Thursday 5 January 2017

3 JRPG New Year Resolutions for 2017 ~Realistic Edition~

Let’s start the New Year with some honesty - my last two gaming resolution plans haven’t been the most successful. I made resolutions then ended up becoming overwhelmed between achieving them, fulfilling my regular JRPG desires and living my everyday life, and eventually abandoned all except one or two of them. This bums me out, because I get very excited to achieve all of my goals and I set them because they’re something I actually think I should do. Not being able to do them makes me feel like something I want is missing from my JRPG life and I’d like to make my JRPG life as great as possible.

To make my gaming resolutions more achievable, I’m doing three instead of five this year. It’s a simple solution that I think will make things a lot more doable and I’m already excited about the goals I’ve chosen as they’re three things that I really wanted to do last year but I didn’t have (or give myself) the time to do. Here are my three gaming resolutions, posted with high hopes that I will stick to them!

Play an old game from a JRPG series
The one resolution I regretted not doing last year was playing another old Final Fantasy game. This was my favourite resolution to complete in 2015 when I played Final Fantasy IX as it really made me feel like I got to know the Final Fantasy series better while playing a fantastic JRPG that was totally new to me. I’d like to do this again to educate myself as a JRPG fan who mostly plays modern titles and I hope to find another great game I've missed out on.

Plan: I'd like to do this with either Final Fantasy or Persona preferably, especially since I have Persona 2: Innocent Sin (which I started a few days ago!) and Final Fantasy VIII digitally already. Some of my readers/Twitter friends have also recommended great older JRPGs such as Legend of Heroes, multiple Tales of... titles and Fire Emblem games, so I have plenty to choose from depending on my mood. Since a lot of the games I’m really hyped for have been delayed or don’t have solid dates, I’m confident I’ll achieve this goal but I'll be doing my best to start playing old titles from now on.

Finish Persona 5 in English and Japanese

I’ve talked about my journey playing Persona 5 in Japanese and it hasn’t been easy. However, I’ve probably spent 10+ hours doing this and I want to see it through to the end, even if it will take a lot of time considering it's taken this long and I'm honestly not even at the second save point. Finishing Persona 5 in English is a given considering how important Persona 4 Golden was to me, but I would love to make Persona 5 the second game I’ve completed in Japanese. When I played Final Fantasy X in Japanese, I felt like I learnt a lot and became more comfortable hearing the language for long periods of time, so playing more Persona 5 to improve my Japanese seems like a fun and productive idea, especially with a game that I still have hype for!

Plan: I already try to dedicate an hour a week minimum to playing Persona 5 and using my dictionary to understand the story. I will keep doing this with the hope that the more Japanese words I study and learn, the less I have to look up and the faster I’ll be able to get through Persona 5 in Japanese. Completing Persona 5 in English will be no problem as long as it sucks me in as much as Persona 4 Golden did, so the real challenge will be (and already is) the Japanese version!

Platinum a JRPG
Regretfully, I didn’t platinum any games in 2016. In fact, I haven’t platinumed anything since February 2015 when I platinumed Trigger Happy Havoc: Danganronpa. I love the challenge that comes with platinuming games, so I would love to get back into it. I want to play side quests, level up my party to ridiculous levels and indulge my inner completionist just a little.

Plan: To also assist my Japanese studies, every time I found a JRPG I wanted to Platinum in 2016, I internally made a note that I should buy the game in Japanese to do a platinum run. I plan to do this with a few games already, such as Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and World of Final Fantasy, so I hope I can start buying the Japanese versions of these games and doing this soon. As I've mentioned, I already own Persona 5 in Japanese and am going through it very slowly to study from it, so it’s also a candidate as I highly enjoyed platinuming Persona 4 Golden for eight months (no sarcasm, I loved it) and I’ll have a head start from trying to complete it in Japanese.
These three JRPG resolutions I know will take time and effort to complete, but with plans in place to complete them I hope I can actually achieve them. I hope these resolutions will allow me to appreciate some 'historical' JRPGs, along with giving me a deeper appreciation of ones I already love. I also hope to open up the world of unlocalised JRPGs a little more so I can have even more games to play, with language being less of a barrier for a certain game I want to complete. Fingers crossed I can report back with success, but my track record isn’t perfect so we’ll see if my high motivation lasts. Wish me luck!

As I did last year, I invite you guys to make your own by commenting on this post or posting with #3JRPGResolutions on social media (please tag me so I can see yours! <3)
_________________________________________________________________________________

What are your JRPG New Year Resolutions? What JRPGs are you looking forward to this year?
Leave a comment below, send me a tweet at @JRPGJungle, hit me up on Facebook or Instagram and let's talk!

Thanks so much for stopping by!
Make sure to follow the blog here, follow @JRPGJungle on Twitter and Instagramlike JRPG Jungle on Facebook and Subscribe to the mailing list for updates on content and random musings on JRPG news and games. You're awesome! <3

2 comments:

  1. I recently discovered your blog, and I must say your entries are a ton of fun to read. I have a blog as well that I recently started, and wanted to compile a similar list in response. Please take a look: trevrpg.blogspot.com.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey!

      Thank you for your kind words and linking me in your resolutions post! I've checked out your post, so I'll leave a comment there too but yeah, I appreciate it! :)

      Delete