Oooh, FFXIII, do want. I decided to import today, after seeing the dubbed trailer. Not keen on Serah and Vanille's voices, and hadn't realised that the dialogue changes would bother me if I understood some of the Japanese (they got from '来年もここで見よう' to 'All we need, just you and me'. Huh?). Probably need a transcript to look at before watching each cutscene, though, it'll be too fast otherwise.

I definitely think this is a great idea for people who like video games; I think that playing a bunch of RPGs really increased my reading speed and comprehension more than anything else. A lot of newer games have full voice, so that you can hear a native speaker say the line in addition to reading it -- this makes it easier to look up words that you don't know and can help your speed. Plus many games then stop until you press a button, so you have as much time as you need to look things up. (Unfortunately you usually can't get them to say the line again...)

I would not recommend this if you don't like video games because then it just becomes a chore. And as for recommendations, I would say just pick whatever game you like -- the more interested you are in the game the more likely you are to have the motivation to do it.

As people indicated, there can be a problem with some of the screens on the portable systems. The fonts used in games for the GBA and DS, for instance, sometimes squash the kanji into such small shapes that you sometimes need the context and some familiarity to even know what the shapes are supposed to represent (though having done RTK might help here if you're good with the stroke orders?) In my experience, the PSP fonts are much easier to read. (And even SNES is not generally as bad as GBA/DS.)

Perhaps the only thing to watch out for if you're still beginner/intermediate is games that automatically advance the dialogue without waiting for a button press -- this includes Xenosaga, Kingdom Hearts, and the PS2 Final Fantasies (IIRC), at least.

Of course, if you want to find out the readability of a font, nicovideo is a good place to go (or youtube, but they might not have the JP versions easily findable.)

(Also, this method won't work if you have no grammatical basis in the language, since you can't use dictionaries to parse kana strings or look up casual speech/conjugations -- this is true of use of any native materials, though.)

Some have probably seen it, but here's a Polish man's success story with learning English, thanks in part to playing an RPG.

http://www.antimoon.com/learners/tomasz_szynalski.htm

and the link to the article about adventure games

http://www.antimoon.com/how/advgames.htm

The antimoon site has a lot of great advice for people who are at the point where the antimoon guys were when they started -- i.e. you know a fair amount about Japanese grammar from textbooks or classes but you're still not really able to tackle native texts without help. (That's the only small issue I have with the antimoon site; I think on the whole their advice and method is very good, but they don't really make it clear that it won't work for complete beginners, although if you read between the lines you can see that they implicitly acknowledge that.)

One addition thing from the original post:

Quote:4. You get a feeling for nuances like ~ませぬ instead of ~ません, じゃね~ instead of じゃない, who uses them and what they communicate.

While this is definitely true, you have to be somewhat careful with this. Anime and video games tend to use exaggerated versions of real life speech to delineate character. So you can definitely get a good idea of how speech styles are perceived and used, but you should not expect that people in real life will talk exactly like that.

Hopefully it's become common knowledge to get experience from multiple sources (TV, Movies, Games, Books, Manga) and genres (Comedy, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Dramas) in various areas of life (School, College, Home, Work, Hospital, Military, etc).

Anyway, adding a bit more to this thread, I looked for more Adventure Game types on the SNES. These are more puzzle/mystery type games though interactive novel is close description too. Here's a couple I looked at that are just straight interactive novels:

Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi
Famicon Tantei Club 2 - Ushiro ni Tatsu Syojyo

So you read the story, see the pictures move a bit, sometimes make a choice, occasionally get your throat cut. Good times.

Stephen Krashen (I guess he is a researcher) wrote a short article titled "88 Generalizations About Free Voluntary Reading." Read it here:
http://www.sdkrashen.com/handouts/88Gene...index.html

"more reading > read faster"
This idea of playing videogames seems like a good idea. Any reading at all, I think, will help you read faster though.

Keeping in the vein of recommending good games, I've found one that has both a large amount of voice acting and a large amount of reading:
Tales of Rebirth (PSP/PS2)
English wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_rebirth
in Japanese: テイルズ オブ リバース

I've only played about 4 hours and there is a bit of fighting, but there is a TON of voice acting, and it's easy to understand what to do next. The thing I really like about it is the there are set voice acting bits, but in your travel time you can also press select and your characters will talk about what is going on in the story line- like you're just eavesdropping on random conversations. They will eventually run out of things to say but the last conversation can be repeated over and over, and it will tell you what you need to do. The amount of reading you can do (through the "Battle Book") is very large- and almost too much for me at times. It's optional however- basically explaining how the game works.

Here's a better explanation from the wiki:

wiki Wrote:"Skits" can be triggered by the player under certain story-based conditions in the town and dungeon screens. A skit involves animated images of the main characters accompanied by voice acting as they discuss issues pertinent to recent plot development. This feature has become a defining characteristic of the Tales series, with each game presenting hundreds of skits; listening to skits is almost always optional, however.

