/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4602816
スレ立ておつかれー!
寒すぎるからかわいい女の子に体を温めてほしいわ

Learn moon runes.

Or just play gameplay focused games and not story/dialogue driven games like rpgs. Puzzlers, fighters, platformers, shooters, a game of those genres are usually “import friendly”.

Or find and English patched ROM.

>>4602816
Non-RPGs are usually pretty easy to play even with no knowledge of Japanese. Not like older games explained how to play anyway. And even if they do a guide is easy to find these days.

>>4602816
Well you can learn Japanese, like many people who enjoy weeb retro games do.

JRPGs and visual novels aside you don't even need to learn much, just the kana will get you through a lot of retro games. And for action and puzzle games you often don't even need to know that, you can just memorize the menus.

If you want to play JRPGs you honestly do need to either use a translation or learn the language, since you'll be missing out on the bulk of what makes the game appealing.

>>4602816
Just learn Japanese, it's the best way. I'm playing through a number of Japanese games that never got even a fan translation, but I know the language so it's okay.

>>4602816
I read a little, then I start a game thinking I can do it, then I struggle for the first five words and end crying and quitting the game forever. I only play RPG's.

>>4602969
Start with easy games anon. Ideally games with voice acting or furigana so that you can look things up easily.

Tales of Phantasia has a full Jap script available online, that's pretty useful. I'm about halfway through that one myself.

Also Digimon Adventure for PSP. It's not retro but it's got furigana, voice acting, and also the vocab is generally pretty simple.

>>4602816
I played through a bunch of jap snes games, mostly DBZ games, out of stubbornness when I was 10 or so just because I'd occasionally get see a cool picture. I eventually started recognizing some letters and what they meant, but just knowing the meaning and not the reading of Japanese words is not very useful in the end.
>>4602993
This. It might feel a little degrading to play literal kids games, but it's just like how you wouldn't give Hamlet to a beginner english student. Don't make my mistake of trying to play Ace Attorney after only learning basic kanji and grammar.

>>4603000
And honestly kids games can be fun, too. I had a lot of fun with Digimon Adventure because I had a lot of fond memories of the series (which it follows exactly).

4chan's jap threads also recommend starting with reading Yotsubato manga, which is also very easy but entertaining for anyone to read since it's beautifully drawn and pretty funny.

>>4602816
>without knowing Japanese

>>4603000
>Hamlet

Very off-topic, but I've been learning english for 10 years or so (still feel I have a long way to go), and every time I try to read Hamlet it fucking kills me. Is it hard to read for native speakers too?

Trial and error.
Memorize some basic katakana. For example, the katakana for "ro" is a square (sorta). I've finished a game like that because one of the items was called "Rope" and it was important to know when to use it.

Some games even help you a little. Super Robot Wars has all those comands that do buffs/debuffs on your units. There's a number to their side saying how much MP they use. If you use each command at least once, you just have to memorize how much MP it uses. Even my cousin who doesn't know japanese got to finish of the SRW games like this.

>>4602816
I guess that you mean "Japanese games where reading comprehension is required to beat them". Otherwise the only thing I play these days are Japanese versions of Japanese arcade games, and I know jack shit.

>>4603153
Honestly it takes like two to four hours to learn all katakana. Just do it man.

Just play American games, you damn communist

>>4602816
>How do you get past the language barrier?

You learn kana and basic vocabulary. A lot of retro games didn't use kanji due to various technical limitations.

Kana + basic Japanese vocabulary is actually incredibly simple. The biggest hurdle to learning Japanese is setting aside everything you currently know about language based on your biases as a native speaker of English (or presumably some other European language that has nothing in common with East-Asian languages)

When you become intimately familiar with a genre like for example Survival Horror, you know the formula by heart.

>>4602969
I can read decently well, the only hard part is grammar, dunno why everyone says that is suppose to be one of the easier parts of the language

>>4603135
Most Americans have no fucking idea what’s going on in Hamlet. It’s part poem, part archaic use of English. Don’t give up or be too hard on yourself. Besides, maybe 1% of native English speakers could go out and read Don Quixote in its original language.

>>4602816
I know Japanese

>>4604492

Early Modern English isn't difficult to understand. It just has different inflectional rules and slightly different bits of syntax. But Shakespeare isn't quite Early Modern English since, as you said, it's poetry. Shakespeare quite literally made up his own form of English as he went along. If you read Shakespeare from the beginning and pay attention to all his idiosyncrasies and how his personal expression evolves, you'll have no problems understanding it. But no one should reasonably expect to pick up a random work by Shakespeare and be able to understand its context right off the bat. That's not a linguistic issue, it's an issue of not being familiar with the writer himself.

>>4602816
I guess the same way kids not born in a native english speaking country did

>mfw based James is learning japanese

>>4604568
>uh huh gozilla yeah bela lugosi uh huh little frankenstein in new york yeah halloween

>>4604440
The actual principles are easy, it's memorizing/recall of the particles/smaller phrases that's a bummer, especially in less formal speech or writing.

>>4602816

>>4602816
as a kid, i used to download and emulate them like crazy. back then, everyone on gamefaqs would pool together info on the message board to figure out how to slog through the game, and then a walkthrough would be compiled. i didn't mind banging my head on a game for hours on end to get a bit further, because i was a turboweeb back then and was entranced simply by playing a japanese game.
nowadays i'm working on learning japanese because i at least want to accomplish ONE thing that young me wanted in life if nothing else is gonna be possible

>>4604492
Don Quixote has to be adapted to modern Spanish for native Spaniards, the original text is very hard to understand, it's almost a different language.
Will this happen to games eventually? Fantranslations of retro games so that they can be understood by later generations after languages morph.

>>4604951
>Don Quixote has to be adapted to modern Spanish for native Spaniards, the original text is very hard to understand, it's almost a different language.

would you compare it to Chaucer's English? When I read the original canterbury tales, I could sort of follow it, but not easily.

>>4603135
like the other anon said, you shouldnt be too hard on yourself. archaic language is challenging even for a native, educated speaker. I wouldn't expect someone learning a language to grasp every nuance.

That game is amazing

>>4602835
>wants a girl to heat up own body
>talks like a girl
Book learned weebs are the fucking worst.

>>4606040
I don't get why weebs say things like this

>>4606072
Because they never actually learned Japanese. They learned animu weebanese. And because they're more concerned with flaunting their weebness than writing correctly.

>>4602816
>muh nigga
That game is sick

I play games made for children, since they typically write everything out in Hiragana. Also a large number of Famicom games only used Hirgana, or just had English text.

If the game has too many kanji, I'm totally helpless. I only took Japanese as my required language class in high school, and it's been a decade since I gradated. I should have just taken Spanish instead.

>>4602969

Might be a bit generic but the key is to not give up. Push through it and just try to understand as well as you can. No matter how long it takes you at first, you need to keep doing it. You'll just get faster and faster and eventually you'll be going at a speed where you don't feel like you're dying. That's how I did it and I think it ended up working well for me.

>>4602969
>I only play RPG's.
Fuck

I don't bother with text heavy Japanese games unless they've been translated a fair amount, and even then I'm really not a jRPG kind of guy, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on much. Others I just press shit until I get to the gameplay.

「ファミリーコンピュータ ディスクシステム」&『ゼルダの伝説』の発売32周年!

>>4604724
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