Anyone currently gaming in Japanese for practice?

I’ve been playing Genshin for years, and it’s helped me a lot. But it can definitely be hard so I would recommend it at more advanced levels.

The steam version shows as fully supporting japanese text, and it is 70% off right now! Save 70% on Persona 5 Royal on Steam

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I’ve been playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It’s definitely harder than N5 but since I remember the whole game from childhood it’s easy to skip through text boxes if necessary. What’s weird is that there are very few kanji (seems like 2nd grade reading level) though happily they have furigana, but then meanwhile there are a bunch of loanwords that I don’t think 8-year-old Japanese kids would know?

I especially noticed this in Chapter 3 with Grubba. In English he talks like a cowboy wrestler type accent, but in Japanese he uses lots of loanwords, even going as far asユー and ミーinstead of あなた、ボク、私etc. But do Young Japanese kids know words like エクアイーティング? It was interesting for sure

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Atlus is very stingy about that for some reason, but they seemed to lift that restriction for P4 Golden and P3 Remake. All Playstation version of P5 however, still have no Jpn text.

There’s a free game called MARY - メアリ姫の奪還 that just came out and looks super duper good to practice vocab and reading:
The concept is: you can add one kana to the button before pressing it. And depending on the new sentence, different choices will lead you different places.

It’s a really cool concept, I wish I had the level to understand it all. If anyone wants to make a deck for it… :eyes:

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Seems to be quite a funny concept
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I am a fan of the Mushou games (Dynasty warriors, Samurai warriors) though they are beyond difficult and seem to enjoy using particularly hard kanji (I assume because the names are Chinese origins especially characters like Cao Cao or the Sun family where in English they are both read a certain way but with Japanese the kanji have different readings, so they are changed and I often don’t remember who is who, and why my allies are already dead)
They are fun games with extremely, extremely, extremely repetitive dialog (“I’m going to have your head” is said like 20-30 times per battle in English.) Not useful dialogue, but repetitive.

The same thing happend to me. change the Language in steam instead of the main menu

I just finished my first game in Japanese, ゼルダの伝説:時のオカリナ and now I’m hooked so planning to play the next one in the series. I’ve noticed as I progressed in the game my reading speed and comprehension increased at an incredible rate.

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What games would you recommend for someone who finished only N5?

I was thinking about Pokémon games on Switch since I finished them and remember the plot, co I could learn some kanji and attack/type names.

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Honestly, not that you can’t try a game, but I would really wait until you’ve at least finished N3 grammar and have more vocabulary under your belt. Otherwise, your experience will be very painful. At least my experience back in the day was painful.

BUT

if you want to play some games anyway- Pokemon will be easier, but won’t give you a lot of “useful” japanese. (which is fine) You can also try something like Yo-Kai Watch or Animal Crossing. This list from Game Gengo is worth a look to help you out as well.

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Playing non-localized games was what kept me sticking with Japanese long enough to get better at it!

I tend to play older games since I’m in my forties (and I despise a lot of modern gaming trends, like gacha and lootboxes). I especially like untranslated entries to bigger series, like Tales of Destiny DC and Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X. The latest one I put a dent in was Blaze Union, which I want to beat eventually.

My big long-term game I want to finish is 街, a visual novel that’s a spiritual prequel to my favorite visual novel, 428: Shibuya Scramble. But 街 is especially text-heavy even for a visual novel. A lot of obscure kanji too. And with older games, obscure kanji are ridiculously nerve-wracking because the glyphs are so pixelated. It deadass took me about half an hour to look up what turned out to be 瀟洒.

Also trying to beat Planet Laika, which is this really weird adventure game that was the last game Quintet ever made. Their games are pretty out-there but I like all that I’ve played.

I agree with @obscureniche here, but plenty of games have only kana (with sometimes a few really common kanji) if you’d like to take a crack at them, like older Nintendo games and the Mother trilogy. If memory serves, Ni no Kuni for the DS has furigana but it’s extremely pixelated. I believe there were some other DS games that had furigana that could be toggled by tapping?

I find that reading all-kana Japanese drives me up the wall. So many homonyms. That’s probably a skill I could stand to improve at.

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Fun fact I found out there’s a fan translation for this game now. I simultaneously get excited and annoyed when that happens. BokuNatsu 2 recently got a fan translation as well. I played it in japanese anyway lol. What’s even worse is when you finally play a game after like a decade and they immediately announce a re-release. (looking at you Persona 4)

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Same and same. I chipped away at Tales of Destiny DC for months and I felt a new vein sprout out of my head the day I stumbled on the fan-translation!

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i love those easy kid-friendly pokemon games! they are great katakana practice (and we all need more of that :sweat_smile:).

if you already know “the story”, and you know who gives important info and who doesnt, it’s a lot of good practice for just reading and getting a bit of immersion. you can skip npc dialog or decide to go full out on this one snippet, depending on mood and cognitive load.

i played my first pokemon game at around n4, with already a bit of immersion beforehand. but n5 is doable, if you do not mind being confused by the japanese half of the time (please don’t hit yourself in confusion :dizzy_face:).

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I feel like this is a bit of a bad take, but pokemon doesn’t seem that good for learning the language, as others said it has a lot of not very useful vocabulary. Back in high school I tried using it to learn mandatory French and I gotta say, I finished the game without learning a single new word. I think games that kind of force you to understand something would be better. Like animal crossing you must understand what Tom Crook is trying to tell you at the start of the game, or in ocarina of time Mido just stands there yelling 剣!盾! at you until you figure it out. Pokemon doesn’t have too many of those except for the train gym in black and white.

I think you’re right. I didn’t grow up playing Pokémon. I’ve tried getting into it several times over the years. Even so, I’m thinking about taking another crack at FireRed in Japanese. I know I should improve at reading all-kana Japanese if I find it this frustrating. I think it might improve my aural comprehension if I get better at picking out homonyms by context clues.

On the other hand, this is something that makes the Pokemon games good if you are looking to increase your volume of Japanese consumed without necessarily increasing mental load too much.

As gets tossed around a lot in the running community, most of your miles should be ‘easy’. Pokemon is perhaps a great way to get those easy miles in whilst someone is still at an N4 level.

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I’ve said this before, but counterintuitively, I’ve found my easiest miles are technical documents. Since I’m a math professor, I can go through Japanese math books like butter. Video games are often harder for me because of colloquialisms and humor. But then, my favorite games are RPGs and that text-heavy stuff is a beast!

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And after finishing N3 grammar, what games I would be able to play?
Will there be any ceiling, like only simple games? Or will finishing N3 allow me to play whatever I want? Knowing, that some fantasy games may have some vocabulary and grammar forms not used in daily Japanese of course.