I'm finding that, thanks to anime and music, I know a metric f**k ton of words that I can't read when I find 'em in books. I'm anki-ing them, but that's starting to get boring.

So specifically, I'm looking for games that have a lot of cutscenes with a subtitle feature so I can I read and listen simultaneously.

Played or will replay in Japanese:
Basically everything in the Final Fantasy line.
And Kingdom Hearts.
Persona (but didn't like it much)

As you can see I like RPG's most, but really the only requirements are that they are for PSP (or any system that can emulate on it) and give a lot of opportunities for reading and listening //simultaneously//.

サンキュウ～

The Tales Of series has several entries on the PSP with full voice; Rebirth and Destiny 2 are fully voiced (and incidentally are two of the best in the series), and I guess Phantasia and Narikiri Dungeon X are too. Eternia only has partial voice.

It you don't mind visual/sound novels, all the dialogue in the PSP versions of Umineko no Naku Koro ni & Steins;Gate is voiced.

Series of strategy games from Sting:
Yggdra Union (PSP ver.)
Blaze Union
Gloria Union
... have ~80% of the text in the game voiced (all of the main story).

銃声とダイヤモンド and 428 ~封鎖された渋谷で~ would be my recommendations. I learned a lot of cop/criminal slang through these.

Dangan Ronpa 1-2 are both excellent games for PSP that I strongly recommend. Unfortunately not all dialogue has audio, but a fairly large part of the game does so there is quite a bit of dialogue with simultaneous audio. The games themselves are also very good and worth playing anyway.

I played some Final Fantasy games in Japanese and let me tell you something, cutscenes with subtitles will not teach you to read anything new. Just too fast to remember any of the new kanji you just saw, and not enough repetition for them to stick. Because in the end it comes down to slaying monsters for an hour, then watching 5 minutes of cutscene.

If you want to improve reading, play visual novels on a computer. They're much denser in actual written content, you can govern the speed you read and listen yourself, can repeat audio, and most importantly, can look up any word instantly and at will.

RPG video games were a huge part of my Japanese practice taking me from JLPT3 to 1 level. Most of them do not have uncontrollable cutscenes where the dialogue advances automatically (like FF or Kingdom Hearts). In the majority of games I've played, you have to press a button to make the next line of dialogue appear.

I would have found VN boring at that level because the nice thing about RPGs is the balance between game and story. You can study for a while with the story, then play, then study a while more. Most modern RPGs have a lot more than "5 minutes" of story between game segments.

Yeah you're probably right yudantaiteki. I probably played the wrong games. Played FF 13 and its sequels, which mainly have dialogue during cutscenes that are basically videos. They do have some clickable dialogue, but overall I thought the material I could learn something from was very thinly spread between the gaming parts.

Still I played the danganronpa games, which were mentioned earlier in this thread, and I can't imagine myself playing that with less kanji knowledge than I had at that point. From my experience games are usually merciless in kanji usage, requiring a lot more than the jouyou. VNs (played on a PC) are just so convenient in that you can usually look up everything with a mouse click.

Playing lots of VNs got me to the point where I don't need that convenience anymore.

You just have to pick something you're interested in. You don't really "play" VNs as much as you read them, so that wouldn't be the best choice for everyone.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The Tales Of series has several entries on the PSP with full voice; Rebirth and Destiny 2 are fully voiced (and incidentally are two of the best in the series),

I think fully voiced is kind of a misnomer. They do have a lot of voice though and they're good games. I also liked Growlanser 1 and 4 which are on psp.

EDIT: The Langrisser games on psx are full voiced and you could probably run them on your psp. They're tactical rpgs though.

EDIT2: Forgot Nippon Ichi games.

The only jrpg I've found that was actually full voiced was Romancing Saga on ps2.

Well, by "fully voiced" for an RPG I mean that the story sequences are fully voiced, not the random NPC townspeople. Not all Tales games have all the story sequences fully voiced, but Rebirth and Destiny 2 do.

