One thing that must have helped my English immensely when I was still learning it must have been discovering the Let’s Play Archive, which holds thousands and thousands of let’s plays of any kind, divided and sorted by type/genre/medium.
One thing that I really loved was the screenshot let’s plays, which other than being extremely impressive (instead of a video with voiceover, it’s literally posting thousands of screenshots and pretty much transcribing the entire game, AND add their own commentary/reader participation and so on) gave me literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of reading practice. I used to have this website bookmarked on my 3DS, and before I played Monster Hunter it made the browser my most used “game” on the 3DS. THAT’S how much stuff I would read on there.
I know it’s a very long shot, but is there any chance that there’s something similar in japanese?
I’ve tried simply searching for let’s plays on say YouTube using 実況プレイ, but it gets… how to say…. Overwhelming really fast lol, being bombarded by twenty different videos for twenty different games made by twenty different channels and completely random recommendations put every couple of videos, so I was hoping to find something more “organized” and where I could read on a browser instead of painstakingly pausing a video every couple seconds and squint at the screen to read.
Even if it’s not literally a screenshot play through but just a blog where someone posts their impression of playing through whatever game and you can simply click on the next part would be awesome!
I just added “blog” to your search term and googled for “実況プレイブログ”, and there seems to be some blogs that might be up your alley? I’m not into let’s plays and I’m a bit unsure what it entails, though.
Maybe you would like something like this. No guarantee, I just googled the above and read through the first few sentences
I’ve also looked around a bit and looking for プレイ日記 seems to be the closest to what I’m looking for; not quite a complete let’s play but lots of general impressions written right as someone is going through a specific game.
I can’t really help you with the screenshot Let’s Plays – I’ve always watched them on video.
But if you’re up for listening practise, what I’d recommend for you is to find and focus on just a couple of channels that feature the type of games you vibe with, with a voice you can easily understand.
My favorite Let’s Play channel is いちなつ. Her taste in games is quite similar to my own, and she has great commentary to go along the games – really chill listening practise. I first found her channel when I was looking for support to play through the original 逆転裁判 trilogy and wanted someone to read the text aloud for me, but I’ve ended up watching many of her other series since then.
Another Let’s Play YouTuber with a similar taste is まみむめも、 sayak@. Found her channel while playing through the ファミコン探偵倶楽部 series, but she also played through Xenogears.
