Games you've missed out on because of the Language barrier.

[shin kai]

You mean Fatal Frame 4? That was actually fan-translated quite a while ago. There's a full English patch for it, just Google it.

Awesome, thanks for the tip. I hope the Fatal Frame 2 remake may end up released in the States too but if not I hope the same people are up to making another patch for it.

[rabidmedia]

Anyone who gets offended by something like that probably isn't worth your time. My Japanese friends all think it's kind of cool that I learned their language from videogames. :'D And some of them learned English for stuff like Twilight and Harry Potter, anyway, which is basically the same deal. As far as I'm concerned, there's really no valid or invalid reason to learn a language. And by my experience, the people who preach such elitist attitudes rarely get very far with language learning to begin with.

In short, so long as you don't go around telling Japanese people off for not knowing who Cloud Strife is or asking them if they think Miyamoto is the most important figure in Japanese history, then chances are nobody's really going to care why you're interested in learning their language. On the contrary, I've found that most people are just really happy that you are.

In any case, good luck with Japanese! I've had so much fun studying the language, and I'm always happy to see other people taking it up. It isn't nearly as hard as some people would have you believe, and if I can learn, there's no reason you can't too! Feel free to ask if you ever need help with anything~

On topic, there are a number of Chinese RPGs I'd really like to play at some point. Chinese games tend to be pretty low budget and by the books gameplay-wise, but the settings, stories and art styles take a quite different approach to Japanese games, leaning heavily on Chinese mythology, history, and wuxia movies and drama. There are a few I own in particular that seem really fascinating. And I'm currently making decent-ish progress with Chinese, so maybe in a year or so...

I'm very interested in learning Japanese, mainly for games, but also because I want to visit Japan one day and rent an apartment there, soaking up the culture and living a different life than what I am used to.
as a hardcore gamer, I would love to enter a japanese arcade and just kick ass on some shmups and fighters that most Americans woulden't understand (which is partially why I emulate (^u^) ). for instance, there was a sonic the headgehog arcade game only released in japan, I love playing it, but it would be nice to understand the dialog.

I guess a question for you would be: how do you reccomend I learn japanese for cheap (or free! I have very little money... (-n-) ) How did you learn?

[Mohit]

I'm very interested in learning Japanese, mainly for games, but also because I want to visit Japan one day and rent an apartment there, soaking up the culture and living a different life than what I am used to.
as a hardcore gamer, I would love to enter a japanese arcade and just kick ass on some shmups and fighters that most Americans woulden't understand (which is partially why I emulate (^u^) ). for instance, there was a sonic the headgehog arcade game only released in japan, I love playing it, but it would be nice to understand the dialog.

I guess a question for you would be: how do you reccomend I learn japanese for cheap (or free! I have very little money... (-n-) ) How did you learn?

mhh

[Sheik]

Id say I miss all of the Japanese GetBackers games. I want to play them without having to guess where to go. Or what to do besides fight. I only understand very little Japanese so I could just go learn more. I think I should, Kingdom Hearts 3D is in Japan right now.

[rabidmedia]

mhh

Thank you! this seems really helpful!

[Xyn]

Thankfully for fan translations, I've gotten to play a lot of these games.
The problem is, that with the language barrier, you don't even hear about the games you're missing, so I'm sure I've missed a lot of great ones and not known about it.

As far as learning Japanese goes (I'm attempting to, and I've found what I was looking for).
Go here and on the upper right side, click on Japanese Grammar Guide. It's a 189 page PDF on Japanese and Japanese grammar.
The difference between this and every other thing I've found, is that it teaches you Japanese the way Japanese people learn Japanese.

Genki I and II, for instance, basically cover grammar very little, and focus on teaching vocabulary, phrases, and a very limited amount of kanji, because they want to teach you to speak polite Japanese as quickly as possible, they don't want to scare people away with hiragana, katakana, and kanji (the first and only semester of Japanese I took, the sensei spent almost the entire semester teaching hiragana and katakana, 5 new symbols per week, alongside the lessons from the book. I learned both of those alphabets completely on my own time in the span of a week during the summer before that class. Another problem with these and other textbooks is that they want to teach you to say English phrases in Japanese. This is fine and all, but it's better to understand how to construct sentences and so on that it is to know a hundred different random phrases.

