Hi, like some people aroud I'm learning japanese also to play videogames.

I'd like you to post your suggestions.
Let this list be a list of useful games, not just good games.
For instance fight games are kinda useless to learn japanese, so please dont post them here.

Here are mine, both are for Sony PS2:

真女神転生　3 - nocturne
Shin Megami Tensei 3 - nocturne

Old school RPG. You go around talking with everybody to find your way trough the game. This game is sorta like a pokemon that gone wrong, where you catch demons in a post-apocaliptical tokyo instead of cute little animals.
There is no furigana but japanese in it is not so hard to understand. Also places have english names, for instance: 新宿衛生病院, shinjiku medical hospital

大神
Ookami

Adventure RPG. You go around talking with everybody to find your way trough the game.
In this game you are amaterasu the sun god in medieval japan. There is a monster that is taking over the country and you have to purify the country. The story is a comedy and the game is very beautiful (I think maybe it is the most good looking game of PS2).

Right now I'm working my way through some of the various Touhou games. They are basically side scrolling shooters that fill the screen with insane numbers of bullets, and they also happen to have a fairly deep storyline (for a shooter, at least!). Over at http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Touhou_Wiki you can find the Japanese transcripts from the games along with english translations.

Heh, a couple of years ago I bought Pokemon Diamond thinking that it would be a great game for learning Japanese. It did have a lot of simple, easy to follow text. But the thing is, the game has NO KANJI. I was actually disappointed by that fact.

Zarxrax Wrote:Heh, a couple of years ago I bought Pokemon Diamond thinking that it would be a great game for learning Japanese. It did have a lot of simple, easy to follow text. But the thing is, the game has NO KANJI. I was actually disappointed by that fact.

I like to think of it as an opportunity to learn the pronunciation of words that I might stumble over in kanji :)

But hiragana is soooo hard to understand. With kanji sometimes you can guess the meaning.
I played some old games in the emulator too. But even when there are kanji, they are so hard to read.

No one mentioned the Zelda games yet?
There are plenty of dialogues.

Kingdom Hearts final mix is a good japanese game too

The gyakuten saiban (phoenix wright) series. Great fun and looooots of text

I'm currently playing through Tales of Rebirth (PSP) and it's great. The thing that stands out for me is that all the dialog is fully voiced. The dialog definitely does have an anime type of tone to it, but this has been a great way for me to work on my listening comprehension.

I recently sold all my English-language games, and have started working on a Japanese collection. Some of my current favorites include:

ひぐらしのなく頃に祭カケラ遊び
A visual novel that is... more "novel" than "visual", but excellent for studying Japanese. One feature I really appreciate is that you can choose to repeat any part of the spoken dialogue. The story can best be described as horror/mystery; if you've seen the anime, you know what to expect.

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
This is one of the best RPGs I've played in English, so I just had to get it in Japanese. I got my hands on the "Director's Cut" version, which is probably better than the regular version, but I have yet to figure out the difference between the two. Of course, being a RPG, it has plenty of dialogue, spoken as well as written.

Yeah, I wanted to recommend Visual Novels in general as well (I reeeaaally want to play Higurashi Matsuri at some point). They're incredibly useful for essentially being novels with graphics to make them more easily digestible. And the ability to scroll back through text and make the characters repeat any of their lines is pretty priceless.

Unfortunately Visual Novels as a genre are kindof similar to American Superhero comics in that they're just... squicky. Erotic fiction is prevalent, and the cleaner stuff is still often just.. degrading. If you can find stuff you like, though, it's pretty excellent.

Differences in the Director's Cut version of Star Ocean:
link

mentat_kgs Wrote:真女神転生　3 - nocturne
Shin Megami Tensei 3 - nocturne

Old school RPG. You go around talking with everybody to find your way trough the game. This game is sorta like a pokemon that gone wrong, where you catch demons in a post-apocaliptical tokyo instead of cute little animals.
There is no furigana but japanese in it is not so hard to understand. Also places have english names, for instance: 新宿衛生病院, shinjiku medical hospital

Really? 真女神転生3 was one of the first games I played in Japanese, but I found it difficult to understand at times. Demons range from all katakana speech to classical Japanese, and the human characters could be tricky sometimes as well.

But it was one of the first games I played, and years ago at that so I'm better than I was back then. I'll be playing it again when デビルサマナー葛葉ライドウ対アバドン王 is released, since a new version comes bundled with it. It'll no doubt be different this time around.

I'd still recommend it and other Atlus titles, but that's just personal bias. The main series Megaten games are usually voiceless, but side games out of the main series do sometimes feature voice acting. デジタルデビルサーガ～アバタールチューナー～ (Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, 2 games) had voice acting on key scenes, and the new ペルソナ (Persona) games (３, ３フェス, and ４) are heavy on the (rather slangy) voice acting. With most of Persona's scenes (apart from the animated cutscenes), by default the dialogue won't move forward until you press something (like older text based games), so you could easily write down any words/sentences you want.

From a comprehension standpoint, I'd second the recommendation for the Kingdom Hearts series. I found those pretty easy to understand. Wouldn't so much recommend the 'Final Mix' for the first game, since it's English voiced and presumedly we're going for Japanese here. The second game's 'Final Mix+', though, might be worth it. The main game would be voiced in English, but if you unlock it you can watch the cutscenes in Japanese in a 'Theatre Mode'. And it comes with a remake of the "Chain of Memories" game which is completely Japanese (though not full voiced, only certain scenes). All of them should be available cheaply now (if you get the Ultimate Hits).

