Help me find a good Visual novel for studying

Japanese Language
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Disclaimer: sorry for the unstructured mess of a post, my dyslexia and generally bad writing skills are not doing me any favours.

First, a bit of background facts, so you can adjust your answers:

I have studied Japanese at a slow and steady pace for soon to be 7 years and now have a relatively easy time with simple Japanese there are still enormous holes in my vocabulary and very inconsistent vocabulary knowledge some words I can only identify in spoken Japanese some I know only when written in Kanji and the opposite to some I only know when written in hiragana and visual context helps a lot.

I’m as previously mentioned Dyslectic which in my case mostly translates to being a slow reader in English and Swedish (native language) but when it comes to Japanese all the old problems re-emerge and some new ones. Some of the problems are that I have a hard time with what my brain views as similarities so to me for example しゅう, ちゅう, しゅ and ちゅ are hard to differentiate when memorising and on top of that hard for me to hear the difference to if it is not a side by side comparison, the same thing applies to all S and Z sounds in Japanese.

I have read a lot of Manga with furigana, but the problem with that is that it still requires a lot of dictionary use that slows it all down to a crawl, for example a 200ish page manga can take anywhere from 40 to 15 hours of inefficient reading time.

So in a last desperate attempt to effectively use my limited study time (40 years old and working full time) I have started to use Visual novels for reading and listening practise and so far I have finished Tokyo School Life and Marco and the Galaxy dragon. The problem with those are that they only have simultaneous subtitles in both English and Japanese, and it gets hard to not accidentally just read the English subtitles or just default back to them completely when the Japanese gets too hard or confusing.
So my next attempt was Muv-Luv to get a story more in line with my interests and having the option to switch subtitle language with a button press to avoid unintentional cheating with visible English subtitles.
But I sone realised that this was even worse partly because there is no furigana so it is hard to identify kanji I don’t know or are unsure of and on top of that the English subtitles are not “Translations” they are “Localisations” so in many cases they don’t even use the same words just something that has about the same meaning :frowning:

The actual question:
Can someone recommend a good Visual novel that is not a slice of life romance story, and works well with a text hooker or has good native options that help with language learning. Preferebkky with full voice acting to train listening comprehension and not a faceless protagonist (really don’t like those).
I have no problems with H content so long as it is not the main focus of the story.

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Stein’s Gate is usually a go to for this situation.

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Already have Stein’s Gate in My Anime collection and really want something new

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Uh…

Saya no Uta is like horror suspense with some H.
Interesting story, but I think it might be a bit difficult, considering the themes. Though jpdb doesn’t exactly agree.

There’s always Ace Attorney.

And I started reading this one as practice, and it was pretty simple, though it felt like the classic romcom vn, it’s not very heavy on that, I think. I didn’t get very far.

Oh, Danganronpa.

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There’s plenty of sequels. But Danganronpa is great too

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Maybe because it is so short. Takes less than 10 hours while some other VNs are 40hours+
I really enjoyed it though it is really Horror / dark, better be prepared (but played in English with JP voice)

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Thanks for the suggestions, should have mentioned that I generally find Horror boring :sweat_smile:

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After some searching, I found “Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen” which looks like something I will like, but I can find no information if the game is compatible with any text hookers.

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I am playing this one. Though, I am OK with looking up on my smartphone. Also, I am playing fullscreen.

Trying Textractor x86 just now. ATRI works, but I can’t figure for this one.

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what app are you using to look up things I have Yomiwa but that dosent work so good

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Aedict3. But some things just can’t be helped, like alternate Kanji forms, or not being the first variant form.

I also add hyperlinks to Goo and Weblio from the app, but I don’t often open in web browser in practice.

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Thanks for the info this games seams to be interesting enough for me to tolerate some inconveniences in looking up stuff and I got the “brilliant” idea to run a youtube Playthrough in English so if I absolutely don’t understand something I can quickly find the Official translation.

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I played the steam version of Utawarerumono last year with Textractor. It worked, but I had to fiddle a lot to find the proper hook.

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Have you had a look at what the Visual Novel Reading Club is up to nowadays?

There you can probably also get advice on your VN of choice and how to integrate it with texthookers etc.

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Hi, would you find sharing your hook code for the game? I can’t seem to find the way to configurate textractor…

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