What consoles are you looking for games for?
Shujinkou for PS5 is a decent “dungeon” crawler and the main theme is to teach you Japanese as you play through. Some of the battles can be difficult, so I advise maybe setting the difficulty to easy. Also you can choose your level of immersion(and change it via settings.) There’s grammar as well as vocab and a dictionary to reference as you collect words.
Best 5 bucks I spent as a beginner for a phone app(android android) and they recently released a steam version. Wagotabi. The mini-games for Kana and words is really fun, and definitely made kana second nature. As you progress, you see less English.
The app/game is still an ongoing development (approx halfway to N5 level currently) but the grammar examples and vocab is really decent.
I can’t recommend Wagotabi enough.
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Thanks for all the suggestions so far! To answer a couple questions:
@teclasgmxbunpro No, I didn’t search before posting. That’s on me. ごめんなさい
@obscureniche I do most of my gaming on Steam Deck these days, so Steam/PC games would be preferred (controller support optional). That said, I also own a Switch 1, PS4, and Xbox One, plus an android phone and a handful of retro systems. So aside from the next-gen consoles and any iPhone exclusives, I have access to most modern NA releases.
shirokuma cafe is an anime that has easy Japanese, funny funs and is spoken slowly. Give it a try. I find it much “easier” to watch compared to anime for kiddy kids
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Switch
On Switch you can get Yo-kai Watch 1 and 4, as well as Yo-kai Gakuen Y. (4 and Gakuen Y are also available on PS4) All of those games have furigana and mostly easier language. There’s sometimes higher level grammar and language when certain characters are talking though. It’s mostly just antiquated language for older themed Yo-kai.
Switch and Steam
There’s also Shin Chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation, Shin Chan: Shiro and the Coal town (the sequel), and Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid. These are all part of the Boku no Natsuyasumi franchise. The Shin Chan games both have furigana and easier language. I would say Natsu-mon is a little more difficult as it doesn’t have furigana or push to continue when some characters speak, so you may be a little lost in the beginning, but you can always replay the beginning of the game in english (if you buy the Steam version) just to make sure of your understand. I literally cannot recommend Natsu-mon enough. It’s one of my favorite games of all time.
Doraemon Story of Seasons : Friends of the Great Kingdom is very long, but I think the language level is great. On the Steam version you can choose japanese or english. I only played the demo in japanese, but have played the full game in english on the Switch. Wonderful game.
All of these are also lower stakes relaxing sort of games to play that will still give you a lot of reading practice.
Steam Only (I think)
The first Nekopara game is free on Steam. It’s a visual novel, so no furigana there, but you can always text hook it and use Yomitan to look up words. I actually haven’t played through this one in english or japanese, but it’s free and I’ve tested it with a text hooker before, so I thought I’d recommend it.
If you have a japanese 3DS or a DS then I can give you more recommendations.
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For anime the first I enjoyed a lot because I could understand quite a bit of the dialogue when around completing just N5 was Flying Witch (and there is also a manga with many more volumes).
As for ease of understanding I also watched a few epidose of Shirokuma Cafe, already recommended above, but I didn’t like it that much, so didn’t continued with it.
Apart from that, I’m just watching any anime that I like in crunchy roll with japanese subtitles added via Chrome asbplayer extension, even if just catching a bit is the most fun 
Go for things that you already enjoy 
. Here are some ideas:
Bunpro’s JLPT Reading Practice
JLPT N5 or N4 reading exam books like the Kanzen Master books?
Anime / manga - One Week Friends - 一週間フレンズ。Bookwalker link to the manga
The manga has a lot fo furigana to make looking up words easy. Just click on the book cover to try the free sample.
The great thing about Bookwalker / Booklive is that most stuff has free samples (even for limited time, sometimes full volumes to read). I used to browse and just try to read different manga / light novels.
If you into Spy Family: Here is simplified light novel / manga hybrid volumes aimed for kids. Have furigana on everything: SPY×FAMILY まんがノベライズ１
Horimiya or most slice of life manga / anime?
(Maybe for later) Something that I really liked was reading a few kids books by 角川つばさ文庫 imprint . These have green covers, have furigana on everything and simple-ish grammar points (some N3)
Eg for Your Name - 君の名は。 君の名は。 角川つばさ文庫 Link
Here is the manga adapation - 君の名は。１ - マンガ（漫画)
Hopefully this gives you some ideas.
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If you are okay with JRPG’s, I found Romancing Saga 2 Revenge of the Seven to be incredibly good, difficult game with pretty easy and almost everything is voiced dialogue. most spells and attacks are in katakana, too with anglosized names like ファイヤーボール (fireball) and passage of time, so it’s interesting how things play out. I don’t know what people really consider beginner content, though outside of the same cut-paste childrens books repeated ad-nausium. You could also try the new frieren light novel released last month, covers the tv episodes 1-4, if you like that kinda stuff. Other than that many anime movies are often made into books, like dragon ball super super hero has a light novel adaptation. You could try looking into those and they’re aimed at school children, so they have furigana.
Personally I think that ‘beginner friendly manga’ is an oxymoron.
