It’s still less expensive to order it from Amazon Japan. Including shipping and import taxes, SMT 5 would come to about 80€ in the standard and about 100€ in the collector’s edition for me. Shipping is also really fast - I’ve had quite a few orders over the years and they have all arrived in Germany in 3 to 4 days
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People recommended Paper Mario for Switch left and right for language learning.
The original is now on Switch Online, basic grammar, very few Kanji. (That can be good or bad).
It’s the better game though.
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Seriously, it feels so good playing this. It feels like a graded reader, just what I need 
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Fantastic post actually, thanks for calling my attention to that. Your screenshot made a little wary because it’s scary how blurry that kanji is, but I just started last night and the kanji so far is so rare and common that it hasn’t been an issue. And this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Something that, at my still kinda low intermediate level, I can just sit back and read and enjoy, letting the occasional missed words go with no issues. With most stuff the dictionary is a little more essential.
And yes, this game is extremely good, just as I remember it being.
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If this game was full of Kanji with many strokes, the font would be absolutely awful. But yeah, there are very few Kanji.
Bad for Kanji practice, but good for vocabulary 
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Does it have an option to choose to play in japanese or does it just pick up the language your switch is in (I share my switch with a non-japanese speaker!).
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You need to create a Japanese account to access the Japanese Eshop. There you can download the N64 App in Japanese. No extra cost.
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You don’t need to switch your region to Japan?
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If you download the Japanese N64 app, you don’t.
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I’m currently playing Yakuza Kenzan since it never got released in the West.
GAME: Kenzan
PLATFORM: PS3
PRICE: $60?
GENRE: Action Adventure RPG. Lots of substories and minigames, dating sim, brawling Lots of dialogue!
LEVEL: I don’t know how to find this out. Lot’s of slang though, but it’s reused and figure-out-able.
REVIEW: I’m loving it so far. I’ve played all the RGG studio games released in the West and needed more. I think this is actually one of my favourites in the series.
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I decided to take a look at Paper Mario (or as it’s titled in Japan, Mario Story) after seeing the discussion about it here and just want to echo that it is a really nice game in terms of difficulty. The spaces do help the readability where there’s a lack of kanji, and the sentences are basic enough that there are likely plenty of opportunities for finding i+1 sentences if you want to sentence-mine. I’ve never actually played Paper Mario before, but I might just keep going with it after this since I’ve been meaning to for a while and it’ll be good for my Japanese learning
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I’m still sooo damn bad at Japanese. I can’t be the only one who avoids talking to the NPCs even in this game, because the story is exhausting enough 
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Hah, I wouldn’t sweat it. As long as it’s not your primary studying right now, you want to keep a videogame light enough to still be fun. After making that post I played a little more and went through the Goomba family section and there was a lot more I was skipping, haha. Still enough to mostly get it and it helps that it’s a game where it doesn’t matter much, but I think it’s gonna be slightly harder than my first impression. Hang in there!
Also please do; this game is fantastic. And if you enjoy it, definitely try to get your hands on The Thousand Year Door (titled Paper Mario RPG in Japanese because this series’ naming is a mess); it’s probably even better!
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GAME: Zelda and the Spirit Tracks
PLATFORM: DS
PRICE: $ ?
GENRE: Zelda
LEVEL: I played it after passing the N3 and understood most of it.
REVIEW: The Japanese version is great for learning kanji because the kanji are written without furigana but when you click on them with the stylus it shows the furigana, which is great for checking accuracy and learning ones you don’t know. I attached a picture of what I’m talking about below.
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GAME: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD
PLATFORM: Nintendo Switch
PRICE: €59,99 (eshop price)
GENRE: Action/Adventure
LEVEL: Intermediate
REVIEW: I have played the original on the Wii and replayed it in Japanese on the Switch with the HD remaster. Two things must be noted immediately, every copy of the game will support Japanese, as long as you put your system language in Japanese. This game supports furigana, there’s a toggle in the options menu. The furigana is quite handy as the kanji font can sometimes be a little tricky to parse.
It was my first full fledged game I played in Japanese and quite a challenge at the start. Over time I got more comfortable with it. Zelda games are fantasy rich, so I expected it to have archaic words, but there’s plenty of colloquial and casual modern day speech mixed in with it as well. Despite this game taking place first in the timeline, it doesn’t feel like it. I put down intermediate as a level range as there are sentences that use more advanced grammar or more basic grammar, it kinda depends on the character that speaks and the situation. Alongside me playing the game I started studying with Tobira and as Link grew stronger, so did I in reading it. Skyward Sword is a wonderful game with various different speech styles and grammar, it makes everyone feel distinct in this world. There’s always plenty of practice to be had in this game, talking with NPC’s, doing their sidequests or just going on with the story. The key take away is that it is very much a game you can play on your own pace and decide what to do. That said, cutscenes break away from this. It auto advances text and this is quite a text heavy game so yeah those were the parts I only caught part of the dialogue there. Helps I have played the game before and the story is simple enough to fill the blanks at these points, but it is a bummer all the same.
