Howdy!
I'm mostly a lurker in this sub, and this is my first post (ever on Reddit lol). I stream games in Japanese on Twitch and have a running series where we rank the language difficulty of the games we play (S=hardest; D=easiest). We recently did the fourth installment, and I frequently see posts in this sub asking about games to play in Japanese. So, I figured I'd share my take on it. I don't know if I'm allowed to link the YouTube playlist, but, in case you want to see more about the reasoning behind these rankings as well as the criteria I'm using, you can search my username on YT. I'd recommend watching the first installment if you're curious about that, though it has evolved over the series. Please note that I record these live on stream, so they're not the most polished or concise videos haha Also there's a chat that I don't have displayed on screen but is actively contributing.
For clarification, this is predominantly about how hard the Japanese is, rather than how good the game is at teaching you Japanese. I recently ranked all these games according to that metric and am editing those videos.
Here's the gist of the criteria:
- Japanese difficulty
- Vocab
- Archaisms
- Jargon
- Expressions
- Hard synonyms
- Dialect(s)
- Kanji Density
- Dialogue Density
- Furigana
- Made up words
- Dialogue Audio
- Vocab
- Length of the game
- Language as a barrier to in-game progress
- Does the game require you to use language to progress (instructions, location directions, etc.)?
- Convenience
- Dialogue log
- Font legibility
- Save spots (more of a streamer issue)
- Dialogue Pausability
Since the images are a bit hard to see, here's a breakdown:
S – Disco Elysium, World of Horror, Kuon, Yakuza 0, Elden Ring SOTE (I played the base game in English), Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn
A – Persona 4 Golden, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Final Fantasy XVI, Hades, Lies of P, Saga Frontier, Signalis, Octopath Traveler 2, Sea of Stars
B – Katana Zero, The Messenger, Ace Attorney Trilogy, FFX, Omori, Resident Evil 4
C – The Crooked Man, FFX-2, Brave Fencer Musashi, Vanguard Bandits, RE 2, RE 3, Teleforum, Kuukiyomi
D – Chrono Trigger, FFVI, Bokura, Pokemon: Arceus, Pokemon: Scarlet, Celeste, Night Delivery, Cuphead
Duo – Wagotabi, Duolingo
Not enough info – FF7R Yuffie DLC
I posted the third episode in the self-promotion thread a while back, but this time I'm looking for more of a discussion about the criteria and placement of the games.
by MrSlippy101