Thanks for all of the information 
I’ve been playing Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sphere of Influence a bunch. It’s a grand strategy game set during the Sengoku (Warring States) period of Japan. It’s the Japanese equivalent of Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you’ve heard of that series. If you enjoy slower paced games with lots of strategy and war planning you would enjoy it. Plus it gives you a double whammy of not only getting the Japanese Language, but also learning a ton of the history of Feudal Japan, it’s historical figures, and how it formed from dozens of different countries with their own Daimyo constantly fighting each other into the unified Japan we all know and love today.
Anytime! Honestly, in my experience, you can make just about any native material work just fine for study so long as you try hard enough and there’s actually stuff to be learned. After reading a couple volumes of childrens manga, I decided that I wanted something that actually interested me and went straight into a VN with over double the vocab count of harry potter. I feel like way too often people limit themselves to i+1 by default, when in reality there are a lot of resilient people out there who would do just fine struggling with more interesting and difficult content.
Just something to keep in mind for if you stumble across some stuff you wanna read one day.
2 Likes
Has anyone mentioned Caravan Stories for the PS4?
If you have a japanese account it’s a free mmo you can download and personally I think it’s great. The chat bubbles always wait for your input before going to the next one so you can take your time and look at the sentences. The sentences themselves are not overly complex so you can take your time with them or not.
Edit: Oh yeah, someone mentioned Animal Crossing. You can download Pocket Camp for your phone and switch the language to Japanese. Don’t have the time to play the game, but there should be a lot of diversity in the vocabulary and kanji there.
Not sure if it’s been mentioned elsewhere on here, but Kotaku has recently started a playthrough of Chrono Trigger in Japanese where Tim Rogers is helping Jason Shreier to learn some Japanese. They’re streaming it on Twitch weekly and also uploading to YouTube, both on the Kotaku channels.
I love the way Tim Rogers translates stuff so it could be fun to try and follow along whilst also enjoying one of the finest RPGs ever created!
Tim has also done a series for Kotaku where he takes a deep dive into the Japanese version of FFVII and compares it against the english version, so that might be an option also.
3 Likes
Hmm, that’s very interesting to me. I’m way below N2, I’d say, and I’m playing through the second Edgeworth game right now and finding it quite doable. I’m getting near the end of case 3 now, though my progress is quite slow.
That difference must then come from having played the fan translation first (a year or two ago). I feel like if you’ve played any of them before in English, you’ll be fine. 
1 Like
I was actually planning to try playing it in Japanese while(Black Eagle route spoiler) playing the church route, which will be the last one for me, so since it’ll be a new one just rewatching the cutscenenes wouldn’t work
Fire emblem three houses US cartridge works in Japanese if you put it as the language.
1 Like
I was going to ask if anyone had tried playing Stardew Valley in Japanese. It was recommended on Tofugu a while ago, IIRC. Beating Journey of the Prairie King is hard enough as it is…
2 Likes
+1 for Stardew Valley
edit: Not fully awake yet, didn’t get that it was a question. 
I like to play Stardew Valley in Japanese. It’s still above my level but not super hard.
1 Like
Entirely my bad for not being clearer in my original post, but I more meant for later if you (or anyone else, really) wanted to cross-check the localization or just experience the story in both languages for kicks. For example, you’re planning on playing your last route in Japanese, but you can also just read the dialogue from the other routes in Japanese without having to actually replay them if you’re interested in that.
I guess my point is that it was less of a direct response and more of a “by the way, if you didn’t know about it there’s this other tool that can be useful just in case”. But I didn’t make that clear the first time, which is entirely my fault.
How’s the difficulty of the Japanese in that? I did see one of the Nobunaga’s Ambition games on the eShop the other day, but it looked… intimidating. I’ve been playing a lot of Samurai Warriors 4 lately, although that’s considerably less useful for the historical accuracy bit.
I’ve played Stardew Valley maybe half a dozen times, and all but my first playthrough was in Japanese. I’ve only heard one person criticize the Japanese in it (incidentally, that person was Clyde Mandelin, a rather experienced J>E translator), but even then the impression I got was that it was just the occasional mistake that popped up. Like Shane using わ as a sentence-ending particle at one point.
The great thing about Stardew Valley is that you can take it at your own pace, so you’ll very rarely feel like you’re getting overwhelmed with dialogue you can’t read. It doesn’t have furigana at all, though. And I’ve never even done Journey of the Prairie King in English, so I can’t really help with that one XD
3 Likes
Try convincing yourself of that when it’s 01:30AM, you’re in Skull Cavern, and you just realised you forgot your farm warp totem. 
2 Likes
I haven’t noticed the Japanese being too unnatural, but the translation does sometimes mess up the meaning of the English. It’s nothing that would get in the way of Japanese practice, but it sometimes alters characterization a little.
I’ve seen quite a bit of criticism of the Stardew Valley translation, and having peeked at it myself I think I agree on many of the points. It’s not that the grammar is bad, but more that it’s just a really terrible translation, and it renders everything in this strange neutral language that kinda seesaws back and forth between masculine and feminine speech, so none of the characters sound unique at all.
[article in English about various games including Stardew Valley]
[article in Japanese specifically about Stardew Valley]
May not be bad for some practice but, I feel like reading more “authentic” works that were originally written in Japanese would probably be more fun. Just something to consider.
I agree 100% on games originally written in Japanese being better for practice than ones translated from another language. I didn’t know the Japanese players considered the official translation that bad, though; the English article is one I’ve seen before (the one by Clyde Mandelin), but the examples on the Japanese one were interesting. So it’s one of those games that could work for comprehension practice and vocabulary (I actually learned a lot of fruit and vegetable vocab from it, for example) but not so much for creating an Anki deck to learn grammar from. Good disclaimer to keep in mind.
See, my definition of “at my own pace” includes “Skull Cavern scares the crap out of me, so I’m just going to go hide in my bed”. I’m an absolute coward in that game.
3 Likes
Hmm, could be… I only tried the 2nd Edgeworth game since it was the only that didn’t get an English release. Though, the logic in those games works a bit differently to the original trilogy. Might also be that throughout my JLPT journey kanji was my weakest point whilst listening/speaking strongest. So it might’ve been easier with furigana 
1 Like
Watching part a play through of Undertale I think that looked like it would be a good one though it definitely was beyond my ability.
Haven’t used games for practice much myself, but my Japanese-practicing friend really likes visual novels like Steins;Gate or Clannad. Also, as many others have said on this thread, swapping game language to Japanese.
1 Like
Actually Undertale in Japanese is very hard lol.
They don’t do Kanji often so there is a disconnect because you can’t visualize it first. I have no idea what’s going on half the time because of it ;_;
A really good play through of Undertale in Japanese I recommend is by a person named Milca. She has divided the play through in several sections in youtube. She reads all the words and she’s also quite funny overall.
I really recommend Super Kirby Hunters on the Switch. It just came out and it’s free.
It it’s pretty easy to read Kanji-wise and the words that are not in Kanji can be easily looked up. I haven’t had much trouble other than slowing down to get the meaning of long explanations.
1 Like
I’ve just downloaded the English language demo of Doraemon Story of Seasons on my switch. The text seems to be all in English but the characters speak in Japanese, albeit a much shortened version! Has anyone downloaded the full version and can confirm what the language settings are, and how easy it is to move back and forth between them? i.e. Is it a one time selection? I’m playing AC: Pocket Camp on my phone and I switch back and forth between English and Japanese on that so I can understand what the tasks are so I think I’d probably need to be able to do the same with Doraemon.
1 Like