going off topic a bit but...

As for me, learning languages should be fun, or else I will never be motivated enough to learn it. I learned english in the first place because of films and games. As for japanese, I've learned a bit by watching animu, but the writing is ultra difficult compared to other languages. It's not something you could just casually learn over time.

For now, I've identified 2 possible ways to learn kanji which would work for me. First is to play games on emulators and/or read raw manga and use japanese OCR software to learn the frequent kanji's, and then putting them on anki to memorize them. This heavily depends on how good would a free ocr software be at recognizing kanji.

Second, is to memorize a small, essential number of kanji, and use that simple knowledge to play games, and while at it, learn more kanji bit by bit. The problem with this one is I have troubles finding a good essential kanji list. Everything I find has way too many kanji. what I'm looking for is around 100-250~ words to put on anki and memorize. More words won't work with anki for me. Learning these would have to allow me to recognize most kanji in regular casual sentences seen in games and manga.

If only there were some equivalent of rikaichan for games... I wouldn't even have to learn japanese at all.