complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine
One of my recent favourite anecdotes is about my nibling who told me, after I said that I liked games that helped me relax, “you should play Genshin because you’ll be super relaxed after killing lots of goblins.”
Not to knock goblin killing - violence-focused video games may not be my thing, but I do remember being very satisfied with my kill counts as a dragonborn cleric in D&D. But there’s a reason why I - and (judging from the number of islands in existence) millions of others - enjoy games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s a nice fantasy where you can actually pay off your loans. It’s a fantasy where if you work hard you will actually earn enough to live whatever kind of life you wanted. And, it’s a fantasy where your neighbours are kind, warm people you will come to love dearly after spending days and days with them. (It helps that they’re usually super cute, I guess?)
I first heard about Spiritfarer, “a cozy management game about dying”, in a YouTube video listing “wholesome games” that the YouTuber loved that didn’t involve farming. I don’t have a good attention span for farming games, so I was eager to try most of the recommendations in that video. I didn’t get Spiritfarer until MUCH later, a little bit earlier this year when it was on sale for Switch. And I didn’t start playing it until last night.
Within minutes, I was hooked. In fact, it felt so much like the first time I started on ACNH. You might not think that a game about DYING is wholesome, but it is, so very much. In this game, you play a character named Stella who together with her cat Daffodil take over the job of being a Spiritfarer from Charon. (You know, Charon, who ferries the dead in Greek myth? Yeah, that Charon.)
Stella’s job is to meet spirits and help them move on by performing tasks they need. I’m still early in the game, and most of the spirits I’ve gathered are those of Stella’s friends and relatives. Each spirit will have a series of quests for Stella to complete, and in order to complete them, Stella would need to collect/harvest resources from islands, and build/improve on her boat. This is the “cozy management” part of the game, I guess, and the part that keeps me going - because as tasks get fulfilled, you/Stella also learn more and more about each spirit.
There’s cooking, fishing, and other mini games as part of gathering resources (Stella plays a song to help plants grow, which becomes a mini rhythm game) so it’s easy to just play for hours, switching between tasks in order to keep things interesting. These quests are sometimes elaborate, requiring Stella to go from island to island in search for ingredients, and every single act pays off - the spirits share their past joys and regret, and gets a little bit closer to coming to terms about their own death.
It’s a little strange to be playing this game about death when we’re surrounded by death right now - I read a tweet the other day about someone in Malaysia dying of Covid every 12 seconds that day, and statistics aside, more than a few people close to me lost someone important to them since the pandemic started. Because of the series of lockdowns since 2020, I can’t even be there for all these people. I guess it feels comforting that in this game, at least, I can help these spirits work through their own traumas and reflect on the lives they’ve lived.
I haven’t got to the point where I’ve had to say goodbye to one of my spirits yet, and ferry them to the Everdoor - I have a feeling that when that finally happens, it’s going to be a very emotional moment for me. But from what I’ve learned so far from all these spirits’ stories of their past lives, the most important lesson is no one is ever truly gone as long as your memories of them survive.
I’m starting to buy more manga in English. It’s a little weird, maybe, considering that the main reason I learned Japanese was to read manga. I think these days I’ve become more impatient than before, and also more out of practice - reading the average shojo or shonen manga in Japanese takes me a lot longer than it used to, and sometimes I only understand 1/3 - 2/3 of what I’m reading if it’s a seinen, due to the fact that I’ve forgotten so much kanji and vocabulary.
When I read in English, though, sometimes I retranslate words to Japanese in my head to make sense of them - or to get specific nuances that may not come across in English. It’s weird, but it’s also kind of automatic for me these days. So I started collecting What Did You Eat Yesterday? (きのう何食べた?/Kino Nani Tabeta?) in English, due to my laziness (let’s just call it that) to reread my Japanese volumes. Now I’m slowly reading BL Metamorphosis (メタモルフォーゼの縁側/Metamorphose no Engawa) and a couple of other series that I’m not sure if I’ll go on collecting.
It really made me think about all the manga that I wish I had the option of buying in English. These include:
- Midnight Diner (深夜食堂/Shinya Shokudo
This is the only manga I am still making myself read in Japanese despite the fact that it’s more difficult that most of the seinen I read, due to the cooking/food-related kanji that I still can’t read now. But it’s either read it in Japanese or not read it at all, and it’s SO GOOD I can’t not read it! This is exactly my kind of manga in terms of mood/setting/characters, and since there are a lot of popular food manga in English, not to mention the fact that the Netflix drama is up there with Terrace House in terms of popularity in the US, I’m not sure why it hasn’t been licensed yet.
- March Comes In Like A Lion (3月のライオン/Sangatsu no Lion)
I’m a big Honey & Clover fan, but this is so much better. It’s about Rei, a young shogi prodigy who is good at winning games but bad at making friends, or even communicating with his adopted family. It captures the quiet loneliness of Natsume’s Book of Friends, and the same sort of slow character development where Rei comes out of his shell a little, and open himself up to the possibility of friends and family, something he didn’t seem to think he deserved at the beginning. I’m so behind on this series now (I own volume 5 in Japanese, so I guess that’s the last one I read) and I should get back to it soon. This is one of those series that I am still a bit torn on having to read in English, because while reading it in English would make things SO much easier for me, the current covers/binding of English translations make me despair for this beautiful series.
- Mokke (もっけ)
A quiet, not-spooky-at-all manga about two sisters. One of them can see spirits, and the other is easily haunted by them. This manga is a lot like Mushishi in the sense that each chapter focuses on a particular spirit/story and has a proper ending. There are nine volumes of this manga and I only own 3, and these days reading them is a little harder than it used to be, so I wish there’s an English version!
&etc
- I really don't have much else to add this time. Stay safe, drink lots of water, don't work too hard <33