Hi. I’m looking for some good games to play in japanese to get listening, and reading practice. Any suggestions? My current japanese level is high n5 or low n4
I can recommend Animal Crossing on switch. You can engage in as much dialogue as you want and you won’t be slowed down by not knowing something. And there is furigana.
for N5 or N4 I’d recommend
​
Lugi’s Mansion 3
Paper Mario Origami King
Monster Hunter Stories 2
​
(All on switch)
Project Sekai has a ton of fully voiced visual novel style story content. Though it might be a little harder than N4.
Yeah, Animal Crossing is a great suggestion. I’d recommend starting in English, but then once you move to daily routines, switch to Japanese. In the early game, there’s a lot of text and you’ll want to get your bearings before you can comfortably control how much language you want to engage with.
Aside from that, you can change the language for even action games to absorb a little general game and settings language. Any text-heavy game is going to be a slog, so if you do decide to go for something like an RPG eventually, I would recommend playing it in English first so that you can go in with some basic familiarity and not feel the rush to drive the story forward.
When you eventually feel ready for a bigger game, I recommend Chrono Trigger because all three scripts (two English and the original Japanese) are readily available online, and the game is available for purchase on PC, mobile devices, and even stuff like the Fire TV.
Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan
Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening wasn’t too bad if I recall. There was a couple parts i was iffy on at N4, but the text is sparse enough that it didn’t hurt my enjoyment.
There’s no voice acting, but Dragon Quest 5 would be my recommendation. The language is on the simple side and the actual story isn’t complex either.
Yokai Watch games are very fun (and imo better) Pokémon-like experiences with basic vocabulary and furigana.
Ghost of Tsushima
Dragon quest 11, if you search dq 11 セリフ you will also find all of the game dialogues for the main story. Pokemon arceus, pokemon violet/scarlet, digimon and pokemon mistery dungeon find team dx. Also, as others have said, zelda and animal crossing. They all have furigana, so it’s easy to search the words in a dictionary.
Also, a favorite of mine, albeit harder than the others but has all japanese text and dialogues in the game available on a site, is fire emblem three houses. The site is: https://houses.fedatamine.com/en-us/
Youkai Watch, Pokemon Games, Animal Crossing
I learned a lot by playing Phoenix Wright games but “high N5” isn’t going to take you much further than action games with incidental text most likely.
FFXIV, you’ll never run out of content
not sure what N4/5 is but if you like visual novels i’d reccomend your turn to die
I’m around the same level and am enjoying Story of Seasons: A wonderful life on Nintendo switch. It is only out in japanese right now. There is no furigana or voice acting, but the language is all very slice of life everyday kind of stuff, and the characters repeat themselves a lot
Check game gengo’s channel
Games I’ve played in Japanese with language difficulty and fun rankings/10 in no particular order:
* Shenmue – 5/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun * Shenmue II – 6/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun (slightly harder due to a Chinese location) * Ni no Kuni – 3/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun (has furigana) * Ni no Kuni II (currently playing) – 5/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun (no furigana this time around) * Paper Mario Origami King (currently playing) – 6/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun (harder than one may think due to slang/abundant use of kana in lieu of kanji) * Eternal Arcadia (Skies of Arcadia in the West) – 4/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun * Ghost of Tsushima – 8/10 difficulty, 9/10 fun * Boku no Natsuyasumi – 4/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun * Boku no Natsuyasumi 3 (currently playing) – 4/10 difficuluty, 7/10 fun * Trusty Bell (Eternal Sonata in the West – currently playing) – 4/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun (the font they use in this game may prove difficult) * Persona 4 Golden (currently playing) – 6/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun * Final Fantasy IX (currently playing) – 5/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun * Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monotagari (currently playing) – 4/10 difficulty, 6/10 fun
I hope this helps! Gaming is far and away my #1 source of input for Japanese and I’ve really been noticing improvements when I take the time to look things up as well as supplementing with other forms of input (grammar vids in Japanese, other Japanese youtube vids, movies, shows, written stories, etc.)
