Anyone currently gaming in Japanese for practice?

They definitely did the katakana talk thing a lot haha. The character names and stuff were especially interesting and often relevant to how they talked - I remember one character was named like 俺の女の子 or something like that, and she kept saying 俺のさぁ as a filler even though she was like one of the tiny little girl npcs. There were definitely some weird regional dialects, the kid with the lisp kept saying like でしゅ, and other just weird stuff like that - I’m sure I missed a lot of the more niche nuances cuz of lack of fluency lol. One thing over the english version though, is that all the text would fit on one screen - I know in the english the sentences would sometimes get cut off and have to continue, so at the least its easier to read in that way.

Oh yeah, the way Stan talked also most notably was quite strange - he used あまり in not negative ways a lot for example. The princess also used like a weird pronoun わらわ, but the rest of her speech wasn’t tooo out of the ordinary.

I might watch a playthrough in english eventually as well to see the differences.

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Played through Super Mario Wonder a couple years back, which wasn’t bad. Been playing through Pokemon Legends: Arceus over the past few years in Japanese and that’s a bit more trickier. Did roll credits, but didn’t catch Arceus so I plan on going back and finishing up. Also played through most of the first Kingdom Hearts in Japanese (at the room before the final boss).

My plan this year is to play through any game from Japan in Japanese whether I like it or not, dammit. Think it’s about time I try putting all this Japanese learning I’ve been doing the past five years to use. Three years ago I tried to play through Like a Dragon: Ishin in Japanese, and it probably took me an hour and a half to get through like the first ten minutes of the game. Feel like I’d be able to do a bit better now, and, tbqh, if I don’t fully understand stuff in a game now, I don’t get hung up on it like I did before.

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I’m an Animal Crossing: New Horizons (集まれどうぶつの森) fan through and through, and that’s as close to gaming as I ever get :rofl: I don’t necessarily like the lack of kanji like others have mentioned, but it’s good practice for remembering readings and learning cute little slang and contractions, and reading quickly!

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My gf’s sister asked me to play Animal Crossing with her when she found out I have a Switch so I might pick this up, seems like fun and low-stress way to further immerse. I played as a kid and liked it, though I definitely wasn’t great at it.

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Elden ring broke me. bought it second hand here in Japan thinking it would allow swapping language for menus, but no only audio language can be changed. Everything else was in Japanese. I hated my life playing that game.

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Elden Ring broke a lot of people… regardless of the language.

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That’s one of the reasons I game on PlayStation. They seem to have an endless supply of Japanese games. Here are some of the games that I have played in Japanese (in no particular order):

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (currently playing through this)
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Final Fantasy XVI
Final Fantasy VII: Remake
Ghost of Tsushima
Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection
Ghostwire Tokyo
Final Fantasy XV

On my list to play in the future:
Ghost of Yotei (next in queue)
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII Reunion
Rise of the Ronin
Judgment
Lost Judgement
Trek to Yomi
Nioh 1-3

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So far I’ve played in Japanese:

  • ICO
  • ワンダと巨像 (Shadow of the Colossus)
  • METAL GEAR SOLID

Basically, games that I’ve already played many times in English so I could practice vocabulary without being lost—especially for MGS1 where very specific technological and military vocabulary is used.

Plan for the future:

  • クロノトリガー
  • ファイナルファンタジーVII
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I had a terrible experience with P5 Scramble…

I jumped through so many hoops to be able to play it and Japanese and when I finally got it the text for conversations in the game is so small and blurry I couldn’t tell apart the more complicated kanji.

What’s really annoying is the text box for the words is HUGE and the text only takes up about 25% of it. So much wasted space they could have used to increase the text size. (Which there is no option for)

I know my eyes aren’t the best but I think it’s objectively small.

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LOVED this game. Also played it in Japanese.

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Yes, after getting familiar with the game over dozens of hours of gameplay, I switched Helldivers 2 to full Japanese audio + text a long while ago. The familiarity meant that I wasn’t completely lost and could infer what certain words meant even if I’d never seen them before - and I still have to work my brains to understand new things when there are new updates, new communication etc.

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Hi everyone, could you suggest me some PC games(any genre is ok)?
I’m very new to japanese and I think learning it while doing something I enjoy could boost my learning process.
Thanks in advance!!

I like to play minecraft in japanese and then add words to an anki deck that I don’t know. It’s a very good vocab source, but there aren’t very many sentences to practice reading on minecraft, though, so it’s not good reading practice lol.

If you had a 3ds or someway to play 3ds games, I’d recommend something like yokai watch or one of the mario & luigi RPGs since they are meant for kids but still have kanji with furigana so good for someone who is new. For PC, there’s less younger audience options, but you still have games like 二ノ国 and Inazuma 11 on steam which are on the long side but have a lot of what the other game I recommended give.

Even though they are amazing once you are good enough, I wouldn’t recommend visual novels (even though there are a million of them on PC). Mostly because pure reading as a beginner is exhausting and you might burn out. Something with a good mix of dialogue and gameplay breaks is good. RPGs made for kids like the ones I mentioned usually have a decent mix. Think Pokemon.

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Strongly recommend Natsu-Mon and Crayon Shin-Chan: Mine and the Professor’s Summer Vacation. You can set the language for both of those to Japanese.

Edit: Doraemon Story of Seasons: Friends of the Great Kingdom is also an excellent game.

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I have started to use gaming as a study tool seriously as of last fall. For the longest time I had convinced myself something silly like “you can’t use methods your enjoy as a study method” and did that for many years. I’m glad I broke that habit, because a ton of what I’ve encountered playing things like Animal Crossing, Pokemon and Final Fantasy 2, pop up elsewhere in my Japanese learning journey.

I’m playing less now that winter quarter at university has started up, restricting myself to only gaming on the weekend, but my end goal is to be able to play things like the Yakuza series, and Final Fantasy 14, in Japanese with no English subs.

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Thanks everyone for the suggestions!
I just bought Ni No Kuni, as I’ve heard of it before.
I’ll play it in full Japanese, so wish me luck.

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I started playing Genshin in JP not too long ago. I was suprised to see I could get a gist of the story! Enough to give a summary at least. When event mechanics are explained though it kicks my butt. There’s several games on my backlog (FF7 remake, Death Mark, Grand Bazaar…) that I plan to play in JP too.

Do you know if you need to buy a Japanese copy of Persona 5 Royal? I tried to change the language to Japanese on my (North American, digital) copy but could only get the audio to be Japanese (which is too bad because I’ve played the game in English like three times, so I was excited to use it again as a study tool). I even tried changing my console language but that didn’t work, either.

I’m also kinda playing RE4 remake again in Japanese tho its pretty irregular. I find it surprisingly understandable, though I am quite familiar with the plot.