Japanese games by JLPT level

The interesting result isn't that some games are harder than others. It's that each one has two different difficulties inside it, and the gap between them is enormous.

Menus, item screens and system text land between N4 and N2. Story and flavour text land on N1 in every single game we've measured, without exception. A game whose menus you can read comfortably will still hand you lore written well above your level ten minutes later.

That's worth knowing before you pick, because it changes what "can I play this?" means. You can navigate almost any of these games far earlier than you can read their writing. The menus are what you'll learn first, they're what repeats, and they're the part that stops needing help within a few weeks. The story is the long climb.

The honest answer is that it depends less on the game than on whether you'll finish it. A game you're excited about at N2 difficulty beats a "good for learners" game you abandon in week two, because volume is what builds a language and only motivation produces volume.

Past that, two things genuinely help. Text that sits still and waits for you, which rules out most fast action games regardless of their vocabulary. And a game you've already played in English, because knowing the story frees your whole attention for the words.

What the measurements are for is the third question: whether the game sits close enough above your level to stretch you rather than drown you. That's the one you can't answer by feel, and it's the one nobody else publishes numbers for.

Game writing reaches for register. Lore is archaic, villains are florid, item descriptions are compressed to fit a box, and invented terms are built out of kanji that no wordlist contains. Our scans count those honestly as beyond JLPT rather than quietly dropping them, which is why the story numbers look forbidding even in games with friendly menus.

This isn't a reason to avoid story-heavy games. It's a reason to stop treating "I can't read the lore yet" as failure. The menus are the part that responds to a few weeks of play. The writing responds to months, and it responds faster once the menus stop taking your attention.

If you want the method rather than the measurements, how to learn Japanese with video games covers picking a game, what to save, and what to do when a translation is wrong.

Each game gets a real screen captured during play, not a store screenshot or a promotional shot. Every word on it is matched against the same JLPT wordlist Playto uses in the app, and the result is reported as a distribution rather than a single verdict, so you can see how much of a screen sits at each level.

Kanji compounds that fall outside the JLPT lists are counted as beyond JLPT instead of being dropped, and katakana runs are counted separately because they're largely free if you read English. Both of those choices make the numbers look worse than a generous method would. That's deliberate: a number you can trust to be pessimistic is more useful than one you have to discount.

Sample sizes are printed on each card, because a 35-word evidence file and a 147-word inventory screen aren't the same kind of evidence. More games are added as they're scanned.