I think you’re gonna struggle with just about anything at that level but it’s definitely worth trying something you might enjoy. As long as you don’t let it discourage your progress, learning a language is a long journey.
I found Persona 4 on Vita to be fun because you can press select (If I remember correctly) during dialog scenes to see previous dialog messages and replay the audio. So you can use that as listening practice as well as reading practice. It’s slice of life to some degree, although the police investigation and game-universe lore is not going to be easy vocab. It also helped that I’d played the game something like 6 years ago, so I at least remembered some story beats.
Good luck on your journey!
Oh, and by the way, the best platform for this is Steam. Aside from the convenience of the Steam Deck, you can change the language settings on a per game basis while PS5 and Switch often require a system language change.
Rather than a specific game, I recommend replaying any of your favorite games you know really well. If you already know the outline of the story it makes it a lot easier to learn new words and phrases by inference, and you don’t have to worry about getting lost.
On the switch, if you like rhythm games, check out Taiko no Tatsujin Rhythm Adventure if it’s on sale. Fun and easy since the story is aimed at kids. There is no furigana but it uses a lot of hiragana and new kanji gets introduced periodically. There are also lots of different characters with different speaking patterns so that’s good practice too. (Edit: there’s only voice acting in some lines in the story for dramatic effect so it isn’t good for listening practice)
Also if you have a DS that can run roms or an emulator, ‘ukkari wo nakusou: yomitore’ is a reaaaalllyy good reading training game that helps with reading comprehension and even onomatopoeia
If you like reading I suggest you go with visual novel. It’s like a novel but you read it in a computer game. Sometimes there are visuals and music in it to enhance the story. All you have to do is press next to read them
It’s not as difficult as a novel, you can take as much time as you like searching for dictionary etc when reading. You can even “hook” them to some special software so that you can automatically Translate it to English or just make it copiable to google translate yourself.
My first ever VN is Narcissu, downloadable from Steam and it’s free. If you like anime, you might be familiar with some of them that were adapted from VN such as Steins Gate, Higurashi, Fate Stay Night, Clannad etc.
Does anybody know daganronpa’s approximate difficulty?
The new Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have furigana! But in general pokemon is marketed for kids so the sentences are always easy to read
For listening I like Persona 5
Tokimeki Memorial. Tim Rogers has a 5+ hour review of the game on his channel “Action Button”.
I am also as the same level and recently purchased the Shinchan game for switch. It’s not super easy but there is furigana. The game is also super slow paced. There is no voice acting.
I figure learning about the level your at will increase your chances at getting better. However I find it’s a lot of “dictionary / translation” grind.
If you can stomach the guy – there is a YouTube channel called game gengo and he offers a switch specific video on his suggestions for practicing / learning through video games. He’s a huge geek though so it’s easier to just view his conclusion.
Doki Doki Literature Club
I recommend the whole 逆転裁判 series ( Ace Attorney ). Don’t worry about not understanding at first. Just dive in. I started playing those games when I could only inderstand about 15-20% of the language they used. By the time I was playing the 3rd game in the series I’d learn most of the regular legal jargon vocabulary and loads of other cool, fun and useful stuff. The desire to understand the mystery pushes you to trying to understand more and more. Great games for motivating language learning!
pokemon games are pretty easy. I think I was N5 to N4 the first time I played one. I think it was one of the originals though, like red or blue. That or the next generation.
The dialogue is pretty short in the game so it isn’t as good as translating readers/manga/books, but it does familiarize the gaming vocab and kanji.
​
More like it burns them into your brain.
I’ve been practicing with the Inazuma Eleven game series, on Nintendo or emulators. There’s even a new one coming out this year
I found Zelda: Link to the Past to have the most simple and understandable vocabulary. Since Star Fox 64 helped me learn reading English as a toddler with its spoken dialog matching it’s written, I imagine it would be similarly helpful for learning Japanese. Bomber Man 64 (Called Baku Bomberman there) has furigana (Hiragana spelling of the Kanji on top of them).
