I know there are many gamers who like to collect Japanese games. After all, Japan makes most of them. However, I don't know many here in the States who are actually able to navigate the screens of their beautiful product. Consequently, they are unable to participate in playing their favorite games, or even those exclusively from Japan, due to language barriers. Of course, you should play in the language you know, and that is how games are meant to be played.
I, myself, am playing Nintendo games in Japanese as a beginner in the language (just learned hiragana, katakana, and ~ 100 kanji). Right now, if I had to say, I'm half way to N5 based on mock tests I've taken this week. But as I learn more, I also want to share what I've discovered. And that's why I'm beginning my Playing Video games in Japanese from a Newb series.
*As soon as I find a good video editor that I'm comfortable with, I'll begin uploading content about 'Japanese for gamers' to my YouTube channel (YUH8 SpartaN).
**While I do operate on the assumption that there is no pre-existing knowledge of Japanese, knowing katakana and hiragana is a huge must for enjoying the full experience. More so than other mediums in the language, games tend to be very liberal with their use of katakana.
The very first thing you should learn to read is..
The katakana in the menus. Obviously, you could just hit every option until you get the desired result, but it's nice to know what the hell you're doing. The first two terms to learn should be: load and save. How else will you be able to continue your game? They also happen to be easy two syllable words.
- Load: ロード (rohdo: ロ is "ro"; ー makes the 'o' in "ro" a long vowel; and ド is "do").
- Save : セーブ (seibu: セ is "se"; ー makes the 'e' in "se" a long vowel; and ブ is "bu").
コントローラパック is katakana for controller pack ("Kontorooa Pakku"). Remember those? If you don't, it's because you're too young. They were memory packs that plugged into the controller. Yep. Memory cards went into the controllers and not the console itself. Anyway, used here, コントローラパック is just another save option.
If reading menus are so important...
It is important! So here is a screenshot of the starting menu:
And it's a bit more to take in than the load and save. There's even kanji. All four are important, so from the top:
ニュゲーム (nyugeimu) New Game
ゲーム ファイル (geimu fairi) Game File(s) - is 'Files', but there's no plural in Japanese words. You have to infer from surrounding words. In this case, you have multiple choices between load, save, and controller packs, so they likely anticipated multiple choices.
ゲーム設定 (geimu settei) Game Settings - the kanji 設定 (hiragana: せってい) is romanji 'settei' for settings. These kanji are beyond the scope of my knowledge (learning grade two kanji now), and so I can't break it down here.
オプション (opushon) Options - where you tweak your settings.
In all these examples, katakana spells the word out to closly resemble it's sound in English. There is one recurring term, especially important to gaming, but mostly when shopping on Japanese sites: ゲーム (geimu). It is actually a modified ケ ('ke'). It's dakuon, the quotation-looking marks (diacritic marks) to the top right are what changes the sound from 'ke' to 'ge'.
And that's the quick basics to how to navigate the menu, in part 2 I'll actually go into the katakana syllabary with screenshots from my let's play of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. Released for the Nintendo 64 in '96, FE: Genealogy was never formally released in English. It is an excellent examination into the use of Japanese in typical RPG settings. I was excited to recognize some of the kanji, like 力 (chikara, meaning 'power').
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