I’ve always wanted to play these games and ever since the developers shut down their English branch the last two games (1 remake and 4) never came out and probably never will come out in America. They are games made for children though and I believe what manga adaptations it has are kodomomuke so I assume it will have relatively simple Japanese
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Maybe not too helpful lol but I am a big fan of Yokai Watch so I did end up buying Yokai Watch 4 I’m very much a beginner. I found myself not really reading too much or paying too much attention to the story and just going through the motions (a bit biased bc I watched the anime and already knew the plot).
There is a navigation system for most quest so you’ll never be too lost but there had been times where there was no navigation and you have to rely on your reading skills, my very basic Japanese did help out in those times. The first game has more slice of life elements than the 4th one. The 4th one leans more into the Supernatural than the rest of them and the kids are a bit older than in the previous games but there is furigana for all the Kanji.
I do recommend finding gameplay and watching a bit of it just to judge if you’d be able to learn from it or if it’d be too much for you. As well as see if you’d be interested in playing it, if you aren’t already into Yokai Watch you may not be able to get into it.
Yes! I played YW3 and YW4 in Japanese and understood them decently well and learned a lot of new vocab. I played 3 before it was out in English, so I used a Japanese wiki for both games if I got stuck. It felt really good being able to answer a bunch of the riddles! I was around N3 when I played. I treated it like homework, not just fun, and tried to look up every word I didn’t understand.
I did some games and it’s a mixed bag. You decide but here is some info:
* To actually enjoy the game you need a decent vocabulary, and dictionary lookups can kill the pacing of your game
* A lot of vocab found in specific games isn’t that transferable to other domains (but everything is like this)
* The “game” part (killing enemies, traveling, etc) doesn’t get you closer to understanding Japanese, only the dialogue does