Besides that, Zelda: Ocarina of Time ain’t too bad either. Pokemon, maybe Final Fantasy 7, which both have “Learning Japanese with Pokemon/FF7” series on Youtube.
You should play undertale in japanese language mode. It still kept the humor and manor of the english version
Stardew Valley and the pokemon games are great!
I gotta be honest, you’re not really gonna be able to play any games in Japanese. Most of the suggestions here range from ok to just awful. I think a lot of people are just suggesting games they personally like. However I do second playing any games marketed specially for kids that use basic language. I recommend Animal Crossing but maybe play the tutorial in English first and then switch to Japanese. Animal Crossing has inconsequential dialogue, features a lot of vocab for everyday items, and it’s easy to play with low understanding. Also in steam there’s quite a few games targeted specifically for language learners that could be useful, I’ve never tried them but I think they’re worth a look.
I recently played starfox assault in Japanese thorugh emulation (am arround the same level), was quite enjoyable 🙂
I’ve been playing Pokémon shield though shield and sword have no Furigana but the two newest ones do! So I’d probably go for those
A good reading challenge would be Okami, if you can get it in Japanese.
I really liked the Japanese versions of the Famicom Detective Club games on Switch. All dialogue is fully voiced and there’s Furigana above all the kanji. If I got stuck in the game, it was pretty rare that I thought it was because I couldn’t understand something. Even if there was something I didn’t understand it was very easy to look up the work.
Just keep in mind there’s no option to swap the language in the English version. You’ll have to either buy it in the Japanese eShop or purchase the physical copy from Japan.
The Yakuza series is great, written natively in Japanese, and is based mostly in the real world, so the dialog is more natural and realistic. Also, the voice acting is incredible, and the storytelling is solid. The games are long enough for story progression and, therefore, language continuity to be a factor too. Absolute gold for learning.
Definitely Ryu Ga Gotoku! The most entertaining is Yakuza 0
I am currently playing cyberpunk 2077 in Japanese and it’s a great experience. My method is to take a pic of the subtitles with my phone and pause the game to read them and look up anything I don’t know before I listen to whatever they say. This is overwhelming and draining at times but you learn faster than you think. Here‘s just a random snippet of a dialogue that I ran into yesterday:
I had to look up about 5 words to understand this, mainly nouns. If you‘re in a similar boat, maybe give it a try. If the grammar itself is beyond your level though, it will be way too hard. I don’t use the N-scale so I have no idea how much of the basic grammar you have down at low n4.
13 sentinels is just the best.
The game 牧場物語再会のミネラルタウン (Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town) is available on switch and PC. Only characters’ speech are written with furigana so you’ll have lots of kanji practice when reading the in game instructions and item descriptions. Just check the [screenshots](https://imgur.com/a/Ku0xm52) and see for yourself.
Atelier series maybe (just saying it because I didn’t see any mentioning).
I personally love playing Borderlands games in Japanese. Especially Borderlands 3 since the Japanese voice cast is actually very nice to listen to like Tyrene not only sounds good but very cute and funny too in Japanese.
Also in Borderlands 1 where you fight bunch of claptraps they say hilarious lines like “りんごみたいに剥いてやる！” still in my head but characters don’t have their southern accents anymore so listening to some may be strange.
DANGANRONPAAAAA!!
It’s all text based but i mean c’mon.
I do really recommend mario 64 since it uses relatively easy japanese and at the same time is really fun to play since the Japanese version is already far superior than the english or Europe versions
Entire Yakuza Series plus the spinoffs like Judgment and Lost Judgment
47 comments
I can recommend Animal Crossing on switch. You can engage in as much dialogue as you want and you won’t be slowed down by not knowing something. And there is furigana.
for N5 or N4 I’d recommend
​
Lugi’s Mansion 3
Paper Mario Origami King
Monster Hunter Stories 2
​
(All on switch)
Project Sekai has a ton of fully voiced visual novel style story content. Though it might be a little harder than N4.
