I’m gonna preface this by saying that my Japanese is pretty bad. I’m on level 33 on Wanikani and around the first quarter of N2 on Bunpro. I can read most news articles on NHK Easy, but reading even relatively simple manga like Yotsuba requires using a dictionary.
I’ve seen a lot of threads asking for what games to play in Japanese and I think I just found an ultimate genre to practice if your language knowledge is still relatively low. Card games! They usually have little to no meaningful story that you have to keep track of, and the vocabulary is quite simple (you just have to know words like 敵、味方、与える、得る etc), but at the same time, they require pretty precise translation (e.g. カードをすてていれば and カードを捨てれば are different conditions).
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If you like card games I really recommend trying something like Slay the Spire or Wildfrost in Japanese. As I’ve said, my Japanese is pretty bad, but to my huge surprise, I managed to understand almost everything while playing these games even though I never played Wildfrost in English before.
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Everyone likes STS, and I’ve been really liking wildfrost as well so might try that. If you wanna go that route you might also like six-sided-oracle, which also has a JP translation.
The drawback is, I think those games were translated into Japanese. They weren’t first in Japanese. You might want to play games which were written in Japanese at first.
I think セリフ集 (script collection) is a really good option. What this is is the text of a JRPG (or maybe some other game). You just read the text in your browser with yomichan. It’s like reading a book.
I also had ok luck translating some basic trailers (the class trailers for etrian odyssey), these have a lot of “rules-like” words you’d see probably in a card game.
Other than that I had decent luck playing JRPG which I had already played a lot of times in ENG. Such as Final Fantasy V.
Play Persona 5 in Japanese. You get to live a virtual life in Japan, interact with characters with subtitles and enjoy a good game. Royal version adds a lot of content so that version is best.
I’ve been really enjoying playing Pokémon Scarlet in Japanese. Because it’s aimed at children, it has word spacing, the kanji has furigana, you can take as much time as you need to read. It’s also got a pretty decent word selection.
I’m a bit lower level, just practicing for N3 and I like action adventure games, like Kingdom Hearts or Zelda for a specific reason. During cutscenes or dialogue, I spend a lot of time looking up translations and Kanji to build an anki deck, so it might take 5x longer to get through the cutscenes. Then I get to rest my brain and have fun for a bit just running around and mashing monsters for a while.
As someone who has trouble focusing and sitting down to properly study, this method has helped me balance by making it shorter bursts of studying and little fun breaks.
Project zomboid, Minecraft, and animal crossing helped me learn Spanish very comfortably. Sandbox games are helpful with language learning.These games have Japanese too and it helps with vocab without you having to worry about understanding a story.