I’ve found that any time I’m interested in a game, looking up let’s plays in Japanese has helped me make a lot of connections between the game’s contents and Japanese vocabulary.
I’m linking a good example of that with Metroid Dread, which is a game I played last year and I spend a few weeks watching let’s plays and reading online content about it in Japanese, mostly because I loved the game, but I also thought that doing so might be a good exercise for intermediate learners as well.
The key to searching for a let’s play is to just enter the Japanese name of the game (for example: バイオハザード４ or ダークソウル３）and then adding 実況 which is the keyword here. Any popular game followed by 実況 is likely to yield tons of results, so give it a try if you’re into games, and you may learn a lot of vocabulary from it!
I played some of the Tomb Raider games through in Japanese, iirc, and I’m planning to do the same with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
Oh yeah, playing through the games is ideal for sure. Though I remember kind of feeling stressed out at not understanding a lot of the dialogue when I was just getting started with Japanese. Definitely recommend doing it with games you know pretty well so it won’t be super frustrating, at least if you’re a beginner-to-intermediate speaker.
Yeah, I’ve already finished Survivor in English so I should still be able to track with the story even if I’m not following the dialogue 100%.