Yeah, Animal Crossing is a great suggestion. I’d recommend starting in English, but then once you move to daily routines, switch to Japanese. In the early game, there’s a lot of text and you’ll want to get your bearings before you can comfortably control how much language you want to engage with.
Aside from that, you can change the language for even action games to absorb a little general game and settings language. Any text-heavy game is going to be a slog, so if you do decide to go for something like an RPG eventually, I would recommend playing it in English first so that you can go in with some basic familiarity and not feel the rush to drive the story forward.
When you eventually feel ready for a bigger game, I recommend Chrono Trigger because all three scripts (two English and the original Japanese) are readily available online, and the game is available for purchase on PC, mobile devices, and even stuff like the Fire TV.
Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan
Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening wasn’t too bad if I recall. There was a couple parts i was iffy on at N4, but the text is sparse enough that it didn’t hurt my enjoyment.
There’s no voice acting, but Dragon Quest 5 would be my recommendation. The language is on the simple side and the actual story isn’t complex either.
Yokai Watch games are very fun (and imo better) Pokémon-like experiences with basic vocabulary and furigana.
Ghost of Tsushima
Dragon quest 11, if you search dq 11 セリフ you will also find all of the game dialogues for the main story.
Pokemon arceus, pokemon violet/scarlet, digimon and pokemon mistery dungeon find team dx.
Also, as others have said, zelda and animal crossing.
They all have furigana, so it’s easy to search the words in a dictionary.
Also, a favorite of mine, albeit harder than the others but has all japanese text and dialogues in the game available on a site, is fire emblem three houses.
The site is: https://houses.fedatamine.com/en-us/
Youkai Watch, Pokemon Games, Animal Crossing
I learned a lot by playing Phoenix Wright games but “high N5” isn’t going to take you much further than action games with incidental text most likely.
FFXIV, you’ll never run out of content
not sure what N4/5 is but if you like visual novels i’d reccomend your turn to die
I’m around the same level and am enjoying Story of Seasons: A wonderful life on Nintendo switch. It is only out in japanese right now. There is no furigana or voice acting, but the language is all very slice of life everyday kind of stuff, and the characters repeat themselves a lot
Check game gengo’s channel
Games I’ve played in Japanese with language difficulty and fun rankings/10 in no particular order:
* Shenmue – 5/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun
* Shenmue II – 6/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun (slightly harder due to a Chinese location)
* Ni no Kuni – 3/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun (has furigana)
* Ni no Kuni II (currently playing) – 5/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun (no furigana this time around)
* Paper Mario Origami King (currently playing) – 6/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun (harder than one may think due to slang/abundant use of kana in lieu of kanji)
* Eternal Arcadia (Skies of Arcadia in the West) – 4/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun
* Ghost of Tsushima – 8/10 difficulty, 9/10 fun
* Boku no Natsuyasumi – 4/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun
* Boku no Natsuyasumi 3 (currently playing) – 4/10 difficuluty, 7/10 fun
* Trusty Bell (Eternal Sonata in the West – currently playing) – 4/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun (the font they use in this game may prove difficult)
* Persona 4 Golden (currently playing) – 6/10 difficulty, 8/10 fun
* Final Fantasy IX (currently playing) – 5/10 difficulty, 7/10 fun
* Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monotagari (currently playing) – 4/10 difficulty, 6/10 fun
I hope this helps! Gaming is far and away my #1 source of input for Japanese and I’ve really been noticing improvements when I take the time to look things up as well as supplementing with other forms of input (grammar vids in Japanese, other Japanese youtube vids, movies, shows, written stories, etc.)
I think you’re gonna struggle with just about anything at that level but it’s definitely worth trying something you might enjoy. As long as you don’t let it discourage your progress, learning a language is a long journey.
