I really love raising simulators like the Princess Maker series. I originally played the fifth game before I started learning Japanese, but now I’m wondering what JPLT level they might correspond to. I booted up 4 and found that I could understand ~20 percent of what was being said although most of what I understood were simple words like doll and farm along with simple sentences. I think the most complicated thing I understood was “Do you think I’m fat?” Princess Maker does not use furigana. Does anyone know what JLPT level the games might be at?
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I am not speaking from any direct experience, but I took a look at some screenshots.
It’s hard to label anything aimed at natives with a JLPT designation, since that’s inherently about a test for non-natives, but looking at it, I would think if you were below JLPT N2, it would probably be a slog to get through.
That’s not to say you’d definitely understand it well at N2 or N1 (there’s too much variability for me to guarantee anything), but you’d at least be better-equipped to pick up new words and kanji quicker.
If you have to be looking up new kanji and words every screen, as could be the case at N3 and below, you have to have an exceptional amount of passion for the content and patience to get through it.
EDIT: Though of course, take this with a grain of salt. I don’t know how much total text there is, so if the total text is relatively minimal, it might not matter as much.
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it’s a stat-raising game so it’s like 70% menu screens. I think you’d need to read a lot.
It strikes me as a difficult game to try in Japanese as a first one, at least without a text hooker. Perhaps it’s more workable with a texthooker…? I think at the very least the ‘functional’ menu elements would be so common with a bit of effort you could probably internalise them quickly. The issue would be with the story segments and suchlike.
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How much of a slog are you ready to endure ?
For each menu a single screenshot will suffice to extract the needed vocab from chatGPT or similar (ask to transcribe the text in the images). Since the menus mostly do not change in a few session they will be learned easily enough.
For the story part several questions:
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How often are you able to save ?
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How much raw text can you process in one given session ?
If you can either:
- texthook sentence to sentence
- prepare the vocab in advance
easily enough it’s doable.
Since you already own the game I’d advise to just pass it in Japanese and try to go from page to page. It will probably be slow as hell but also you’re gonna have a lot of fun !
I’ve already memorized the stats and know what they mean. It’s childish, but Princess Maker 5 was the game that I swore I would learn to read Japanese for back in middle school. Hardly any raising sims get an English translation. I’m also willing to pull out my dictionary for every dialog box. You should see me when I read manga in Japanese - the dictionary is out every speech bubble! But I enjoy the learning process so it doesn’t matter much to me.
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Yeah. I thought I could try it too before finding that I own “Long Live The Queen on Steam” and not Princess Maker.
If it’s important to you then it’s not to be mocked in any way 
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i am actually gearing up the courage to play uma musume on android since it’s maybe the most modern raising sim I can think of (not that I go diving into JPN raising sim news very often, but still)
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I briefly misread that as “racing sim”, which I guess isn’t totally out of the question for uma musume
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funnily enough, it’s both - you raise the uma musume for the races
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