I’m planning to take the N2 this December and passed N3 last year in July. Recently I’ve been obsessed with Fire Emblem 3 Houses and after completing the game in English, ive been watching Game Gengo’s video where he goes through the beginning of the game in Japanese and explains the vocab/grammar along the way. Getting hit with stuff like おぬし as a pronoun and all the archaic ways Sothis conjugates verbs, I’ve wondering if I’m wasting my time using this as a study resource and I’m gonna end up learning stuff that’s way too far removed from actual jlpt test content and too niche/historical
For anyone else who used Fire Emblem 3 Houses as a study resource, please give me your honest opinions here
I haven’t played this game specifically, (haven’t taken the JLPT for real either lol, but I’ve practiced with a past N1 test and passed comfortably) but the vast majority of my learning since about N4 has been from playing games and reading visual novels like this.
If you want the absolute best thing to get better at the JLPT specifically, you probably want to be hitting essays and news articles and the like. But to enjoy yourself and still improve your Japanese, yeah, this game will be fine. What you’re getting is kinda “Ye Olde Japanese;” it’s modern enough with archaic signifiers. Like reading something in English that has some "thou art"s but ultimately is still made to be clear to a general audience. Presumably you enjoy fantasy games besides this one and you’ll see these same speech styles all the time. Might as well go on and learn かたじけない and べからず and whatnot for your future enjoyment.
You’ll absolutely have to learn some specifics you aren’t going to see much outside this kind of context, but everything you read is made up of thousands of things that you won’t see on your JLPT. It’s an insignificant blip I wouldn’t think anything more about than how lots of RPGs are going to make you learn 属性 and odds are low you get tested on that either.
Edit: Just to add on since you are on a timeline, I think learning from reading (and listening to) just about anything is the best way to learn, but it is a function of quantity. Fire Emblem will contribute its little part to your abilities whether you learn some specific words or just get a little bit faster at reading by the end, but if you don’t feel comfortable about your progress towards N2, more specific test-prep style studying might be the difference maker.you need so don’t expect TOO much short term gain out of Fire Emblem. Please do play the game sometime when you can either way though! You don’t want to let dealing with the JLPT get in the way of your real learning in the end.
For N2 and N1 a big area where I think many test takers have difficulty is the reading speed it expects. The expectation is not super high; but you do need to be able to read a page of text fairly smoothly, actually reading it rather than plodding through it decoding it. The only way I know to get to that is simply more time spent reading. Finding something you actively enjoy to read is the best way to get yourself to put the necessary hours in – five hours of Fire Emblem is better than 45 reluctant minutes reading newspaper editorials. (Plus I think “use the language to do things you enjoy” is the whole point of putting in all this effort, so it’s a good outcome in its own right.)
As @Daisoujou says, opinion essays and newspaper editorials are the kind of style the JLPT reading section uses, and if you’re mostly reading from video games or novels or whatever then some N2/N1 grammar and vocab will come up less frequently. By and large eventually it will turn up, it’s just going to take more reading before you run into it. So some mix of “large volume of reading for pleasure to get the hours in” plus “a smaller amount of specifically test focused prep reading” is probably what I’d suggest (and is roughly what I did).
