A lot of retro games aren't great for learning japanese at a certain level because they're either:>only in hiragana>have kanji but the font makes them extremely hard to readWhich is unfortunate because I started learning to play games like the MOTHER series in their original language but those games are fully in hiragana (as far as i can tell) which is imo hard to read.Newer games have all these fancy features like furigana toggles and voice acting but I'm partial to retro.I'm wondering if any of you have experience playing retro vidya as a jp learner and if you have any recs for immersing.
>>12436845Macarthur fucked up by not imposing Romāji
>>12436845>I'm wondering if any of you have experience playing retro vidya as a jp learner and if you have any recs for immersing.Ive played like 200 RPGs in japanese and my recommendation is just play as much as possible. The more you play the easier the kana only gets and the easier the low res kanji is to read. There is no silver bullet, if you spend the time you see results.
>>12436851Not op, but how did you handle learning words while reading? Did you learn a bunch of them before playing, or just learned them while you played and looked them up? And if you did learn them as you played, do you have an online resource or specific dictionary that you would recommend as a companion while playing?
>>12436848lol>>12436851>Ive played like 200 RPGs in japaneseI fucking kneel.>The more you play the easier the kana only gets and the easier the low res kanji is to read. There is no silver bullet, if you spend the time you see results.The worst part about the low-res kanji blobs is I can't even look them up half the timeBut yea I should just dive in I guess. But out of those 200 RPGs you played can you think of any more beginner-friendly ones offhand?
I forgot about the jp scripts you can find online for a lot of games though so I'm probably just bitching about nothing
>>12436856>Did you learn a bunch of them before playingwhenever I started learning japanese years ago I basically just did the anki core 12k or whatever the DJT recommended deck was and read manga. I cant remember the exact timeline but a while after that I would play japanese games I previously played in english so the stakes were lower and I wouldnt get stuck not knowing where to go. There were times where I would also transcribe everything id see on screen just for practice, all while still doing flash cards, I personally gravitated towards the 常用漢字 decks and read the common words that used each kanji. for a dictionary I just use https://jisho.org/ mostly because I like the kanji lookup because it lets you sort by radical. Learning radicals early is important to help you to look up kanji. >>12436862>But out of those 200 RPGs you played can you think of any more beginner-friendly ones offhand?You mentioned it in the OP but the presence of furigana + voice acting is just infinitely easier for understanding. If you are really struggling to get through an older game you can start with something newer but dont be afraid to spend 90% of your playtime in the dictionary. I just see it as studying. I cant recommend any specific game but if youre playing on emulator I like to have emulation pause hotkeyed so you can make sure fast moving text doesnt pass you by.
>>12436845Magic Knight Rayearth (Saturn), Tales of Phantasia, Lunar (Sega-CD), Kita He, TokiMemo 1 & 2 and FF6 are all games I managed to complete in JP with Kanji and a pretty big, easily readable font.If you're a beginner I recommend avoiding hiragana only games, so pretty much anything prior to SFC and handled systems before the DS. You should get used to read Kanji and, first and foremost, learn more vocabulary
>>12436893>>12436903You guys are great. Thank you.
Just play games from PS1 onward. Those usually have high res fonts and a fair amount of kanji. Later on, you can come back to 8/16-bit games and realize it wasn't so bad after all.
Super Robot Wars at least starting from SRW3 has kanji
>>12436845Mother 3 is literally the reason I started learning Japanese. Breath of Fire II and that Tenchi Muyo game on SNES were the last games I played in Japanese. I also tried playing one of the Saburo Jinguji games on PSX because a friend of mine who's into the series and was curious about those games wanted my help with them, but it was a bit dense for me. I never got too good at the language despite all my years studying it.I'm not sure what to recommend for a learner, but I think there's a lot of visual novel type games on PSX/2 if you're into that.
>>12437106Yea that's probably for the best although some of the recs from here >>12436903 like tokimeki look finewtf is that pic Lol>>12437124Looks like the PS version has voice acting too! Nice>>12437138>Mother 3 is literally the reason I started learning Japanese.Same for me at least one of the reasons. Did you finish it because I'm considering just dealing with the kana for MOTHER 2/3.Breath of Fire II's text looks fine so ill keep that in mind too.>visual novel type games on PSX/2I guess there's a shitton on the ps2 at least. Never knew that.
>>12437234>wtf is that pic LolSome 8-bit games use 8x8 kanji as a way to troll foreigners.
>>12437271imagine being the guy that designs new typefaces in japanese or chinesethey're either in it for the love of the job or there's a method that makes it not miserable
>>12436845>A lot of retro games aren't great for learning japanese at a certain levelThe real truth is that all Japanese native media is "not great" for learning Japanese, because Japanese creators do not care about what JSLs think. They make things with the expectation that native JP speakers are engaging with it, regardless of their age.No one "writes down" to JSLs. When they do "write down" to younger readers, it is usually in ways that are not a help at all to JSLs, again, because of the expectation as to who is engaging with it.So, when you fire up an episode of imouto-core anime like Pretty Cure and hear words such as 汚名返上 (freq: 48k+) or 燻り出す (freq: so low it isn't measured), or when you're playing Pokemon and bump into 水夫 (freq: 30k+), or when you're reading LNs aimed at younger readers and see something like 泡沫 (freq: 32k+), they don't care, because the writers are expecting the younger audience to either intuit the meaning based on context, or to have already heard this word somewhere before, or to ask their parents/older siblings/dog/whoever.When they bump into grammar elements (lol) like がてら, or びる (as in 大人びた and similar), or すら, they don't stop and think "holy shit N1 grammar, not bothering with THAT shit", again defaulting to either intuition, prior knowledge, or asking someone wiser for advice.Your only choice is >>12436851, just keep reading, listening, playing. There is no quick or easy way that this stuff becomes second nature to you except to steep in it as much as possible.
>>12437234>Looks like the PS version has voice acting too! NiceYeah starting from SRW F on Saturn they started getting voice acting due to CD audio but it's only really during the attack animations, or specific cutscenes, all the long story dialogue text dump in the game are without voice acting
