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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