Anyone have any suggestions for games that I can use to practice Japanese. To be specific, I don’t mean study games (like doulingo or something), but rather entertaining games that I can play in Japanese and practice through that.
I was trying to look for a visual novel style game like “Cooking Companions” or maybe like “Doki Doki literature club”, since it’s mostly just an interactive story. But I can only find these dating sym type of games, and I’m not interested in downloading/playing that.
I’d like to get more ways to study that are fun and different so Learning doesn’t become a constant drag where the only thing I read/listen to is dull papers/audio practice and whatnot.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_QrcROWKmA
this guy covers a fairly good spread of games, if you don’t mind a long tier list video
Persona 3/4/5 are basically my ideal learning games for many reasons.
1. They’re long. 3 is a bit shorter but 4 and 5 are about 80 hours presuming you read fast. 100+ if you don’t.
2. They’re extremely dialog heavy.
3. They’re a good mix of fantastical game vocabulary and real, Slang filled daily life.
4. They have a log feature that let’s you replay lined of dialog from the current scene as many times as you’d like.
5. They’re genuinely good games that are amongst the top of what the JRPG genre has to offer.
The PC version of 4 let’s you switch both text and audio language. 5 isn’t on PC yet so it remains to be seen if it allows that too.
If you want VN that don’t have romance Phoenix Wright is quite popular. I also like Nonary Games. I however have not tried them in Japanese personally. I feel like romance games would be the easiest to read. Time hallow is a niche one that I also enjoyed but it is DS exclusive.
The term you are looking for is “visual novels” – you can find untranslated recommendations in the sidebar of r/visualnovels for those that also include “beginner level” stuff.
As Game Gengo was already mentioned, Matt also recently posted a video about the Shin-chan Boku no Natsuyasumi “copy” and seemed very enthralled by it and it has Furigana etc.. If you are really dedicated to also deal with difficult language, any game that lets you proceed at your own pace is fair game honestly. If you are lucky, they are also supported by Texthookers such as Game2Text which makes the translations and looking up things a breeze. Without those, there are quite a few Switch titles that have Furigana for quicker lookups, e.g. the newest Kirby game.
I’d suggest playing anything you’re already familiar with and really enjoyed before so it doesn’t feel like a slog and you can still get into it. When I played yakuza 0 in Japanese completely in Japanese it was hard to get into but playing it in Japanese after English was way more interesting and I was able to connect the dots between words/grammar much easier with the context already known
沙耶の唄
https://store.steampowered.com/app/753220/Mhakna_Gramura_and_Fairy_Bell/ has toggleable JP & English
https://drdru.github.io/stories/twc_save_aryn/01_intro.html is an RPG-style graded reader, that a user here made
I liked old GBA games cuz you can play them on your phone. I’ve always thought that the Hamtaro games would make the perfect Japanese learning game. Its a ‘puzzle adventure’ game where you have[a dictionary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzASOr98NvI) in the game, and you interact with the world using [‘hamgo’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM7XYhfPPmM) (Basically, cool made up slang, which is why the game has a dictionary)