I’m quite excited to give Ace Attorney a try in Japanese. The only thing I think I might struggle with is that there are a lot of puns and jokes.
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I recently did a computer-assisted playthrough of FF7 and FF8 (now working on FF9) in Japanese with some help:
https://www.timmahrt.com/game_scripts/
I played through Dragon Quest 11 without any help and it was pretty rough–it was much easier to just skip through text without reading it. But playing through a game while having a reference script (English and Japanese) where I can easily lookup words etc makes it much more doable.
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I’m considering a fresh run of DQ11 in Japanese (I have the enhanced edition but still haven’t played it). May I ask what made it rough? Just lots of new vocabulary? Or were there odd/archaic words and grammatical structures, etc?
My Japanese just wasn’t good enough at the time. 
When I started I would look up words and kanji manually but that was super tedious. Being able to mouse over words and get their translation makes it much easier to study while playing the game.
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Anecdotally, I’ve no idea about Fire Emblem or Dragon’s Dogma, but for whatever reason I found Persona 5 to be a pretty big step up from Persona 4 in terms of reading difficulty.
I played a lot of P4 with probably less than a year of WK under my belt. Then I bought P5 and quit immediately.
I tried again about a year after that and found it doable-ish but still too much effort to be fun. It wasn’t until recently (over four years in) that was finally able to play it and enjoy it. (Then I quit anyway because I’m apparently too old for games and can only bring myself to read books ;_; )
Still, better that you judge for yourself. Here’s a let’s play series you can check out to see if you can read it or not: vanilla, the royal.
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I´m hearing these things a lot. What exactly makes P5 so difficult? Grammar, Kanji, etc.?
You could always get the demo for Strikers on Switch and get a feeling for it.
I played the first case of the first game in Japanese. But I know the trilogy basically by heart.
The text is in the easy side because of the gameplay. The sentences are short because they have to fit in a single text book.
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I know it’s been 160+ posts since the original question, but I still wanted to put in my two pennies’ worth.
I completely sympathise with the feeling that the experience of the game is affected by all of the interruptions necessary to look up every other sentence on a dictionary, but that should only be a deal-breaker if your main goal is to enjoy the game. If your goal is to learn a language through playing video games, then the whole experience becomes more tolerable, and even enjoyable as you see your own pace start to increase.
I learned english back in the 90s through playing Monkey Island and Leisure Suit Larry, armed with a dictionary, and I remember going through months of painfully slow gameplay before it started clicking. But it really paid off in the long run: english is no longer a problem.
Now I’m going through Pokémon Black in japanese, and I feel the same pain as back then, the same sluggishness you’re going through. But if we stick with it, we’ll both come out fluent on the other side - not after the first game, mind you! But if you keep at it, you will definitely notice a difference by the third, fifth, tenth game.
And eventually, we’ll be having this conversation in 日本語！
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I’m curious too. I’ve heard constantly that it’s really difficult, so never looked into it, but I just listened (at work, didn’t watch) to the first 45 minute lets play video posted and it didn’t seem any different from a typical anime episode so far. Does it get really existential or whatever later?
Keeping in my I do actually have years of experience, so I’m not calling it easy, I’m just surprised that it seems pretty normal.
I don’t know how one would quantify “more difficult language”…
The best I can explain is that it feels more like the target audience is assumed to adults.
More uncommon/colloquial words, more complicated sentences… dunno…
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It also touches sooo many different subjects which all come with their own set of vocabulary.
But what’s good is that there are only a few cutscenes that play without being able to pause.
I played through all of P5 Royal last year and it took me a LONG time, much longer than when I played the original version in English. The main area of difficulty is the sheer range of vocab, due to the fact that your confidants come from all walks of life – aside from your standard ヤンキー schoolmate character and such you also end up spending time with a politician, an ex-yakuza, a shogi player, a psychologist, and more. Each of the dungeons also has a distinct theme and comes with its own domain-specific vocab (one is a castle, one is sci-fi, etc). And of course, just like with any SMT game, the end sees you facing off against gods and angels, all of whom speak in a very old-timey, biblical style.
I also remember quite a few unusual kanji – I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire joyou set and then some is used. The spritesheet used to render the font is quite massive.
Comparatively, I actually beat Scramble (aka Strikers) in 75 hours, which was actually slightly faster than a native Japanese speaker I follow on Twitter. It’s much more linear than the main game, and the domains of vocabulary are dramatically narrower. It also helps that nearly every line of dialogue is voiced (whereas in the main game, all side content and a fair amount of the main content is just text), so I was often able to keep up in realtime without having to pause.
I would definitely recommend P5 as study material if it interests you, just be aware that it’s a big undertaking. I’m quite sure I saw every piece of grammar I’ve ever studied, including my first-ever in-the-wild sighting of ～わ～わで, which is one of those mythical non-JLPT constructions. If you’re willing to slog through some tough stuff (or alternately, if you can be satisfied with imperfect comprehension) I’m sure it’ll benefit you bigtime.
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“Imperfect comprehension” is the only kind of comprehension I believe in!
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That is such a good game! 
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That spritesheet is insane, just wow 
I really don’t know either 
Once you understand something it can be really hard to know why it might have been difficult.
I once stopped reading a book because I couldn’t understand enough of it, then I looked at it again recently, and literally couldn’t even notice anything I thought might have been unusually difficult about it 
Curse of knowledge I guess.
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I actually just saw this grammar in Sword Art Online 1 (the light novel).
It too uses some surprisingly rare grammar and has thus been pretty difficult (and useful) as study material!
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Sometimes playing games in Japanese is also just not “possible” because of stupid limitations.
I saw Xenoblade DE for Switch really cheap and thought, that I might get it. I can’t play it in Japanese because the cutscenes are too fast anyway, BUT, there randomly the game can’t be played in Japanese anyway, if you have the phyisical version. If you download, you can play in Japanese. That’s just stupid.
And it is by far not the only game to pull that stunt. I always check on the website. Really annoying =/
I’m sorry if the question is obvious, but…
While I’m used to importing games/using Japanese eshop, because sometimes West editions don’t have Japanese language option at all, it’s the first time I hear about difference between physical and digital.
So… did you try to change the Switch system language to Japanese?