That reminds me that I have to post the reviews of the books from there that I’ve been reading this month… and add ratings, I never did get around to doing that for any of them.

I’ve actually never played Mother 2 in Japanese, though I’ve played Earthbound a couple of times — I was thinking I’d play that one next, actually, I’m about 45 minutes in but may or may not pick it back up.

I was doing the SRS/flashcard thing for a while with Kanji and sentences. Now I’m kind of bored of that, and am looking for Japanese activities that don’t feel like a chore so much.

Tadoku sounds like an cool idea. I think I kind of did that by accident before when I read through Yotsuba, but after I finished that, I didn’t have any other reading materials targeted towards kids.

It sounds like the SPL has a bunch of good books though? I’ll check that out.

Thanks for putting all these lists up, they are pretty useful.

I don’t know how much of my site you’ve read, but I spent way too long playing video games above my level and really don’t recommend it as a vocabulary building method ^^;; But there were some that were more helpful than others. I liked really repetitive games — I blush to admit this, but dating sims were fairly useful, because they’re so extremely repetitive and because they bring an emotional context that made it easier for me to remember words. I played a lot of Tokimeki Memorial and Angelique on the SNES and Seirei Gakuen on the GBA. Also, it seems to me like a lot of GBA games were at a fairly low level and repetitive — I liked こいぬちゃんのはじめてのおさんぽ (a cute dog care sim) and グルメキッチン〜すてきなお弁当 (dunno how to describe this game, but I sure enjoyed it — you talk with people and get recipes, do little mini-games then put together a lunchbox). For the SFC, I loved はじまりのもり, which was a sort of text-based adventure game pitched to younger players. (Not repetitive, and not even really all that simple, but an amazing game.)

In any case, even games that don’t have a lot of kanji still rely on a huge base of fundamental words, and because I lacked that base even the easy ones were too hard for me. That is to say, I can’t think of any that consistently had simple vocabulary. I’d peg even the easy ones I played at a third or fourth grade reading level; around level 4 by the book evaluation system I use, although it’s kind of hard to apply it to games. I will say, having learned what it’s like to read fluently, I’m not satisfied anymore with trying to decode a game, and I’d rather wait until I can enjoy it.

So I’m an advocate of tadoku even over easy games, but it’s all pretty much just my opinion and I have no idea how far along you are, so YMMV. Of the games I’ve played, the ones that stick out as being easyish but fun were 星鈴学園, こいぬちゃんのはじめてのおさんぽ, グルメキッチン〜すてきなお弁当 and はじまりのもり; Mother 3 is also probably worth a look. See how they stack up to your idea of “easy,” and let me know what you think, or if you find any particularly good ones!

I’ve been looking for some Japanese language games that have hiragana, and relatively simple vocabulary, so that I don’t have to keep looking up kanji as I play.

I can totally see 帯 as an alien though. Even more so because it’s part of 帝国… invading alien empire, oh no!