupation. I tried 경성 탐정 이상 by 김재희 and loved the one or two short stories I managed to read, but I was struggling too much to make it a pleasant reading experience.
But 1939년 명성아파트‘s plot seems to be more contained, from what I read, it looks like a closed-circle mystery (a murder taking place in an apartment), so I’m hoping it’ll be easier to read.
Or maybe I just choose a book by an author I know… I haven’t read Do Jin-ki for a long time, but I loved his Go Jin series.
As for Japanese, I don’t know. I looked at some of the recent works that won prizes or had good placements in rankings, and I don’t feel like reading any of them. So I’ve been thinking about either:
I unlocked the meeting point of 月荡海, so both are unlocked now. I reached 68% exploration in this region but had to stop because I was getting motion sickness.
The more I explore, the more evident it becomes that I don’t like the new region. I’m not a fan of the puzzles, but the world itself feels very empty, especially 月荡海. It’s beautiful for sure, but I’m someone who usually likes to wander around, losing track of what I was doing while playing around with whatever is in the scenery. But there’s really nothing to do there apart from moving from puzzle to puzzle and chest to chest.
Next goal is to unlock all the islets on 月之高地 and do the puzzles I’ll encounter while doing so. If I can reach 60% of total exploration it would be great, but I’m not aiming for the 80% anymore. I’m not enjoying it all that much.
I’m about halfway through the chapter, the plot is engaging and the structure interesting, but it looks like the story will again be too ambitious for the length of the chapter. I always feel like the topics of each chapter should require more time and development. It feels like the book is making short exposés on various socio-political aspects of the country without really managing to make me care for what’s happening.
Finishing my three books before Snezhnaya is definitely not happening, but I did finish two, so I’m quite happy with how it went. I’ll probably try to make some progress on the third book tomorrow, but I won’t be able to finish it, even if I added Wednesday morning (or maybe??)…
禁忌の子 was really impressive for a debut novel, it starts with a very intriguing mystery and moves on to tackling much deeper and delicate medical topics.
What I really liked is that the novel is both a honkaku mystery, and medical fiction, and both are really well balanced. Medical elements are closely linked to the plot and the mystery, and the two main protagonists both being doctors was also cleverly used in several parts of the plot. It definitely gave a fresh and realistic perspective on some tropes of crime fiction.
It’s also a lot about characters and human drama, which is a part I really enjoyed, but I must also say that I found the drama parts a bit too… I don’t want to say exaggerated because it’s definitely a situation that could happen and that felt very realistic in how it was described, but the dramatic effects felt too orchestrated. The absolute contrast between Wataru and Shinya’s fates felt like a plot device, like something set by the author for the sake of the story, and this is why I’m tempted to say “exaggerated” or maybe even a bit artificial.
This being said, all the parts about the past, the mystery surrounding the characters were overall very good. The part that is more focused on the honkaku mystery was less my cup of tea. I don’t mind puzzle-solving murder mysteries, but sometimes characters tend to be only suspects, and what they were doing at what time ends up being more important than who they are as persons, which always bothers me.
I also found most of what happens in the concluding chapter a bit long and unnecessary, but overall, the book has a really good pace, it’s very engrossing, the topic is personally not something I was super interested in reading about, but it was well integrated in the plot. And I really liked Kinosaki, so I might continue the series one of these days.
