There’s a whole host of book and manga reading clubs for all levels on these forums but every video game-related club I’ve seen so far is generally targeting intermediate-to-advanced readers. However videogames can also be a great way to get into reading Japanese for complete beginners! In fact that’s how I personally started, before even reading manga.
I’ve had the notion to replay all (mainline) Final Fantasy games for a while now and I thought this could be the opportunity to start a book club style thread where we could progress at a very casual pace through the games, helping each-other. Basically reading at a weekly pace similar to the Beginner Japanese Book Club, taking the time to break down individual dialogues if necessary.
Final Fantasy games strike me as a decent starting point for beginners because the level of Japanese is usually not too advanced (especially the early entries which I would estimate at around level 20-25 by Natively standards, with some difficulty spikes here and there) and there’s a lot of optional dialogue with NPCs in the various towns that can be good reading practice while being safely skippable if it feels too difficult.
The idea would be to start in a few months with Final Fantasy I. It’s one of the shortest Final Fantasy games and it’s not too difficult either, so I think it would be a perfect starting point. The original Famicom version is kana-only (no kanji) but the game has been remade many times so there are many variants to chose from, many written in more “normal” Japanese.
If the club is successful we could then continue with the many sequels (in order or otherwise).
I’m very interested!
I’m a little bit interested!
I’m not interested at all!
0voters
I want to start in September
I want to start later this fall
I want to start in 2026
I said I wasn’t interested stop asking me questions
0voters
Please do not hesitate to join us even if you feel unsure of your ability to read this level of Japanese, it’s always going to be rough at first but it can be a great learning experience. Don’t put the bar too high, don’t overstrain yourself and progress at your own pace, it’s not a race!
If there’s enough interest I will prepare a thread for Final Fantasy I with all the prerequisites (the various versions to choose from etc…). Then I’ll probably play ahead a bit to set reasonable weekly progress targets.
I was thinking that we could have a list of home posts, I would love to have a home post where I can write which FF I’ve played already, if it’s in JP or not. (Could also be a different format than home posts, such as a poll?)
I like how they’ve done it in the Harta thread.
Oh I see. In my mind I was going for something more like the BBC/IBC/IMC/… where we progress together on a weekly basis and as such we would be in sync (except for people who catch up later of course, but I’m not sure that keeping track of that has a lot of value?)
Otherwise I think it will be too hard for most beginners to keep up. Basically I was thinking of something similar to what we did in the Trails in the Sky club hosted (magnificiently) by @RebBlue:
Trails was much more demanding than Final Fantasy though in terms of quantity and difficulty of the dialogues. Over 300k characters for our entire Trails FC playthrough versus ~30k for the entirety of the original Final Fantasy I.
But of course that depends on the type of people who want to participate, if everybody is comfortable reading at their own pace then of course it’ll become more like Fata Morgana where we can just create a bunch of threads and people progress at whatever pace they want.
We could also start this way and then loosen things up once people are a little more comfortable.
I watched a good bit of the FF7 remake in English a while back and it seemed really fun, so I’ve been interested in playing the original 7 in Japanese for a while… I could be tempted to play some of the earlier games if they’re not very long.
Per chance does anybody know what’s an average number of characters per week for the BBC? I could try to figure out roughly how long it would take us to go through the games at that pace, since that’s what I have in mind at this point.
Yeah I think it was pretty successful overall. I hope that Final Fantasy will have even more mainstream appeal (on top of being generally easier) so that we’ll be able to maintain a playerbase throughout.
I think another cool feature would be to have a vocab sheet / glossary, like as of today I don’t know how to say all the different stats in Japanese, names of potions etc
Yeah absolutely, I intend to prepare something like that. One difficulty will be to account for the various version of the game which will necessarily have variations. But I’m sure we can figure it out collectively…
Hey this is a really cool idea! I was initially worried about how we’d play the game “together” but with the script sitting out there it’s definitely possible! I also see it’s available on switch…I’m down!
Yeah the game has a fairly linear story, so if we just set stopping points ahead of time then staying in sync won’t be too hard. It’s not Fallout.
In our Trails club the main issue is that the ratio of combat to dialogue varied pretty wildly from week to week, sometimes we would have entire weeks with only dialogues and then a few weeks of mainly questing. I think this isn’t going to be as much of an issue for Final Fantasy I simply because there’s a lot less dialogue overall, so I expect that the balance will be a bit better.
Now, there will probably be some grinding sections because games of that era loved that stuff… But at least that won’t be too challenging Japanese-wise.
I’ll make a post describing the differences between the various versions of the game (of which there are many). But this is a decent one to use, very close to the original but with many quality of life improvements.
EDIT: by the way the Japanese font looks so much better than the Latin one. They kept a pixelated look while still being high enough resolution to be very readable:
@Akashelia Yep also available in the US switch store, Japanese is a supported language. Which is great because I never got my Japanese switch store account working lol. I tried using my card, denied, tried buying point cards on amazon.jp, denied. I was like TAKE MY MONEY, PLEASE
