You can learn a lot of Japanese from video games, but mostly once you can already read. Commercial games are written for Japanese players, so they make excellent reading and listening practice at an intermediate level and a frustrating wall before that. Below are five games learners often pick, how hard each one is, and what a game built for learners does differently.
Why people use games for Japanese
Mostly, people use games because they would be playing anyway. Hours of Pokémon in Japanese feel like play, while hours of textbook reading feel like work, and the time you actually spend with a language matters more than the method you admire. Games also give you context. You see the shop, the item and the character’s face while you read the line, which makes the words easier to pin down than in a word list.
A commercial game has no idea you are learning, though, and most of what follows is about working around that.
Five games, rated for learners
We only list details we could confirm from a source, and each one is linked. Where we couldn’t confirm something, such as whether a game keeps a log of past dialogue, we left it out rather than guess.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: beginner-friendly
Pokémon games from the sixth generation onward open with a language selection screen, so you don’t need a Japanese copy. Japanese players have long been able to choose between a kana-only mode and a mode with kanji, and in Scarlet and Violet all character dialogue has furigana in the kanji mode. There is no voice acting, in cutscenes or anywhere else, so this is reading practice only.
It’s beginner-friendly because the text is written for children, the kanji come with their readings, and a lot of it repeats (battle messages, menus, item names). Kana-only mode sounds easier but can be harder for learners, because long runs of hiragana have no kanji to show where one word ends and the next begins. Pick kanji with furigana once you know your kana. You will still meet grammar you haven’t studied, and nothing can be heard, so you’ll learn words by sight and may mispronounce them for a while.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons: beginner-friendly, for reading
Every kanji in the game has furigana, and the villagers talk in casual, everyday Japanese rather than textbook sentences. They don’t speak Japanese out loud, though. Villagers use Animalese, a made-up babble that accompanies the text, so again you only get reading.
It counts as beginner-friendly because the conversations are short and low-stakes, and the vocabulary (fish, furniture, weather, gifts) comes back day after day. The casual register is a good contrast to the polite forms most courses start with. It suits someone who knows kana and basic grammar and wants a daily reading habit.
Dragon Quest XI S: intermediate
The original Dragon Quest XI had no voice acting in Japan, and the Definitive Edition, Dragon Quest XI S, added Japanese voice acting alongside English. Players report that the Japanese release has furigana, but also that the international release can’t officially be switched to Japanese text. It does offer Japanese audio with English text. For Japanese text you need the Japanese release.
We’d call it intermediate. It is a long, story-driven role-playing game with a lot of dialogue. The Japanese voices help your listening, but you need enough grammar to follow a plot that runs for a very long time.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: intermediate
On Switch, changing the console’s system language to Japanese switches the game’s text and voices to Japanese. A later update let players choose the voice language separately. The voice acting is only in cutscenes, so ordinary conversations with characters around Hyrule are text you read without audio.
It sits at intermediate mainly because we couldn’t confirm whether the Japanese text has furigana, and players disagree about it, so plan on handling the kanji yourself. The upside is that much of the game is exploring rather than reading, so you can take the text in smaller doses than in a role-playing game.
Persona 5: advanced
Persona 5 is set in Tokyo and is full of Japanese, with station names and shop signs left in the original language even in the English release. The international version of the original game offers Japanese voices through a “Dual Audio Track” download, paired with English text. Learners who played it in Japanese describe it on the Bunpro forum as very hard at an intermediate level, because of the slang, the range of topics and the tutorials, and one noticed no furigana on some of the harder kanji.
Rate this one advanced. It is written like a teen drama for adult Japanese players, with slang, fast banter and a huge amount of text. English text with Japanese voices is a good listening option long before you can read the Japanese version.
What a normal game can’t do for a learner
Even Pokémon was made for Japanese speakers, and a game made for them doesn’t know your level. Pokémon is simple because it’s written for children, not because it’s pitched at you, and nothing changes when you’re lost. It will never rephrase a line more simply or slow down.
You can’t talk to it. A commercial game gives you reading and sometimes listening, but it can’t hear you. Nobody recasts your clumsy sentence into a natural one, because you never produce a sentence. For many learners, speaking is exactly the part they need the most help with.
Most games give you no way to slow a line down or replay a single line of voiced dialogue on demand. There are no built-in notes, so you keep a notebook or a phone next to the console. And the game keeps no record of which words you missed, so reviewing means pausing constantly or trying to remember later.
None of this makes commercial games bad for learning. It means they work best once you can already follow most of what’s on screen.
How a game built for learners handles it
This is the idea behind comprehensible gaming: a game in the language you’re learning that’s built so you can follow it, and where what you understand changes what happens.
In mossyrune, the characters are pitched to the level you choose. On beginner they speak simply and slowly, and they gesture, hold up props and change expression, so the scene carries a good share of the meaning. In the dungeon game you’re stuck in a cell with an old prisoner, a nervous merchant, a dramatic ghost and a bored guard, and you get out by bribing the guard or working out a three-number combination. Either way, you have to understand what they tell you.
You talk to the characters, by voice or by typing. The game judges what you meant rather than your exact wording, and on beginner a character will recast a clumsy sentence correctly and carry on, without a list of corrections or a grammar score. If you’re not ready to speak Japanese yet, you can answer in a language you already know and the character replies in Japanese. That’s on by default on beginner and intermediate, and on advanced you can switch it on.
The help is under your control. Any line can be slowed to 0.5× or sped up to 2×, and any turn can be replayed as often as you like. Hints go from nothing at all, through word translations on tap, keyword hints and full-sentence translations, up to an interpreter with grammar notes and reply suggestions. Hint tokens let you ask a character to rephrase more simply. You can save any word or sentence to your notes mid-scene, and every playthrough is saved to your notes automatically, including the conversation, the translations you peeked at and the hints you used.
The games run in the browser, including on phones. You need a free account, and 20 free credits cover one full game. After that there’s a monthly plan or a credit pack that doesn’t expire, with every game, language and difficulty on every plan. You can practice speaking Japanese here.
Use both
A game built for learners and a commercial game do different jobs. Before you can read comfortably, a game that adjusts to you, lets you replay lines and lets you talk is the easier place to start, and it’s the only one of the two that gives you speaking practice at any level. Once you’re at an intermediate level, Pokémon, Animal Crossing and eventually Persona give you a huge amount of real Japanese, written for the people who actually speak it, and that is worth having too.