Have You Guys Played Games In Language That You Don't Understand.

[Appiplyer]

As an Indonesian i can very much say every single gamer here that have played in a PS rental or any console rental service literally played pirated games.

So it wasn't weird for them to play a game in japanese and they won't even understand it, heck my friends don't even know english but still finished GTA San Andreas, MK Shaolin Monk, God Hand, GoW etc.

And it's the same for me and Sengoku Basara, i can very much say that this is one of the most played games inside a PS2 Rental. That's also counting me, i basically have 0 knowledge about japanese i can't read it yet understand any japanese word i mean what did you expect from an elementary school student. Yet i finished every single campaign in that games.

Which made me wonder does any of you have experienced this weirdness or not?

(Some fun fact if you buy playstation here from any electronic shop they usually give you games in which all of them was pirated game).

 

[JustLooking123]

Pretty much the same here...
Though, i only had NES and MegaDrive consoles... (yes, bootleg clones of them)
And most of the games i had were multi-carts...
I could read neither English nor Japanese...

And funnily, lots of games i had were the Japanese versions instead of US/Europe versions of them!

 

[JiruleanSkies]

My sister's journey learning Japanese actually started from her playing Japanese games. Leaving aside gameplay because we're real freaks, both of the works that sis landed on and I inherited had authors whose capacity to spin a story, to set a scene, and to employ music in an artful way to make you feel like you knew what was going on even when ya didn't know what was going on. Some things can transcend language barriers.

Also, plenty of games had really good gameplay but were never released outside of Japan, so in my head, limiting myself to "only languages I 100% understand" seems like I'd miss out on some real delicious stuff.

 

[ToMattoSauce]

I pretty much learnt English by playing video videogames, I managed to beat Fallout 3 multiple times despite the fact I did not understand a single word; good times.

 

[PSVitaForever]

Nope. Once I tried to play a Japanese title (obviously without knowing the language), it must be something wrong with me but I can't even play the partial patched games, where you have what you need in English and the rest in Japanese isn't necessary to go on.
Well, I feel I can't enjoy them anyway: or a full patch, or I will give up and play something already in English (or in my mother language, but since I can read English I prefer that way).

 

[otogirisou]

I pretty much learnt English by playing video videogames

this

 

[Appiplyer]

I pretty much learnt English by playing video videogames, I managed to beat Fallout 3 multiple times despite the fact I did not understand a single word; good times.

I think this pretty much counts to all of us who doesn't have english as our 1st language

 

[jiansongwong]

Man this hits close to home. Growing up I played through so many Japanese RPGs without understanding a word. Just brute-forced menus by trial and error, memorized which option did what by shape and position. Kinda went full circle — now I run this little retro game site called CRTPlay and half the stuff on there is exactly the kind of games I'd have killed to find back then.

 

[Potapota]

English is my second language so practically everything I played I understood nothing of until my young and malleable child brain slowly started to pick the pieces together from context clues and whatnot. Watching a bunch of television with subtitles also was really good at teaching me english I bet.

I do remember things like reading through the doom manual and making up my own lore for all the stuff shown in there. This is something that is really hard to experience these days.

 

[Lod 10]

Since I was little I couldn't read anything, I discovered that I'm very good at English, which my English teacher said is thanks to video games.But sometimes I get too lazy to read a text.

 

[Kratzelf]

As with most people in this thread, English is my 2nd language, so the title accurately describes my experience trying out most videogames as a child, until I slowly bruteforced myself into learning the language.
I've also managed to beat a few in Japanese with a combination of my extremely basic, N5 level knowledge and pure, simple "gaming instinct".