I found Persona 4 on Vita to be fun because you can press select (If I remember correctly) during dialog scenes to see previous dialog messages and replay the audio. So you can use that as listening practice as well as reading practice. It’s slice of life to some degree, although the police investigation and game-universe lore is not going to be easy vocab. It also helped that I’d played the game something like 6 years ago, so I at least remembered some story beats.
Good luck on your journey!
Oh, and by the way, the best platform for this is Steam. Aside from the convenience of the Steam Deck, you can change the language settings on a per game basis while PS5 and Switch often require a system language change.
Rather than a specific game, I recommend replaying any of your favorite games you know really well. If you already know the outline of the story it makes it a lot easier to learn new words and phrases by inference, and you don’t have to worry about getting lost.
On the switch, if you like rhythm games, check out Taiko no Tatsujin Rhythm Adventure if it’s on sale. Fun and easy since the story is aimed at kids. There is no furigana but it uses a lot of hiragana and new kanji gets introduced periodically. There are also lots of different characters with different speaking patterns so that’s good practice too. (Edit: there’s only voice acting in some lines in the story for dramatic effect so it isn’t good for listening practice)
Also if you have a DS that can run roms or an emulator, ‘ukkari wo nakusou: yomitore’ is a reaaaalllyy good reading training game that helps with reading comprehension and even onomatopoeia
If you like reading I suggest you go with visual novel. It’s like a novel but you read it in a computer game. Sometimes there are visuals and music in it to enhance the story. All you have to do is press next to read them
It’s not as difficult as a novel, you can take as much time as you like searching for dictionary etc when reading. You can even “hook” them to some special software so that you can automatically Translate it to English or just make it copiable to google translate yourself.
My first ever VN is Narcissu, downloadable from Steam and it’s free. If you like anime, you might be familiar with some of them that were adapted from VN such as Steins Gate, Higurashi, Fate Stay Night, Clannad etc.
Does anybody know daganronpa’s approximate difficulty?
The new Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have furigana! But in general pokemon is marketed for kids so the sentences are always easy to read
For listening I like Persona 5
Tokimeki Memorial. Tim Rogers has a 5+ hour review of the game on his channel “Action Button”.
I am also as the same level and recently purchased the Shinchan game for switch. It’s not super easy but there is furigana. The game is also super slow paced. There is no voice acting.
I figure learning about the level your at will increase your chances at getting better. However I find it’s a lot of “dictionary / translation” grind.
If you can stomach the guy – there is a YouTube channel called game gengo and he offers a switch specific video on his suggestions for practicing / learning through video games. He’s a huge geek though so it’s easier to just view his conclusion.
Doki Doki Literature Club
I recommend the whole 逆転裁判 series ( Ace Attorney ). Don’t worry about not understanding at first. Just dive in. I started playing those games when I could only inderstand about 15-20% of the language they used. By the time I was playing the 3rd game in the series I’d learn most of the regular legal jargon vocabulary and loads of other cool, fun and useful stuff. The desire to understand the mystery pushes you to trying to understand more and more. Great games for motivating language learning!
pokemon games are pretty easy. I think I was N5 to N4 the first time I played one. I think it was one of the originals though, like red or blue. That or the next generation.
The dialogue is pretty short in the game so it isn’t as good as translating readers/manga/books, but it does familiarize the gaming vocab and kanji.
​
More like it burns them into your brain.
I’ve been practicing with the Inazuma Eleven game series, on Nintendo or emulators. There’s even a new one coming out this year
I found Zelda: Link to the Past to have the most simple and understandable vocabulary. Since Star Fox 64 helped me learn reading English as a toddler with its spoken dialog matching it’s written, I imagine it would be similarly helpful for learning Japanese. Bomber Man 64 (Called Baku Bomberman there) has furigana (Hiragana spelling of the Kanji on top of them).