I started with tons of graded readers. I’m surprised at how infrequently they get mentioned as a learning resource
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I think it’s because graded readers aren’t very interesting for most people, especially when they only tread familiar grounds like “History of Einstein” or something. They seem good, but at least in my opinion, a textbook is more interesting. They are also expensive for what you get (for example, “first japanese graded reader” on amazon, 100 pages, audio sources available for 1600 yen or so.) Assume 5-6 pages for explanation/ ending, then half the pages explaining grammar and words used you’re really only getting like 45 pages of japanese practice, compared to a manga which can be around 200 pages of content for 600-800 yen (100 if bookoff is your friend and you don’t mind really bad manga)
But I agree, beginner friendly manga isn’t a good idea to plant into people’s head. I remember trying to read that one where the nerd is bullied by the girl, and yeah it went over my head despite being “near” N4 level. They are all made for natives, and they are not thinking about foriegners when writing, so none are exactly beginner friendly.
Are you talking about イジらないで、長瀞さん? If so, maybe try giving it a second chance. The intensity of the bullying severely drops after the beginning, and readers / viewer who don’t get past the start of the story get a wrong impression of what the story really turns into. They actually develope a really sweet relationship as the story progresses.
Both the manga and anime are great, I think.
I think he meant that the manga was harder than expected, so it went “over his head”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t enjoy the story.
I agree with what @Rukifellth says though. For the most part, manga are not beginner friendly. There’s many slang words and perhaps even cultural phrases that are not taught in textbooks. That said, there’s only one beginning friendly manga I know and it’s “Crystal Hunters”. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find the Japanese version. All I get is the English version. Book 1 is free, but they have a total of 9 volumes, which are available on Amazon. It’s honestly the only beginner material that wasn’t boring as hell. YMMV though.
I believe that’s it, but Jose got it right. I’m not too much into the whole “Slice of life” genre so I kinda left it there after the first few chapters due to a mix of low interest in the genre and the fact I wasn’t understanding much. I’m sure the story is good, thus is why it’s often recommended. (Honestly, the only slice of life I have enjoyed was Saiki k. But that’s quite a difficult series, they speak so ungodly fast in the anime and the manga isn’t much kinder.)
I interpreted that comment as being in the past and that they had progressed past N4 now. But if that’s not accurate yet then, yeah my recommendation doesn’t stand right now.
I was taken aback how easy the Cardcaptor Sakura Anime was. I tried after that several other series like Digimon or Pretty Cure and non of them hat so easy and basic conversations.
I’m quite new to learning Japanese myself, but I can highly recommend an application called Yomininja. It uses OCR to scan your screen for text, then overlays little boxes above the text that reveal text you can scan using Yomitan. It’s very useful for quick lookups and word mining directly into Anki while playing Videogames or reading Manga.
As for games, I am currently playing ぼくのなつやすみ and I’m having a blast with it. It’s a very relaxing PSX game about a boy who is spending his summer vacation in the Japanese countryside.
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I have been studying Japanese off-and-on for years, too. I felt very frustrated because I thought I wasn’t able to read native material yet. But after learning about 650 kanji I started searching for some materials and discovered I could read more than I could expect. I found all the information I needed in Reddit, Learn Natively and Game Gengo’s youtube channel. This has been my journey so far:
Manga: Chi’s Sweet Home (very easy), Yotsubato!, Flying Witch (up to volume 7 or 8; I dropped it because it gets more and more difficult, with long sentences and tons of magic words and stuff), Kimi no Na wa., Marmalade Boy, Shirokuma Cafe, Rental Oniichan. I recently read Mint na Bokura (from the same author of Marmalade Boy), Happiness (very easy but adult-themed and dark story), Neko Hajimemashita (a bit too much repetitive for my taste). Currently reading Barakamon and Love Hina. Tried One Punch Man and Ranma but found them too difficult for me.
Video games: After Animal Crossing (Switch), I started with Sumire (Steam), very easy. I didn’t finish it though because the story was not that interesting. After that I played Toem, a little gem which can be a bit challenging at times but I didn’t find it overwhelming at all. Then I played Another Code: Recollection (Switch): easy, with furigana, audio and you can replay the dialoges; loved both games (I had played the DS original). The first Famicom Detective Club game (Switch) was a very good choice, too (I still have to play the other two games, though). I highly recommend Toem, Another Code and Famicom Detective Club. I will play Shin-chan’s Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation this summer (hopefully!).
Anime: I started watching Ranma but dropped it. Same happened with Shirokuma Cafe, which is great for learners, but I’m not very interested in anime so I barely use anime as a learning tool.
Hope this helps!
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In case anyone was interested, Shin Chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation is 50% on Steam.
First, this is INCREADIBLY subjective. Any possible suggestions will be filtered through what each person found easy. Not necessarily what is easy.
Example: Someone who is into tennis and has learned all the tennis lingo is going to find tennis related content far easier than someone who has gone all-in on football content.
As such, the most important thing to take into consideration is what you have already learned. If you are still so early into your learning that you haven’t found a “domain” to learn in, pick one and try to either stay in it or near it. That way you are not having to constantly contend with new terminology specific to that one media source.
They bated me into watching some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl2ck8I5spI&ab_channel=TheBellman
But for some reason, it’s a show for little girls but with extremely good fight scenes 
(The Only Japanese Goblin I know is not playing during the fights as well)