It was one of my favourite rpgs when I was a teenager, but I've not played it since then. Recently I got interested in playing games in japanese again, and using them for mining words in anki, so today I decided to try xenogears and played the whole intro sequence (until you get out of the town) and honestly, the vocab wasn't as hard as I expected, so I'd like to continue playing, but it wouldn't be the first time that the first impression regarding difficulty of any media (games, anime or whatever) is not representative of what I encounter later. And this game have a strong sci-fi, religious and filosophical background so I'm quite afraid.
Have you played it? How will describe its difficulty, specially related to vocab? Would you recommend it? I have a level around N3, or at least I'll take that level next week, but I don't study vocab or kanji related to an specific jlpt level anymore, specially in kanji I feel my level is above that level.
I beated FF7 and Mario RPG in japanese prior, thus not understanding 100% of the first one, but it was over 6 or 8 months ago and I feel my level has improved since then, recently I've been also playing Bravely Default and I find the dialogues a little bit harder of what I've played of xenogears, but again I've only played like an hour so I expect the language to become harder.
That being said, I'll continue playing it until finishing or feeling that it is too hard to me, I just want to know the experience other people had with this awesome game.
by AnywhereMoist1908
5 comments
Hi! Have you used wanikani? If not I would recommend making a free user and join the community! They are playing through the xenogears right now! [https://community.wanikani.com/t/%E3%82%BC%E3%83%8E%E3%82%AE%E3%82%A2%E3%82%B9-xenogears-story-club-ongoing/71612](https://community.wanikani.com/t/%E3%82%BC%E3%83%8E%E3%82%AE%E3%82%A2%E3%82%B9-xenogears-story-club-ongoing/71612)
I tried to 7 or 8 years ago, but I put it down because a lot of the language was very specialized. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad now for me. Not sure.
There will definitely be words you wont know, even in english there are words most people have never heard of.
No real comments on xenogears although it’s on my list to tackle one day. If you haven’t, you should check out GameSentenceMiner. It’s an incredible tool for mining games. Full sentence audio on all my cards and it’s ocr is great. The discord is good for support too.
It’s pretty tough. There is a lot of military/tech jargon as well as just about every 役割語 archetype you can imagine being represented somewhere alongside their idiosyncratic diction and speech patterns.
I mine sentences with new words out of JRPGs that I play to make anki cards, and it’s not uncommon I end up with 100-200 by the end of a game. With Xenogears, I added almost 500. Here are a few examples to give you an idea of whether you can keep up:
* 反乱を起こしたとしても、シャーカーンが掌握する近衛部隊によって鎮圧されるは必定。
* ゼプツェン…きさま、創造主たる私に歯向かうというのか？
* 彼が現在特設外務庁の事務職に就いているのには、そういったいきさつがあるんですよ。
* そして刻印＜リミッター＞維持の為の食料、薬品の生産施設。
* 障害物除去行動、達成率約８割。
This on top of the fact that the story and dialogue is pretty heavily layered and utilizes a ton of philosophy and religion, which you can miss even reading in your native language. If you’re stuck grappling just with basic sentence comprehension, you’re going to lose a lot of that.
That said, I tend to find difficult games the most valuable for learning purposes, since they broaden my knowledge much faster than simpler ones. It’s also my opinion that the best media to learn from is media you have a genuine interest in, so even if you’re going to play something this difficult, if you *really want* to play it then you’re much more likely to stick with it long enough to learn something than if you go play Pokemon Sword/Shield just because it’s “easy”.
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