Gonna get this out of the way first; I'm not the type that can replay a game, so playing a game in English first and then replaying it in Japanese doesn't work for me.
I'm at N2 level, my main Japanese native materials are webnovels and occasionally manga and light novels. I have always wanted to study Japanese through games and finally got the motivation for it and recently started Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. I went through 3 stages of studying.
Stage 1 – Although this is not a linear game, the introduction is the same for everyone so after I did it in game, I closed the game and opened youtube let's play video of the game in both English and Japanese gameplay, literally going lines by lines and adding any words I don't know in Anki (and also noticing the huge difference between localization and the original Japanese text). Repeated this process for bond events (basically a cutscene to romance characters) and more main quests that I encountered. I also try to take note of every unknown word in stuff like maps, item descriptions and put it in Anki. At this stage I strive to read everything.
Stage 2 – Started to get burned out by comparing English and Japanese videos to create Anki cards, so I only sporadically look up the videos. I look up unknown words in the dictionary and try to understand every dialogue.
Stage 3 (where I am now) – Stopped looking up videos. Basically I ignore everything that isn't important to advancing the game (item/character descriptions, names of places, monsters, items, weapons, you get the drill). Looking up unknown words in the dictionary depends on my mood. If I'm feeling lazy, I just either guess the meaning from the kanji, or just straight up ignore it (especially if it's a fantasy term). If a sentence tripped me up, I'd hover google lens and use google translate.
So like what I'm trying to ask is, is this method of studying even effective? Am I wasting my time? I'd like to know how people at N2 level study games in Japanese, please share your methods in detail. Thanks in advance.
by Kamishirokun