Oh I didn't know that. I played Rebirth and I liked it. クレアアアアアアアアアアア

apirx Wrote:If you want to improve reading, play visual novels on a computer. They're much denser in actual written content, you can govern the speed you read and listen yourself, can repeat audio, and most importantly, can look up any word instantly and at will.

It could be good advice, but alone, it is not enough to help anyone.

I found this thread on Koohii: (but probably not what most people are looking for)
Eroge / Adult Visual Novels: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=10124

I also found this website: The Visual Novel Database (vndb.org).

What I was looking for and didn't find: Recommendations of VNs for beginners (haven't played VN before).

This is offtopic quite a bit from the OP. Should I make a new thread?

On mobile, so no links. But here is what you need if you want to play VNs. You can find everything on google.

ITH (interactive text hooker), grabs the text as it runs in the game, making it selectable.

A mouse over dictionary of your choice (for outside of your internet browser, so not rikaichan), for example goldendic

As you've already found, vndb is the website to pick your novel from.

Finally VNs are as difficult as it gets language wise. But they provide voice and visual context, which makes it easy to follow even without being able to follow the text completely. They are also long.

Disclaimer: I've only played around 3 or 4 (in English, though) and I only started Majikoi in Japanese. But, I don't think grammar wise any visual novels are going to be significantly harder or easier than others - because on the whole, they're written for native speakers, who have native-level of comprehension. The main problem is vocabulary - slice of life/school related things are going to be easier to go through than ones in the sci-fi/fantasy/detective/ whatever genre.

VN OT:

apirx Wrote:ITH (interactive text hooker), grabs the text as it runs in the game, making it selectable.

A mouse over dictionary of your choice (for outside of your internet browser, so not rikaichan), for example goldendic

Or you could use Translation Aggregator. Automatic furiganization (by MeCab) and WWWJDIC lookup of every word (they don't always get parsed correctly, though).

I later switched to VnReader (it's prettier with its transparent window, and its furigana generation is better) and EBWin4 (and eventually dropped VnReader, of course), with an autohotkey script for quickly switching between the VN and the dictionary.

On VN difficulty: here's a list of the unique kanji counts (and other info) of many VNs and here's some guy's opinion of how hard the VNs he's read would be to translate (which doesn't necessarily translate to reading difficulty, but I can corroborate that White Album 2 and Mahoutsukai no Yoru ("Hard" and "Very Hard", though I might rate them the other way around) were much harder to read than Steins;Gate and Aiyoku no Eustia ("Normal"), and that the fandisc of Hoshizora no Memoria is by far the easiest thing I've ever read).

apirx Wrote:I played some Final Fantasy games in Japanese and let me tell you something, cutscenes with subtitles will not teach you to read anything new.

That hasn't been my experience at all, but I'm sorry that's been the case for you...

As for VN's I've never played them before, so I'll definitely look into them, though if what yudantaiteki said is right, I'll probably like them less. I would prefer to actually //play// a game. Is a VN exactly what is says on the tin -- an interactive book?

Note that difficulty isn't really a concern of mine. I'm not really a fan of doing all of my learning based on level of difficulty because it takes a lot of the fun out of it for me. But that's just me.

Hexerein Wrote:As for VN's I've never played them before, so I'll definitely look into them, though if what yudantaiteki said is right, I'll probably like them less. I would prefer to actually //play// a game. Is a VN exactly what is says on the tin -- an interactive book?

If it weren't for the PSP requirement, I'd recommend Baldr Sky Dive - it's got gameplay (don't know how much though).

Hexerein Wrote:As for VN's I've never played them before, so I'll definitely look into them, though if what yudantaiteki said is right, I'll probably like them less. I would prefer to actually //play// a game. Is a VN exactly what is says on the tin -- an interactive book?

Yeah. The most well known ones are probably dating sims, which I don't really play, so I can't give suggestions, but there are a lot of other types out there. There are the English translations to some short ones (for Win and Mac) here which have nice game summaries, and they link to the Japanese versions. If you want to check out VNs to see if you like them, I might start there.