Actually, I think a lot of things that the writer of Kingdom Hearts, 野島一成（のじまかずしげ） , has worked on are rather easy to understand. But I don't know if that was just me getting better, though. (I've certainly see plenty of people get things completely wrong, so maybe it was just me getting better.)

There is an old adventure game set in the realms of Japanese myth called "Cosmology of Kyoto" that can be found on abandonware sites. The spoken dialogue can be set to Japanese. Its a quirky game, but it might be entertaining and educational to anyone interested in the history and worldviews of old Japan. It does take patience getting used to it though.

Uhm, I'm gonna check Kingdom Hearts!

Btw, 大神 has furigana in all the text. But whow it is hard to understand!

女神転生 is troubling to understand, but the nature of the game is good, I think. It repeats a lot and soon you start to see familiar things everywhere.

MegaTen games always give me a bit of a headache, but Persona 3 and 4 are pretty good since the highschool kids talk a little more realistically, although it does get a little kanji heavy at time. 何処 showing up made me scratch my head at first.
While all hiragana, I had a blast playing Famicom Detective Club (ファミコン探偵倶楽部) that I got through the Wii's Virtual Console.
If you're in Japan, you can get a Super Famicom for a good price and get a stack of awesome RPGs for not much cash. I am playing Super Mario RPG right now and having a blast.
Sure, not all games feature kanji, but the flip side there is that words are easier to look up, and hell, it's still fun.

I think while Persona is easier (? maybe not if you're not good with casual language) to get than the other games Atlus makes, its MegaTen heritage still leaves its mark in some of the kanji choices.

If you own a PS3, there's a game/software called まいにちいっしょ (Mainichi Issho/Together Everyday). It's free to download from the Japanese store, and every day you get a little 'news report' on some topic (a new game, something happening in Japan, some new product/food, a place, etc.). It's pretty simple language, short sentences and not a high amount of kanji. (Incidentally, one of the recent features was on 死語 and 言葉のリサイクル, reusing old words that have fallen out of usage, several of which appear in Persona 4 in minor ways, like items called a food item called ビフテキ or ドロン玉 for escaping from a dungeon).

The only drawback would be that it's hosted by a couple of cats. But as long as you don't start saying にゃ or みゃ　(or the other comical sentence-enders like ピョン、ウサ、わ～ん、ロボ), it can't hurt. I think, as long as you have a basic understanding it's not too hard to pick out when they're talking like cats (にゃんだ、分かんにゃい). Unless that's going to be your trademark in Japanese.

The PS3 will also sometimes automatically adjust to what language your system is set to and change the language of the games to match. So even if you are playing an English version, you can still get some Japanese out of it. (I've only tried this with 'Resistance', which changes the text language to Japanese but the voices stay English.)

Yo, I started Persona 4. It has superb voice acting and extra points for the "engrish" in the game menu.

I'm still playing 真女神転生３. It indeed has interesting kanji choices. Yesterday I met the word 仲魔 instead of 仲間.

Lol, I'm playing persona 4 now and just got at a "ここは何処" =D

I'm playing some regular psx rpgs. I'm playing Popolocrois right now, it's kind of kiddy but the Japanese isn't too hard to understand. Since I can play it on an emulator, I have a dictionary right there whenever I want to look up something.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Yo, I started Persona 4. It has superb voice acting and extra points for the "engrish" in the game menu.

I'm still playing 真女神転生３. It indeed has interesting kanji choices. Yesterday I met the word 仲魔 instead of 仲間.

Well, 仲魔 is a pun, not a real word, I hope you know.

cracky Wrote:I'm playing some regular psx rpgs. I'm playing Popolocrois right now, it's kind of kiddy but the Japanese isn't too hard to understand. Since I can play it on an emulator, I have a dictionary right there whenever I want to look up something.

I'm not sure how that does anything but make it more annoying? I keep my DS next to me while I play games to look up words quickly. That and my computer is also only a few feet from my TV, but that's out of the fact that my apartment is how it is, haha.

I play Chrono Trigger. And any other Old School RPG I can find. I know the story so reading the Japanese is a bit more interesting.

I'm playing Chrono Trigger too. ^_^

Bringing this thread back up a bit, I started playing a game in the 探偵神宮寺三郎（たんてい・じんぐうじ・さぶろう） series (I think it's 夢の終わりに). I haven't got very far, but as far as describing simple actions it seems useful. Stuff like 'check desk' or 'pick up'. It's a long series as well, so there's titles on older consoles (there was a rerelease of the early ones for the Playstation as well), the PS and PS2, and some DS games.

It's probably something that other similar games in the adventure genre of this type have in common, so if you're not up for detectives there might be others. But I can't think of any examples right now.

I managed to find the international Final Fantasy 7. So I've started playing that with a Japanese walkthrough. It's really good because I know the story and dialog already.
http://www.ffdq.com/ff7/

Everyone knows these games so I will try to communicate their strong points.

FF7 has a lot of slang/really casual speech. It's pretty good if you want some natural dialogue (or rather, as natural as a scripted game can get). I wouldn't use it to practice reading, but rather read more casual expressions and slang.

Chrono Trigger's dialogue is much more simple overall. It's good to practice reading and learn new words from. This might be a good game to start with if your nihongo is still floating around intermediate.

I still really recomend persona. The voice acting is simply awesome.