Controls in this game were originally designed with the motionplus on the Wii in mind. So in HD remaster you are presented with two options: gyro controls with the joycons or classic controller. I have played the majority of this game in handheld mode. While both options are fine, they really are not as intuitive as the original. Especially during combat, which I struggled with right up to the final boss battle.
Here are a few screens I took during my playthrough, I didn’t really capture any of the more difficult scenes, so it’s not fully representative of the game. While I didn’t pick any moments specificially from the story, it might hint at some things, so click at your own discretion.
Screenshots
Beedle (テリー) shop, he talks like a foreigner, so most of his lines are in katakana.
Groose (バド) is always pissed off at the start of the game, but he mellows out later on.
One of the many races in this game, Gorons always add a ゴロ at the end of the sentence.
In the end, it took me a bit less than 50 hours to finish the game and I learned a lot from playing it. Skyward Sword uses both common expressions and old fashioned speech. Grammar varies from basic, casual speech to more advanced and polite speech. While I looked up quite a few words at the start of the game, later on the searches became less frequent and with shorter pauses. The furigana is helpful here, to make it easier to look up if necessary. For future reference, I’m now also more accustomed with Zelda terms in Japanese. Skyward Sword might not be the best place to start playing games in Japanese, but it was doable for me. I recommend it to all that want to read a lot and are familiar with basic grammar and want to learn more intermediate/advanced grammar.
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So, I would like to share the games I recently started in Japanese.
First, Pokemon Shining Pearl. It’s definitely a hit for me, the japanese is easy enough for me to understand without translating words. I have a hard time remembering the Pokemon names, though. For the game in itself, well, it’s a Pokemon. I don’t really like the new feature where all Pokemon gain experience during the battle and when capturing a pokemon, I feel like it makes the game too easy… And I already know I won’t be able to complete my Pokedex as I don’t own the previous Pokemons, so I won’t be able to get Jirachi and Mew… 
For the second game, it is Shiro to Kuro no Alice. It’s a visual novel otome game. The Japanese isn’t too hard either but I definitely need way more translation than Pokemon (I was surprised at how easy Pokemon felt). The good feature about this game is that you can replay the voice acting any time in the log menu. The drawback is that the main character isn’t voice acted. I also like the drawings a lot, the voices and musics as well. So, if anyone it interested in this genre and wonder about this game, it’s definitely worth it because the Japanese is doable. I just took the N3 this december and I can enjoy the game though, I need translation quite often, but even without it I can understand the general meaning.
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Man, I just wanted to say thank you for that post. Persona has been on my mind for a while and when I read your post back at the end of October, it was what made me finally get Persona 5 Royal from Japan. I have just finished the game after about 140 hours and it was really good. I think it’s my most played game ever now, since not many games have been able to hold my interest for that long
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Glad to be of help! P5R is definitely a favorite of mine in english or japanese
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GAME: Umineko no Naku Koro ni
PLATFORM: PC/Switch/PS4
PRICE: About 25 dollars for both parts on PC right now as part of the winter Steam Sale. About 10 dollars more usually
GENRE: Visual Novel
LEVEL: N1 (really hard, only recommended for people confident in their Japanese skills, but you can switch between English and Japanese at any time in the PC version)
REVIEW: Umineko no Naku Koro ni is a visual novel, which means it involves A LOT of reading. Getting through this whole thing will for sure take more than 100 hours, but let me tell you, it is SO worth it. This is my favourite story of all time. The characters, the music and the mystery all come together to create an unforgettable experience that will stay in your head for years to come. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and most importantly, you’ll be so engrossed that you can’t put it down.
The story takes place on an isolated private island called Rokkenjima where the incredibly wealthy Ushiromiya siblings and their children hold their annual family conference, this time to settle an inheritance dispute now that their father, Kinzo, is nearing the end of his life. A typhoon seals off the entire island, preventing them from leaving the island or contacting the outside world in any way. Soon after, a grisly, almost occult-like murder takes place, leaving the entire family in a panicked state. What starts out as a fairly standard murder mystery novel eventually turns out to become something far beyond that.
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Huge vouch for this (even though I’m currently playing it in English). Even if you can’t read it in Japanese, there is a mod that adds voice acting, could potentially be a bit of listening practice too. Great music too.
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