After about five years of "I'll wait until I get better at Japanese before I play this", I finally bit the bullet and booted up 『零〜zero〜』 (Project Zero/Fatal Frame) for the PS2 this Halloween season. I normally wouldn't have a problem working through a game for months with a dictionary even back then, but one thing that scared me off more than the onryō of the game was that the cutscenes are completely raw in the first game. I'm sure it gets better with later games from a language-learning accessibility standpoint, but I generally like to tackle game series in either release or chronological order. I'm stubborn in that way (among many other ways).
Of course, I'm faring so much better with the game now, especially since I've spent so much time with j-horror films over the years, though I still have fingers crossed that flavour text and lore documents can help fill in the gaps my ears might miss in the story.
Another game that's in my backlog for a similar reason is the 『Biohazard』(Resident Evil) remake. There is a Japanese audio dub as well as Japanese subtitles, but the subs are a translation of the English audio rather than a transcription of the Japanese audio. It's not a big deal, but it's at least less helpful than it could have been if it had just been a proper Japanese transcription.
Though seeing as I'm playing Fatal Frame and not Resident Evil right now, I guess I'm more willing to play games unsubbed. Honestly, I just went with Fatal Frame because I wanted to both do something active (i.e., not just watching/listening) that's horror-themed, and take a break from so much sentence mining, so I won't be too tempted to go through the dialogue with a fine tooth comb. I could have sworn there was a silent playthrough of Fatal Frame in Japanese with subtitles somewhere on YouTube, but I can't be bothered to find it. And even if I did, tabbing out of the emulator just to find and then watch a cutscene just wouldn't be worth it for how immersion-breaking it would be to do it that way.
by ignoremesenpie