I thought there were several points that make this a good learning resource for those just starting to learn to read:
It forces you to choose your language up front, explicitly stating you may not change it later. While this may be something of a defect from some perspectives, it helps maintain your commitment to playing only in Japanese.
It’s targeted at children, so the language is not terribly complicated.
There are no furigana giving away the meanings of the kanji. However, there is an option to play in kana or kanji.
The game adds spaces between words, which makes it a lot easier to read and easier to look things up in the dictionary when you get confused.
The majority of the game’s dialog waits for your button presses, and you can adjust the message speed to be slower, which can help in the rarer auto-advancing cases.
The game is on Nintendo Switch, so you can use the screen grab feature to snap pictures of text for later reference.
I use this game in combination with the Yomiwa Android application, which allows visual dictionary lookups.
Pokemon in general is pretty nice. Lots of dialogue in the later entries. Lots of repetition. And every Pokemon game since XY has had every possible language on every cartridge, ignoring region, which is really nice since getting a game in Japanese can sometimes be a bit of a pain.
When I first started playing Let’s Go in Japanese, I made a dictionary of words and kanji I didn’t know, for literally everything that I didn’t know. After Cerulean city, spending waaay too much time not actually playing the game cause I was looking everything up, I stopped doing that and played it normally. I now gloss over kanji I don’t know, get thrilled at the ones I do know, and enjoy the game far more.
Odd timing here…just booted up Let’s go in japanese for the first time in 6 months and came here to see if anyone else had experience with it. This was the most recent post in all forums. The spacing is really nice between words, makes it a lot easier.
I didn’t play Let’s Go in Japanese (I don’t have a switch ;u;) but I did recently play Pokemon Moon in Japanese for the first time. At my level, there are only a couple of Kanji that I find myself unable to read and so I look a lot up using the radicals on jisho.org. Very helpful!
After starting to play through Pokémon moon recently, I can agree that it’d probably be good reading practice, but I also feel like it may be hard for somebody who just is starting to read. I imagine that the lack of furigana would make it a pain to look up everything when you’re just starting out and don’t know as much Kanji, and I also think that the point about being unable to change the language midway through the game might scare people more than it helps… but I’m personally beyond that point already, so I have no idea if any of what I just said is accurate or not. Those things did make me give up on playing Pokémon X in Japanese after about 5 minutes a while ago because it ended up being too much work, though
That said, it’s definitely cool once you don’t have to look up nearly everything, and maybe before that too if you’re more determined… but I certainly wasn’t at the time.
Just as a disclaimer, I haven’t actually played let’s go though, just Moon, so maybe let’s go is easier when it comes to Kanji and vocab variety. It’s also not a problem for me personally anymore, so this is really just conjecture based on the level I’m guessing most people would be at when they’re just starting to be able to read easy stuff
Just because I think that maybe ended up being a bit more negative than intended, I do want to say that anyone interested should give it a try and judge for themselves though
I’ve played 二ノ国 on the DS in Japanese, and that does have furigana, but with the pixellation, the small size of the text meant I practically had to learn a whole new character set on the fly.
