I’ve been playing Dragon Quest XI, and at roughly N4 level, I’m having a good time albeit looking up a lot of terminology. I’ve been putting together an RPG terms deck to help with that, and I’ll probably make it public after I flesh it out enough that I’m happy with it.
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I beat fire emblem fates on my 3DS and it was great immersion. A lot of the words I mined from it definitely helped me pass N3. Since then I have beaten a couple VNs in Japanese and I’m currently playing Pokemon legends ZA (pretty easy with N3 level), and Clannad, which is a bit tougher
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Hyperdimension Neptunia ReBirth3 V Generation on the Nintendo Switch. I didn’t initially plan on playing it in Japanese but it’s a JP-exclusive release (at least when I first got it) so I figured I may as well take the opportunity to sharpen my reading comprehension skills, and It’s been going surprisingly well! I’m only around N4 level but thankfully the game’s got pretty low-level writing so it’s been a smooth ride for the most part, only having to look-up certain nouns and grammar constructions.
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I can recommend checking out Game Gengo on YouTube. He reviews and play-tests many games from the perspective of a Japanese language learner. In his Vocab Series he play tested around 40-50 games and recently made a top 100 list just for 2025 games.
That’s where I discovered Triangle Strategy, a story-heavy tactical RPG with nearly full voice acting and a complete dialogue log, which makes it easy to revisit conversations.
I can also generally recommend PowerToys, which includes an OCR screenshot feature. This is especially useful for copying in-game dialogue and pasting it into online dictionaries.
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The forum profile says October 2024. So I’m just assuming it shows the Bunpro registration date. But this might not be the case
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Oh, you’re right! I hadn’t noticed that. Yes, Oct 2024 is correct.
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Nice.
I’m between N4 and N3, and was thinking of going for FE: Awakening soonish (I beat it once already in english a few years back). Maybe after beating Pokemon Ultra Sun.
Sounds like FE would be great for my current level 
I’ve finished Mario RPG last year in Japanese and will finish Mario and Luigi RPG 1 DX (Superstar Saga in the west) either today or tomorrow. I use Kamui OCR and Migaku for look ups and have been enjoying the process.
Games do take longer for me due to look ups. When I first finished Mario RPG in English, it took me maybe 13 hours, but it took 23 hours when I did it in JP. Superstar saga is maybe an 18 hour game tops and I’m 31 hours into it in the final dungeon, lol.
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I’d like to get around to playing some proper games for immersion eventually, can’t really be bothered to set up OCR for texthooking right now though. Visual novels are just so easy for practice (I’m only on my second VN for immersion, so maybe after a while I’ll get very bored though)
Just finished Digimon Story: Time stranger. It has time travel and a lot of “unusual” vocabulary so to be honest I’m not 100% sure I understood that much. I think I more or less understood what happened by the end, but because of time travel shenanigans I’m still not 100% sure in the order it happened 
but it seems like a good time to do New Game+ and see if I understand a bit more
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I just started a replay of my favorite Atelier game Atelier Lydie and Suelle last night. I didn’t use OCR for the first 90 minutes and instead just played. Surprisingly, I really felt like I could follow the plot with my current level and know what I needed to do! I did miss quite a bit of jokes but I wasn’t too bothered, and sometimes I was able to follow the banter. My plan now knowing I can do this is to play the game to completion, maybe also play Atelier Sophie 2 (my other favorite), and then play the newest Atelier game, Atelier Resleriana The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian for the first time, in full Japanese! I think I’ll also be making a compendium for myself from my completed save files of all the ingrediant and trait names to help myself when synthesizing.
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That’s around the level I was when I played FE. I will say the game doesn’t have any furigana, so I used OCR to help me out a lot. If you homebrew your 3DS you can run software that lets you stream your 3DS to your PC (I used this: GitHub - xzn/ntrviewer-hr). Then you can run OCR like yomininja or gamesentenceminter to do fast lookups on unknown vocab!
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I finished my first full JRPG about a week ago, ボクと魔王 (Okage Shadow King in english). It was actually pretty dang difficult for me, not because the vocab was super complex but because the whole game is basically filled with language puns and also strange ways of talking. I didn’t have a great method of looking up kanji I didn’t know either, I just tried to draw it out with the google type thing and hope it would show up - the kanji details don’t show up great on a CRT, lol.
I’ve started Trails in the Sky FC recently, which I’ve heard is another game that’s quite difficult due to the sheer amount of text (I think there are like 400k+ words in the script total), but thus far it’s been simplish conversation stuff so not too bad. I think this is a really good one if you wanna try to immerse yourself in a world that is described through many lines of text - there are quite a few times where you find NPCs you can ask questions about the world and they will go into decent length describing stuff haha. There’s a website: Prebuilt decks – jpdb that has a list of all the vocab in the game and the order it shows up in, so that’s quite nice for this.
Another interesting one if you want a challenge is 夜光虫 on SFC - I haven’t played much of it, but if you want a game that is like probably decently harder than any JRPG you could try it - it has a lot of indirect descriptions of things and seems like it has interesting horror-literary elements.
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Oh my god, Okage Shadow King mentioned 
I could definitely see this one being difficult to understand for the reasons you mentioned above. Out of curiosity, how did they convey different ways of talking? I feel like in other games I’ve played that have characters talk in a unique way usually use regional dialects or make the character talk all in katakana, that kind of thing. Curious to hear if it’s the same with Okage or if they go about it a different way.
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When I was studying for N4, I played a bit of Tales of Symphonia in Japanese. The dialogue is casual and I was already familiar with the story, so it wasn’t too difficult to follow along.
If I looked up a word and it turned out to be N4, I’d add it. I think 反対 showed up in a JLPT exam question and my mind immediately flashed back to a scene in the game where the protagonist used the word. It felt like I was leveraging my episodic memory for recall.
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I’ve been playing a game from the Yakuza Series on pc → Like a dragon: Infinite wealth, and it’s been super good to play with Yomininja!! Learned a lot of expressions and verbs that I can actually use.
I’ve tried playing other games and VNs 100% in Japanese such as Yakuza 0, Persona 5, Shin Megami Tensei III/V, yami no koe, but always stopped because I’ve lacked a lot of kanji and vocabulary.
Had some more luck with Pokemon Scarlet and Dragon Quest XII bc of furigana, but at the moment I’m having the best experience with Yakuza 8
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I’m playing through the whole 龍が如く series for the first time, waiting on kiwami3, but im replaying kiwami 1 full jp while waiting. Lot of fun, if not super usable, Japanese in the series
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Been playing Pokemon ZA in Japanese. Not a premium game for immersion (god I hate that word), since it doesn’t have voiced dialogue, but picked up plenty of unknown vocab so far, even some useful slang. It’s a lot wordier than most PKMN games.
Last year I did beat FF7 Remake in Japanese, and that was an incredible for immersion. Almost everything voiced, a chat log, a lot of NPC’s speaking from all directions with scrolling text in the interface. Really good stuff.
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I played Atelier Ayesha on switch. It lets you replay the audio as much as you like.
I also play sims on switch. click a word, sim does it. I now know the Japanese for ‘tickle’ and ‘put away leftovers’ for example
I recomend kanshudo’s kanji look up. Esp if you learned the kanji parts. if you forgot 魂 you could type 鬼 おに to find it. It’s たましsoul
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