This is a topic I have had in mind for a long time now and I’m curious how you guys deal with it…
I have tried some games with Japanese audio but mostly found it difficult to come up with the story while gaming.
Since I have a version of final fantasy which has also subtitle options I feel motivated to try it ones more.
When did you begin playing games (appr. Level) in Japanese? And what did you do when having issues at times? Did you play the game in English before or just started in Japanese from the beginning?
Since you just said Final Fantasy… Maybe you would be interested in joining this club, over at the Wanikani forums 
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Oh thank you so much! I wish this club could be within Natively as I’m no member at wani kani.
But the idea to break the conversation down to small parts is nice. Maybe a good way to practice Japanese.
Do you know if the language is manga style or based on daily life conversation?
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For what it’s worth, anyone with a WaniKani account has access to the forums. There are several people over there who joined just for the book clubs and don’t subscribe to WaniKani at all.
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I can confirm, I am one of those people. 
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Thank you guys!
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I have been (slowly) replaying the Phoenix Wright trilogy in Japanese, having played it several times in English! I haven’t got on so well with games I started for the first time in Japanese, but I don’t know if it’s the games themselves, or the increased difficulty and also slower pace when I play games in Japanese that means I haven’t got into them as much…
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I find this can make a pretty big difference.
Personally I hate starting JRPGs - between the story scenes, and all the info dumping & mechanics learning. It’s one of those things where I have to really be in the mood for it, even without language difficulty. (Idk if you’re playing those, I just happened to try one the other day cuz my friends asked me to)
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The more visual novel games are a lot easier to get into, in this respect, but there tends to be a lot more text in the long run. In one of the fully voiced games it’s nbd (for me at least), but yeah the start up on a new game is always a lot.
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That’s often true, tho visual novels really run the gamut in terms of difficulty, and some of them also have obscenely long intros, lore dumps, etc. Often times it’s a while before you even unlock the game menu (I do not understand the point of this). Full voicing definitely helps tho (even tho that usually means dialogue-only).
I played the Simoun game recently (from 2006 - half ADV, half tactics), which has essentially no onboarding and full voicing. It basically just throws you in, after a bit of intro. That was a surprisingly nice experience. But it also had the benefit of being based on an anime
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Returning to OT: btw there are usually game dialogue scripts you can find for famous RPGs (esp Final Fantasy) that will have all the lines, and sometimes translation
Idrc when I first started trying them, but basically just tried things I was already interested in playing, or had already played. Most of them were too hard, and I stopped, but probably FF12 was the first I managed to finish. I let a lot of the story go over my head at first. But I also replayed it with EN subs to get the full story.
In general I don’t think audio without text is a good way to go, unless you have a really solid vocabulary already, or it’s something easier. RPGs can be great, because you can easily make flash cards out of all the menu & mechanics stuff, and you’ll be seeing them constantly. Plus you can talk to NPCs for small dialogue that you can look up.
If you care about the story a lot, you could always watch story scenes afterwards on YouTube, or look at summaries if you don’t want to wait.
With VNs I’m kinda love/hate, bc I’m used to reading novels, so getting sentence by sentence is agonizingly slow. Otoh it’s very easy to play casually bc of that, and easy to tell if you have too many lookups.
One thing I did do was watch a GameGrammar(?) YouTube playthrough of Ace Attorney, where the guy read the lines aloud & translated them, grabbed vocab, etc. that was pretty helpful.
Also for VNs sometimes I’ll find playthroughs / 朗読 where someone reads them aloud & talks in btwn - either vtubers or normal ppl
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I’ve played a few of the more difficult games (mostly JRPGs or similar) just with the audio first time then once I know the story, I might do a replay later on in full Japanese.
I have however played some of the Pokémon games (especially Snap), several Legend of Zelda games (but I’ve either played the originals in English or know the franchise that well that I can guess what to do), ‘Little kitty, big city’, fantasy life i, yokai watch and a few others from scratch in full Japanese.
To be fair, I will go for full translation when my energy levels are high and when overwhelmed only struggle through them translating what I can and ignoring the rest as long as I get the gist of what to do.
