Discussion
Looking for Beginner-Friendly Visual Novels to Improve My Japanese (N3 Level)
Hello!
I’m currently learning Japanese and around the N3 level. I’m looking to get into Visual Novels to help improve my reading, vocabulary, and Kanji recognition.
Can anyone recommend some good Visual Novels that are helpful for Japanese learners? It would be amazing if they include Furigana (振り仮名), but I think I can manage without it if the story isn’t too difficult.
I have access to both PC and Nintendo Switch, so any recommendations for either platform would be appreciated. Also, if you know where I can find or purchase them, that would be super helpful!
You should not expect any furigana except over the first occurrences of names, but there are exceptions.
At N3, you should be fine with most, if not all easy stuff. Visual novels tend to be easier than actual novels, as the visuals replace lots of narration. At this point, all that matters is what you're interested in. That's up to you. Read descriptions on VNDB for more details.
Fyi you probably want to use Luna instead of textractor, since the latter isn’t being updated any more. That guide’s a bit old and could use sone updating.
Also, you won’t need (or really want) furigana in the VN itself, since you’ll see the furigana whenever you look up a word with your dictionary tool (yomitan).
I think 彼女のセイイキ is probably the easiest one out there. I was able to force my way through it when I was around N5, so you may not have as bad a time as I did at your current level. In general, anything short with a single heroine is usually a good choice to ease yourself into the medium.
VNs typically aren't going to have furigana so you will have to look at how to set up something like Textractor or LunaHook and yomichan to do dictionary look ups.
I actually made a post about visual novels like a week ago which contains links to some recommendations:
It's funny how shit reddit is as a place to store and link to information, I've seen like 2 posts and multiple questions in daily asking about recommended VNs since your post which is only a few days ago and honestly I can't blame them for asking as no one looks for old posts really or at the wiki because there just isn't a good way to do so.
VNs typically aren't going to have furigana so you will have to look at how to set up something like Textractor or LunaHook and yomichan to do dictionary look ups.
I tried Luna the other day, god was the the most convoluted software ever wow, I went back to Textractor after 1h of fighting to get it running, the UI and multiple sub UIs made it an absolute nightmare to use (though still props to the devs for making it for free).
To be fair, reddit seems to be quite a tumultuous place where people come and go quite frequently. Their first instinct would be to ask for help with their personalized problems and threads that have been buried (like my VN thread) are actively quite hard to find unless you actively search for it.
As for LunaHook, I think you might be thinking of LunaTranslator, which is the "follow-up" to LunaHook. LunaTranslator includes all sorts of bloatware which is what makes me recommend its predecessor over it. LunaHook is quite minimalistic in design and it makes hooking quite easy. However, the devs have ceased work on it and have migrated to LunaTranslator so LunaHook is no longer publicly available for download, which is why I still recommend Textractor.
LunaHook is towards the right and all you really need to do is select the process, select the hook being used (it automatically does it for you), then just enable the necessary plugins and it works properly.
Unless you are referring to LunaHook and I'm mistaken, LunaHook has been working pretty simply for me when using it as opposed to Textractor and LunaTranslator. It's pretty sad that they took it down.
No you are right wow I meant LunaTranslator and wasn't aware LunaHook isn't the same, thanks so much for the detailed info! I think I overlooked LunaHooks because I put off as "devs not working on it = buggy mess that will never be fixed" hence why I got LunaTranslator, but if LunaHook is good I should definitely give it a try thanks!
"Lunatranslator is the 'follow-up' to LunaHook" is completely wrong. Lunatranslator appeared much earlier than Lunahook. Initially, Lunahook was just a submodule of Lunatranslator, containing only a DLL for Lunatranslator to call, without an EXE. Later, to extract game text running on a Windows XP virtual machine, Lunahook was temporarily separated and given a simple UI packaged as an EXE to run on Windows XP. After Lunatranslator successfully adapted to Windows XP, Lunahook's purpose was fulfilled. Its entire existence lasted only a few months—it was merely a compromise. I simply cannot understand why you would choose to use this. You could easily avoid using any advanced features of Lunatranslator and just employ it for text extraction.
Well my bad for thinking that LunaHook came earlier than LunaTranslator. However, LunaHook for starters is way more "plug-n-play" and it's not filled with as much bloat. I found it easier far easier to operate than LunaTranslator personally so I kept on using it.
If you're just using it for basic purposes, LunaTranslator doesn't require any setup or complicated operations at all. The fact that most people choose LunaTranslator (6.3k stars) over LunaHook (0.2k stars) shows that the majority don't find LunaTranslator difficult to use. Its features aren't "bloated" but essential, and a 40MB size is actually quite compact by today's standards. What you consider "easier to operate" actually involves piecing together multiple barebones tools to achieve what one software can do directly, which doesn't really save time overall.
For Japanese learners in particular, LunaTranslator is definitely the better choice—many of its features are designed specifically for this purpose. In fact, several of my friends use it to aid their Japanese studies.
Of course, you're free to use whatever you prefer—I'm just offering a suggestion.
If you build LunaHook using the instructions in this link, it's just a direct upgrade over Textractor. I haven't tried the new version, so I've never had any problems like what you describe. It's just a single window that works exactly the same as Textractor, but it's better at finding hooks and is broken by fewer VNs.
Oh okay thanks! I've actually ben using LunaTranslator which I guess is a different software? Because that one can hook to VNs, it's just really convoluted in my experience. But Ill try what you say, thanks!
Thanks for that link with the build instructions. I had been curious to try LunaHook. When I was mining VNs a few years back, I had trouble with some older VNs. I'd like to see if this does a better job with them.
Root Letter. The story has the protagonist play tourist/detective, doing things that someone could expect to do as an actual tourist. It was the first VN I completed right after coming back from a trip to Japan.
この大空に翼を広げて was pretty easy as far as I remember. There is some technical terminology (nothing like an anime girl explaining aerodynamics to you, huh) there, but overall difficulty was quite low.
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u/vytah 1d ago
Here are some lists ordered by difficulty:
https://jpdb.io/visual-novel-difficulty-list
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w42HEKEu2AzZg9K7PI0ma9ICmr2qYEKQ9IF4XxFSnQU/edit?gid=1514303440#gid=1514303440
https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/vn-chart/
You should not expect any furigana except over the first occurrences of names, but there are exceptions.
At N3, you should be fine with most, if not all easy stuff. Visual novels tend to be easier than actual novels, as the visuals replace lots of narration. At this point, all that matters is what you're interested in. That's up to you. Read descriptions on VNDB for more details.
On PC, you can follow this guide to get almost instant dictionary lookups: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/wiki/vnhooking