If you can get a hold of it, it's probably the best game I've played so far for PSP. Star Ocean kept my attention for a while but got bland, this is much better IMO. FF Dissidia I played a lot but more for the fighting, not the voice acting.

Unfortunately the skits don't pause (IIRC).

All Tales games (at least PS2-era and later) have lots of dialogue and lots of voice acting; I'm a big fan of the series.

The most important thing to be able to understand for Rebirth is クレアアアアアアアアア！

True- no pausing. Haha クレア！Yeah that's about every other word that comes out of the main characters mouth

I'll have to look into some of the other games in the series- thanks for the advice.

Tales of Vesperia on PS3 is a must get captal, not only does it have tons of voice, it's fun to play too.

Unfortunately I haven't gotten a PS3 yet, and I can't play PS3 games on my PSP, so that'll have to wait a while

I'm going to have to look deeper into this series, as I'd never heard of it before I started playing Tales of Rebirth (though Vesperia did come up earlier in this thread IIRC).

well the PS3 Slim is pretty cheap.. now is the time to buy

Hey guys. So what are some good wii RPGs? Planning on modding my Wii so I can play imported games

Obviously LOZ: Twilight Princess

Somewhere in the future there'll be a PS3 and a DS but no mula for that at the moment.

this one looked interesting: http://fragile.namco-ch.net/
haven't played it yet though

if you mod your wii, you might can find a japanese copy of Skies of Arcadia... i think they made it for gamecube...

BooBooQ88 Wrote:Hey guys. So what are some good wii RPGs? Planning on modding my Wii so I can play imported games

Obviously LOZ: Twilight Princess

Somewhere in the future there'll be a PS3 and a DS but no mula for that at the moment.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Bearers is out soon.

Hashiriya Wrote:well the PS3 Slim is pretty cheap.. now is the time to buy

Is the PS3 region specific? Can I buy one in America and play Japanese games and vice versa?

They're about the same price (3万、$300), but I'm heading home (US) in a couple months and then to Australia and thought it might be better just to wait given my low cash reserves.

Man- I hate paying for airfare, but I should count my blessings. How much would it have cost to live and travel to Australia and Japan in my parents or even grandparents generation? Then again, my kids will probably get to use teleportation or something- luuuccckkky.

AFAIK, the PS3 is region free. You can play Japanese games on an American PS3.
For example, I have the Japanese FFXIII Demo and it works on my American PS3.

chamcham Wrote:AFAIK, the PS3 is region free. You can play Japanese games on an American PS3.
For example, I have the Japanese FFXIII Demo and it works on my American PS3.

I thought region locking was a was decision left to the publishers. Most 360 games have some sort of region lock. Most PS3 games don't.

It's really quite strange considering the many multiplatform games are locked on one and not on the other.

Play-Asia.com has data on region locks for particular games. There is no way to determine region lock status before a game is released. You need to wait until release to find out. I would not worry about not getting a copy of FF13- there will be plenty of copies. I would wait till ~1 week after release to see if FF13 is region locked. If it is not, then go ahead and order. If you have a Japanese PS3, you have nothing to worry about.

The 360 enforces region lock. The PS3 does not force it, and even if it did, Japan and the US are in the same region for PS3 purposes.

another thing worth mentioning is that a lot of american games have the entire japanese versions included on the disc... all you got to do is change the OS language on the PS3 before you start up a game... most Capcom games are like this (ex: Resident Evil 5, Street Fighter 4, Lost Planet etc) my j-wife (is that a word?) plays my PS3 most of the day everyday because of this... i created a japanese account and she loves playing Home on PS3 too... it gives her a sense of hanging out with Japanese people that she is missing living here in GA... the funny thing was, she never played games at all until she moved to america, now she is a hardcore gamer haha

Edit: if you play on the Japanese account, you can play on Japanese servers even from America... really fun stuff

I'm playing Soul Blader in Japanese on my SNES, it's a nice action-rpg... but unfortunately hiragana-only.

I think it's actually pretty interesting to play a kana-only game from time to time; it really lets you see how well you understand Japanese sentence structure in reading without kanji as a visual crutch to parse the sentences. Video games are one of the few sources of authentic native materials that use all kana, and the native Japanese players can understand it fine.

(If you really want a headache, try one of the games for even older systems that uses all katakana. I don't know of any RPGs like this, thankfully.)

yudantaiteki Wrote:(If you really want a headache, try one of the games for even older systems that uses all katakana. I don't know of any RPGs like this, thankfully.)

Ahh, that's gotta be horrible In Chrono Trigger, there are parts (in the Future) where robots etc. talk all katakana. It's very tough to read, because you have the katakana ヲ instead of the hiragana particle を, ハ instead of は and so on, it ends up looking like a chiffre.

timewastin Wrote:Ahh, that's gotta be horrible In Chrono Trigger, there are parts (in the Future) where robots etc. talk all katakana. It's very tough to read, because you have the katakana ヲ instead of the hiragana particle を, ハ instead of は and so on, it ends up looking like a chiffre.

Ugh- I already hate katakana as it is... that would drive me crazy. Do they at least put spacing between the words like they do in children's books?