This guide is the a Japanese guide to Japanese grammar, and systematically builds up your understanding of it, teaching you hiragana and kanji along the way.
The trick to Japanese is, once you have a perfect understanding of the grammar, you can start memorizing vocabulary and kanji, and you already have the knowledge to put it together perfectly. Of course, you'll learn quite a bit of vocab and kanji while learning to understand grammar.

I hope this will help some people, anyone who thinks it would be too much should at least download the PDF and read the first couple of pages which are an introduction, talking about the pitfalls of Japanese textbooks and contrasting them with the approach used by this guide.

[Tsukasa]

Code Age Commanders. Man, i remember when this game was announced. I couldn't wait to play it! But it never got a NA release, it was only in Japan. And probably never gonna be fan translated also =/

[foggy_han]

...I want to learn Japanese so I can play their games. (...) I don't think that I'm alone in this, so has anyone else missed out on great games because they can't read Japanese or any other language? I'm currently attempting to Japanese by the way.

You are really not alone in this, sis...

(...) It isn't nearly as hard as some people would have you believe, and if I can learn, there's no reason you can't too! (...)

She is right, really.

On topic, there are a number of Chinese RPGs I'd really like to play at some point. Chinese games tend to be pretty low budget and by the books gameplay-wise, but the settings, stories and art styles take a quite different approach to Japanese games, leaning heavily on Chinese mythology, history, and wuxia movies and drama. There are a few I own in particular that seem really fascinating. And I'm currently making decent-ish progress with Chinese, so maybe in a year or so...

My brother is learning chinese and he says it actually helps memorizing the japanese Kanji in common.
Anyway, I will share a program here that is handy for both japanese and chinese characters.

At the moment, it's probably Japanese games that use a more advanced vocabulary and/or have zero voice acting. I'm a few years away from attempting those, I think.

I actually downloaded a couple of... "Visual Novels" some time ago, but the ones having both voice and text help a lot identifying new words!
(too bad they are almost all "boy oriented"... ... except for Strawberry Panic... )

I really want to learn Japanese as well. So far I can understand most words and some sentences while I'm watching anime (due to excessive watching ), but I can't read/write. Kanji seems like a huge obstacle to me. I'm not even sure where to begin.

I'm learning Japanese from a children's book.

That might help a lot, really. My brother bought some and is making great progress.
Oh, and the anime, of course. Me too, gezegond, although sometimes the vocabulary might be a little limited, but yeah.
Anyway, it seems I really have nothing meaningful to add to what has been said here.
I also, of course, missed some games because of the language barrier, in this case, the japanese language, but I have been learning
japanese for a while, on my own. It is hard, specially tha Kanji, so I thought that would be nice to share with you, in this thread, a
really handy program I sometimes use. If you learn only the Kana you should be pretty much okay with this one. It is called "wakan".

Here is a screenshot of the version in the "about" tab:



And here are some other screenshots, showing what you can do to figure out words and those really tricky Kanji:

Spoiler warning:

You can write the japanese word and it will give you the correspondant english one.
It is really like a dictionary, and you can from there learn when that particular Kanji is also used.

Spoiler warning:

And you can make the opposite: sometimes you can guess the word by simply typing
in english. I love doing that. ...it is the reverse process, again, like a dictionary.

Spoiler warning:

But this is probably the most handy feature. You can study each Kanji individually
and see its meaning, readings, number of strokes... and why do I think I should use this more?

Oh, did I say this program also includes Chinese too?

Just one last thing: the program is a freeware, interestingly enough, so you can google for it and get it.
(and no, I do not get a comission for showing this around... it is freeware. )

[Kool Aid Man]

My top three are Berserk (PS2), Illusion City (Sega CD), and Policenauts (Saturn). Fortunately, Policenauts has an Playstation English translation but I need those light gun segments found in the Saturn.

[Pimpalicious]

The Langrisser series is another I would like to play but other than Warsong I haven't been able to play them.

[arionex]

I'm learning a bit of Jap right now, so I can play the PSX SMT games, especially SMT if...
There are some others too, like the Sega Saturn Version of Grandia, MANY Tales of games, and some visual novels.

"...if" I believe is my main reason to start learning, besides it is said that you can learn a language in 3 to 6 months if you practice a bit each day, I might start as a new years goal.

[Inferno.]

Please don't revive threads that are over 2 years old.