While it was a while ago, I’ve played Stardew Valley a bit, and didn’t notice anything unnatural about the translations, except for when the English would also be unnatural (quirky characters). Like anything else, they seem to have bugs here and there, but it seems to be either typos or missing text. PLAYISM’s main thing is Japanese localization and distribution afaict, and they’ve been doing it since 2011. So I’m really skeptical that they’d be using machine translation.
In any case, I think the biggest benefit from the game is the immense vocabulary - which you can also get from the Japanese Stardew Valley Wiki
Echoing the sentiment that tracking video games would be a lovely addition to the site. Happy to read that it’s already on the backlog.
I’ve recently been playing ファミコン探偵倶楽部 remakes for the Switch: 消えた後継者 and うしろに立つ少女. These are really good remakes of the original NES games from 1988 and 1989 – full furigana, message log with replayable audio and voice acting even for the protagonist make these first two games super approachable.
35 years after the originals, Nintendo just recently released the third part in the series, 笑み男, a month ago. Supposedly it is much darker in tone than anyone expected from Nintendo – maybe explaining why they dropped furigana for this title.
After finishing 笑み男, I’m going to finally dip into バディミッション BOND after hunting down a physical copy from Japan last year. It has this excellent “playable manga” vibe. There’s full voice acting but only some words get furigana.
Another really good Switch game for beginners that I didn’t see mentioned yet would be アナザーコードリコレクション. This is a remake of two games, a DS game called Another Code: Two Memories and a Wii sequel called Another Code: R (never released in USA). Full voice acting, furigana, and a message log here as well.
Game Gengo did a whole video on it when it was released earlier this year:
The game varies but you often need to pick up words from the page and put them into a different sentence. Because it’s a kid’s picture book, the sentences are quite simple.
I finally finished! I’m going to write up a proper sending-off post in the What are you playing thread, but I can at least write my thoughts here relatively quickly. I think I want to go with somewhere in the first half of the 20s for level; the amount and variety of vocab is not great, and after you go through the opening + a week or two of in-game playing, the vast majority of the text is going to be very formulaic and standard. By the end I was all but skipping textboxes since I knew what key words to look for and didn’t need to re-read the same message I’d already seen tens of times before that.
No furigana (of course), and pixelated kanji may have you scratching your head at times. How the game chooses to simplify or abbreviate information could be an issue for players, but that’s as much a game issue as a language one, imo.
I’d be happy to make this a wiki, but I’m not sure how. Do you have to have Regular status?
it’s just asking Brandon to do it, though I’m not sure if it’s still relevant since it became a wiki in another topic 
