There have been a few threads on this topic throughout WK’s existence.
The most recent one I’ve noticed was this one, but it doesn’t really cover listening.
I’ve been fooling around with japanese videogames from my youth for the past 10 years, on/off ever since I first registered in WK. Never quite finding a game that didn’t frustrate me tremendously, be it Pokemon, which forces you to not only comprehend japanese in its phonetic form (which is also a plus and something that should correlate to a certain degree of listening comprehension, but a pain in the ass anyway) thanks to its lack of kanji in the earlier GameBoy versions, but also something like Final Fantasy 7 which is punishing in its own way due to the amount of dialects, contractions and jargon thrown at you from all angles.
10 dialog bubbles would cost me 90 minutes in either game, depending on how much trouble they were giving me. Typically the vocabulary is never the issue, but the grammar itself, and not grasping the context allied with the fact that japanese translation is a minefield of different nuanced interpretations sometimes. It’s easy to get obsessed over “why isn’t something X instead of Y?”.
Pokemon, even Kanji-less, can be a real bitch with the mannerisms. It’s super casual for the most part, regardless of being aimed at children (is it though?; from gambling men to girls asking you not to look up their skirts, I sometimes have my doubts).
That being said, I just recently came upon Star Ocean The Second Story R.
Now… The gameplay itself, admittedly, I don’t care about. I’m only playing this for the learning process. And here’s the thing: it’s the first time in years that I found 90% of dialog to be extremely easy to follow. Obviously using a combination of jisho/chatgpt/google translate/rikaikun to do a double-take on vocab and/or kanji I haven’t seen yet.
But overall it’s been smooth sailing and probably my main morale booster in the past few weeks.
Irrelevant “Sob” Story: I don’t plan on moving to Japan, nor am I a fan of Anime or any other Japanese piece of media, other than old stuff like some 90s anime or older games from my teenage years. I’m learning Japanese in order to revisit those things, more than anything else, because I love the idea of enjoying something in its original “format”, if you will. As you might have guessed, given how hard of an endeavor it is to learn this language, this goal of mine is likely not strong enough to keep my discipline and passion alive. So every time I feel like my efforts are bearing fruit (as with the aforementioned game), it helps me a lot in pushing forward.
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