What I’m doing is playing my childhood games (like Chrono Trigger and Zelda) in japanese, so I already know the story and because I love the games so much I can keep playing them even if I don’t understand some words/sentences.
Basically I’m repeating what I did when I was a kid and didn’t know english, I just kept playing and playing and then, magically, I began understanding more and more. So when I don’t know a word I just try to go with the context (unless it’s some word I forgot but recognize the kanji, in this case I look it up to remember it).
Learning by immersion if the most important thing and for me at least, as long as I’m having fun, I will keep playing and I know that i’ll be learning a lot unconsciously
I play Spiritfarer in Japanese. Great game.
I play in Japanese for a bit and when I get to around 10 sentences I don’t understand and have stuck in my Anki I then play in English for a bit. It’s handy because you can switch languages in the options menu very quickly so if my brain has had enough I go back to my native language for more fluid immersion in the game
I have pretty much stopped doing WK completely tbh. I’m just reading manga, news and playing games in Japanese and using my own anki. It really works for me, having content that I am interested in and the language structured into coherent Japanese sentences. I would say stick with it as the amount of material you can be exposed to in this game is huge! But then I also think the most important part of any learning environment is that its right for you. So I guess go with your gut.
When I first got to Japan, I bought a PS4 because I wanted to play FFXIV like I did when I was back home. Played that for a while but really wanted to try exploring some games in Japanese (you know, forcing me to use it)
So I picked up World of Final Fantasy, which looked cute and maybe I could understand it (this was 4 years ago now, at the time it seemed based for younger kids to me).
Tried to get through the introduction and was so damn frustrated I gave up and haven’t touched it since. I feel your pain, but maybe it is time to look back at it again (after 4 years) and wipe the dust off my collection XD
I recently got “Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin” on my switch and tried to play through it at first in Japanese, but that game has brief introduction and doesn’t actually end the introduction until like the second year (which doesn’t take long) but it had a lot of vocabulary I didn’t really understand and now that I have played it for a bit in English to just understand the mechanics of gameplay, I think I will go back to playing in Japanese.
Though the only game I can really play in Japanese right now is どうぶつの森. I like the Japanese in that game much much more than the English for sure. But that game revolves around doing the same things every day, so it helps to repeat the same things over and over for me. I can also learn the names of bugs and fish in Japanese, which I think is a lot of fun! I also like to see the differences between the names of Japanese characters versus their English names 
I can also type in Japanese to my Japanese friends, so it helps me to talk with people in Japanese too (simple things, but still better than nothing)
I bought copies of some of my favorite JRPGs in Japanese, but they are PS1 and I can’t play them on any system right now so that will have to wait until I either decide to buy a PS1 here or go back home.
Anyways, take a break if it is stressing you out, or switch to your native language and play through until you understand the story and then play through it again after a time. It will be so much more enjoyable! <3
I have 二ノ国 on the DS which I really need to get around to finishing. I still have fond memories of that because it taught me 生える for the first time literally minutes before I encountered it as question one of my JLPT N3 exam. 
It comes with a very lovely hardcover book which includes a list of magic spells, a full monster and item compendium, a short story (I think? I haven’t read it yet), and some things necessary to solve puzzles in the game. The game has full furigana, but it’s written so small that it takes a bit of time to get used to reading it.
I would say it’s about finding the right resource for you that is suitable for your level, challenging, while also being interesting.
I started off by playing Yokai Watch 4 in Japanese but it just wasn’t interesting me so I was going at a slow pace.
I then went to an even harder medium, Persona 5 and boy is the game a challenge. There is so much dialogue lol. But the key thing is I am enjoying it so much. I have learnt so much from it. It’s challenged me in so many ways. I don’t understand everything but that’s okay 
It gets better. Just keep playing. The more practice you do, the easier it gets, the more fun and less of a chore it will become. I will say that it takes AWHILE to get to that last step. Just keep playing
I think I played about three minutes of FFXV before noping back into English, haha. Though I have been thinking about getting my hands on the Phoenix Wright games, since the past few levels of WK seem like they have a lot of legal vocab that could come in handy.
I think keeping separate brain space for study time and fun time is healthy and good, so if you WANT to study with a game, go for it, but if you want to kinda shut your brain off and pew-pew stab-stab some bad guys, or decorate your farm or whatever, just do it in English.