The first one I played that I understood most of was Legend of Zelda: Link’s awakening but I know the game inside out. It’s also very repetitive in terms of the text so easy enough to follow (for me at least). I was about upper N4/ lower N3 level in terms of grammar but my vocabulary was still pretty low at the time.
I did try playing Star Wars: Fallen Order afterwards and some parts were approachable but there was a lot of translation involved for the majority of it.
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I just figured out that it’s best for me to split the languages for audio and subtitle for the best progress in respect of gaming and learning to understand the content.
The only issue before is to get games that have this option.
ChatGPT is a great source to find out or just the Internet.
Enjoy your gaming. 
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Some games yes, other games no. The first Japanese game I beat entirely in Japanese (blind) was Dragon Quest XIS and I had just accepted the ambiguity. If there was a word or grammar point I kept seeing I would look it up. But playing games, like reading, and listening takes time. I recommend reading a lot more manga or books first, but Final Fantasy is a great series for learning as well.
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Here’s a bit of hot take: Just go with a AAA game that you’d play even if it’s not for the language-learning perspective, and then set the language to Japanese.
I’ve tried to look into this as well and looking at many threads.
Everyone seems to go for games that are made in Japan.
And people fall into three categories:
- just looking for some game to play in Japanese
- people replaying games for nostalgia
- people replaying games that they’ve play recently in English (or other known language)
It only seems that the last group is the only successful one, because they actually like the game.
Nostalgia is good, but there’s reason why you haven’t played those kind of games for a long time.
To be specific, I played Diablo IV after barely passing N5.
Most importantly, I had fun.
There was no merci on the kanji and the complexity was too high, but I learned to skim subtitles while listening to audio.
Sometimes I lost track in the subtitle but was able to find the place in the subtitle based on listening.
I found that to be a great skill in combination with my reading on the side.
Also, I just want to say that I played the game in English first, where I had finished the story line.
I then tried to play with a new character, but understanding the skill text was to complex to making a proper build, so I just went back to my main character and did all the side quests.
I was rarely in doubt of what I needed to do, because there was so much hand holding.
Doing side quests was also nice because it was episodic and some were repetitive.
I hope you find what you’re looking for, and have fun.
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So far I’ve only played Touhou Luna Nights in Japanese, and that was just because the English translation was awful, so I switched to Japanese within the first 30 minutes. I guess there’s a fourth category of “why not” / “better than the other options”.
Next game I plan to play in Japanese is Transiruby. I guess that’s category one since I’m picking it solely because it’s made by a Japanese studio and it seemed like a good excuse. (I will not play a game in Japanese if that’s not the original language of the game.) I doubt the game has any voiced dialogue, so I guess it’s just more reading practice.
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Welcome in the discussion here and thanks for your opinion.
You seem to have advanced skills already that you can just switch into Japanese!
I’d say this is not entirely true. There are a bunch of games that have Japanese audio even with a separate language as a subtitle at times.
The difficulty is to figure it out before hand. I was asking ChatGPT for those games but had to ask ones more as it tends to make mistakes. As I’m not in a hurry to find one now I take one game at a time.
In Steam you have a language description for interface, audio and subtitles. There you can see if a game supports a special language which works fine if you don’t want to set different language options within the game. This might be useful for all players who are looking for games to play only in Japanese.
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I meant this game specifically since this genre rarely has fully voiced dialogue.
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Ah ok, that makes much more sense!
I started playing games in Japanese since high school, so very early on considering that was also when I started studying Japanese. Lmao
Although as other users mention, the amount of Japanese you’ll need heavily depends on the game you play. For simpler mobile games with little dialogue? You can probably get by and pick up expressions along the way with beginner Japanese to be honest. For full-fledged titles like Pokemon and more? Definitely have intermediate or upper-intermediate for enjoying the games while still learning.
My first Japanese game I played was Pokemon Black 2 on the DS, and I will say – It was a LOT harder to understand than I thought. Pokemon gets a lot of flack for being a kids’ series so naturally many people assume it must have baby speech basically. Lmao
Wrong. I had about N3-level Japanese and I was still struggling with reading and understanding the kanji terminology. It also didn’t help that was my very first game I played in Japanese, instead of going for something much easier like a free mobile game or something lmfao
However, I also learned new words and improved my reading comprehension/speed very quickly the more I plodded through it. Consistency really is key!
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