I’ve been practicing Japanese by playing video games these last months.
Played gensou suikoden, seiken densetsu 2, bloodstained, danganronpa, currently playing persona 4 golden.
I have just bought ni no kuni and noticed that the game includes furiganas, which is great.
I was wondering if there are more games that include furiganas available?
I played 二ノ国 on the DS, though unfortunately the furigana is about three pixels high. It comes with a really nice magic book as well. I still have fond memories of playing it outside my JLPT N3 exam room while waiting for the exam to start, encountering 生える for the first time ever… then getting exactly the same word as literally question one in the exam.
I really should get around to finishing that someday…
Apparently these games also have Furigana:
Animal Crossing
Yokai Watch
Zelda Ocarina of Time 3DS (only this version)
See this thread:
Also I can confirm Super Mario Oddyssey and Galaxy have Furigana, probably most modern Mario Games do.
Zelda Link’s Awakening Remake as well iirc.
By the way, which systems do you have? Will make it easier to recommend games.
And if i may be so bold to promote my free tool, I made a search engine for kanji where you can search kanji by their Wanikani radicals:
I’ve used this for playing a lot of games myself and it has already been very useful to me, makes it very quick to find kanji. (Use Yomichan to quickly get dictionary entries from them as well)
I’m mostly using my computer and a super famicom mini.
I’ve been using jisho to find unknown kanjis.
Thanks for the links, I’ll have a look
Animal Crossing is nice enough to let you switch languages at any time (even if Tom Nook seems skeptical that you would want to do so), but it’s worth noting that in Japanese, all island names have 島 appended to the end, and you can only choose which furigana it puts there at creation (on’yomi, kun’yomi, and rendaku kun’yomi), so if you switch languages on an existing island, it defaults to the on’yomi reading. Hmm, now I’m wondering about replaying Mario and Zelda… Great, like those weren’t distracting me from reviews enough already.
Reviews first, then reward yourself with games? That’s my method 
Interesting about choosing the reading, permanently, that seems like a weird mechanic.
Well, island names aren’t changeable for some reason, so I guess if the language isn’t set to Japanese it just sets that flag to a default value (the one Nintendo uses in their promotional videos, as their island is named Ninten島 using the reading とう, a fun little pun) and there’s no mechanism to bring the choice up outside of island creation.
Dragon Quest XI has furigana, and is pretty good for learning I found.
cool, didn’t know that, i’ve long wanted to play DQ11 as well.
The original japanese version did not have voice acting actually.
The S Definitive Edition does though.
Pity that neither the (European) Switch nor the Steam version seem to support Japanese text though (you could buy it from the japanese e-shop on Switch).
Which version did you play, Kalas?
I bought the switch’s definitive edition on the japanese eshop. The graphics are quite inferior to the pc version but it was the price to pay to have the jp voice acting (which is pretty good) + orchestral music. Totally worth it.
It will come to PC as well this week but it seems that the japanese text is only available in Japan…
Kanjitomo allows you to recognise characters from images, as long as they are on a reasonably solid background and contrast with it. I’ve used it to play lots of games in windowed mode. Needs Java to run, though, so install that first.
I tried Kanjitomo, and in some cases it worked pretty well, but in my experience in most cases it didn’t, so it was too frustrating for me. If it worked consistently it would be brilliant.
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