Besides that, Zelda: Ocarina of Time ain’t too bad either. Pokemon, maybe Final Fantasy 7, which both have “Learning Japanese with Pokemon/FF7” series on Youtube.
You should play undertale in japanese language mode. It still kept the humor and manor of the english version
Stardew Valley and the pokemon games are great!
I gotta be honest, you’re not really gonna be able to play any games in Japanese. Most of the suggestions here range from ok to just awful. I think a lot of people are just suggesting games they personally like. However I do second playing any games marketed specially for kids that use basic language. I recommend Animal Crossing but maybe play the tutorial in English first and then switch to Japanese. Animal Crossing has inconsequential dialogue, features a lot of vocab for everyday items, and it’s easy to play with low understanding. Also in steam there’s quite a few games targeted specifically for language learners that could be useful, I’ve never tried them but I think they’re worth a look.
I recently played starfox assault in Japanese thorugh emulation (am arround the same level), was quite enjoyable 🙂
I’ve been playing Pokémon shield though shield and sword have no Furigana but the two newest ones do! So I’d probably go for those
A good reading challenge would be Okami, if you can get it in Japanese.
I really liked the Japanese versions of the Famicom Detective Club games on Switch. All dialogue is fully voiced and there’s Furigana above all the kanji. If I got stuck in the game, it was pretty rare that I thought it was because I couldn’t understand something. Even if there was something I didn’t understand it was very easy to look up the work.
Just keep in mind there’s no option to swap the language in the English version. You’ll have to either buy it in the Japanese eShop or purchase the physical copy from Japan.
The Yakuza series is great, written natively in Japanese, and is based mostly in the real world, so the dialog is more natural and realistic. Also, the voice acting is incredible, and the storytelling is solid. The games are long enough for story progression and, therefore, language continuity to be a factor too. Absolute gold for learning.
Definitely Ryu Ga Gotoku! The most entertaining is Yakuza 0
I am currently playing cyberpunk 2077 in Japanese and it’s a great experience. My method is to take a pic of the subtitles with my phone and pause the game to read them and look up anything I don’t know before I listen to whatever they say. This is overwhelming and draining at times but you learn faster than you think. Here‘s just a random snippet of a dialogue that I ran into yesterday:
Policeman: 普通、街に来たら、まずは保安官に挨拶…一般常識だろ？コーヒーでも飲みながら、何しに来たのかを話すもんだ。
Player: 悪かったね。ここに寄るつもりはなかったの。(車は)故障したから仕方なくて。
Policeman:「仕方なく」ね。よく聞く言葉だな…前の戦争じゃ、特殊部隊にいた。“シルバーショーグン”に聞き覚えは？
I had to look up about 5 words to understand this, mainly nouns. If you‘re in a similar boat, maybe give it a try. If the grammar itself is beyond your level though, it will be way too hard. I don’t use the N-scale so I have no idea how much of the basic grammar you have down at low n4.
13 sentinels is just the best.
The game 牧場物語再会のミネラルタウン (Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town) is available on switch and PC. Only characters’ speech are written with furigana so you’ll have lots of kanji practice when reading the in game instructions and item descriptions. Just check the [screenshots](https://imgur.com/a/Ku0xm52) and see for yourself.
Atelier series maybe (just saying it because I didn’t see any mentioning).
I personally love playing Borderlands games in Japanese. Especially Borderlands 3 since the Japanese voice cast is actually very nice to listen to like Tyrene not only sounds good but very cute and funny too in Japanese.
Also in Borderlands 1 where you fight bunch of claptraps they say hilarious lines like “りんごみたいに剥いてやる！” still in my head but characters don’t have their southern accents anymore so listening to some may be strange.
DANGANRONPAAAAA!!
It’s all text based but i mean c’mon.
I do really recommend mario 64 since it uses relatively easy japanese and at the same time is really fun to play since the Japanese version is already far superior than the english or Europe versions
Entire Yakuza Series plus the spinoffs like Judgment and Lost Judgment
Triangle strategy