Do you have any recommendation for a frequency deck that doesn’t overlap too much with WK? Or do you just remove those cards?
逆転裁判
法律 law
異議 objection
裁判 trial
裁判長 judge
弁護士 defense lawyer
法律事務所 law office
検事 prosecutor
検察庁 prosecutor’s office
刑事 detective
警官 police officer
被害者 victim
容疑者 suspect
凶器 murder weapon
殺害事件 a murder
証拠 evidence
You’re set, gogogogogogo
I’ve been making my decks manually, card by card. It’s more work but I feel like my gains have been better. For vocab, I just add words as I encounter them. For each word, I go by four criteria: I’m at least at Guru level with the kanji within; the word isn’t in WaniKani; I’ve seen the word more than once in the wild; the word has the #common tag in Jisho. Sometimes I relax that last one but I’m trying not to waste brain space on esoteric words.
For kanji, I made a list of joyo kanji that aren’t in WaniKani, and I’m also adding some jinmeyo kanji if I see them a lot outside of names.
If you’re looking to add words in order of frequency, japanese.io tags words that way, with tags like Top 500, Top 1000, Top 2500, etc., all the way to Top 10,000. I use that a lot too! I know this sounds like a huge amount of work; I really am sorry that I don’t have a more efficient answer to your question!
I agree with this assessment. Please try a less text heavy game for sure. What about something with more simple gameplay/less plot? For example, I play JoJo’s Pitter Patter Pop. At its core, it’s a matching game with a gacha system to get characters with special abilities. There’s not an overall plot to it, but the game instructions and abilities are all in Japanese and there is also limited character interaction. I’ve been playing for about a month now. At first, I was a little overwhelmed by all the new gaming vocab and grammar. After about a week though, things started to make more and more sense. Now I don’t feel overwhelmed and I can easily read 80-90% of the content.
How about trying a more simple game and then working your way up to more complex and text heavy ones?
No worries, thank you, that was a great answer! I didn’t know about Japanese IO, that looks awesome
Maybe play a video game you know well. I was going to play Ace Attorney once my vocab is a bit stronger because I know those games inside out.
I do however recommend playing through Spiritfarer in its entirety. I love that game so freaking much. It made me cry!! Are you able to switch to English, then back to Japanese later?
Hey, feels nice to be able to understand some of these already. The best thing is for some words it’s enough to piece stuff that I know together without having to bruteforce the word as a single unit to remember it. Haven’t done anything japanese related outside wk for the last 8 or so months, but looks like it’s time to be slowly coming back to it.
My God, you were FAST with Wanikani then. Pokémon Shield came out end of 2019 and you’re level 60 now 
日本語でゲームをやるのはそんな生半なことではない。もっと覚悟しろうお前ら
Yeah that’s a benefit of knowing kanji. Although some seem random and unguessable on their own, like 刑事 or 検事. 検事 makes more sense when you know that 検事 is a particular type (the ones that do trials) of the broader 検察官 for example, and that makes sense, but you wouldn’t know that from just seeing 検事 out of nowhere.
At level 60 you absolutely should not read textbook Japanese, IMO, I’m only 25 and my language partners are already chastising my for the parts of my language that is still “textbooky” Read some children’s novels, so at least it’s native but simple language. Or maybe middle school books so the kanji is there, kanji actually helps me read lol.
I agree though games have never worked for me either unfortunately. Right now I am watching teach master takagi san on netflix, SOOOO much better of an experience.
Started Jan 2020, level 60 March 2021. So just over a year, but just want to say I had been studying Japanese on and off for four years prior (I did not study very hard if I can be honest, not like I am now, but it was enough to give me some speed with WaniKani).
BTW, I would have found Wanikani through jisho.org because I was using it so much through my Pokemon kanji journey!
I would actually love to play it again now to see how I would fare, it would probably help me to learn a lot more considering the major barriers have been lifted and the whole process will be much smoother.
But I probably won’t for a while as I really need to start putting in more time doing active learning. I’ve been way too passive, and I realise that now I started my iTalki sessions again. I’m really getting my behind kicked when the time comes for me to generate sentences, even though I can understand so much of what someone else says.
That depends totally on your goals, though. I just want to understand Japanese at the moment, I’m not planning to move to Japan or something.
Still, twice my speed, congratulations on that