HOME
ABOUT
FAQ
GITHUB

FAQ

What does the 'Morg Certified' seal mean?

Some games have a stamp of approval as 'Morg Certified'. These games are games that I consider, for various reasons, to be highly recommended and are a good starting point if you are not sure what to play.

It might be because the language is particularly fruitful for Japanese learning, or maybe they have features that I find very valuable, or maybe it's just that I think the game is really good and should be a priority play if it suits your interests. I recommend starting from these games.

How do the difficulty ratings work?

There are five different difficulty ratings: Very Easy, Easy, Average, Hard, and Very Hard.

There are no JLPT levels because the JLPT does not follow native media resources, however my expectation is that someone between N5 and N4 should probably be able to dip their toes into Very Easy games.

The rest of the ratings follow the order in succession. You can probably expect a game marked as Very Hard might require even a native speaker to whip out a dictionary a few times.

I don't agree with some ratings. I think $GAME was easy and not hard.

These ratings are subjective and entirely personal. It's completely normal if you disagree and found some game easier or harder than listed here.

There are many factors that make it hard to rate games. Things might appear easier than they are if you are already advanced/native with the language, so what you consider easy might be hard for someone else.

Also, a lot of people these days play games with texthookers and translators to more easily look up words they don't know or figure out sentences they don't understand. Depending on the kind of player you are, you may or may not end up thinking something is easier than it would be otherwise. I do not use texthookers or translators and my dictionary lookups are very minimal when I play videogames, so I base my judgment around that.

Imagine me playing these games lounging on the couch. I don't want to whip out yomitan to do that, because I am lazy.

Why not just use JPDB/natively/etc?

There are a lot of other amazing sites and collections of resources that show the difficulty of native media. To name a few:

If you haven't yet, I recommend taking a look too, this is not a competition. This site is my own take on videogames specifically. Everyone has different ratings and different experiences, if you vibe with what I write here, you will find it useful, otherwise a more collective approach like the ones listed above might be more useful to you.

What does the "Playtime Length" stat mean?

Each game has a "playtime" approximate statistic showing how much of a time investment you should expect. The possible values are as follow:

Obviously these numbers are just approximations based on my own experience (I am quite a slow gamer) and memory. I also try to link to sites like HowLongToBeat or vndb.org whenever possible so you can also look at more aggregate data from multiple players. However keep in mind that most of those numbers are usually recorded on non-Japanese versions of the game, and if you're a beginner with Japanese it might take you longer than that.

What does it mean when something is 'unknown'?

Some of these games I have backlogged from my experiences in the past, and for that reason I do not remember exactly if they have certain features like scrollback, furigana, voice acting, etc. Also, some games do not have links to external sites like Backloggd to track them, so I cannot fill in all the data required. Whenever some data is missing, it will show up as unknown.

If you find some entries that have missing data that you think you can contribute, please file an issue on the project's issue tracker on Github and I will take care of it.

Moving forward with new entries I will make sure to fill in all the data I can while I am playing the game, so there should be less and less gaps.

I have an entry I want to contribute, can I?

The answer is... yes and no. It's a bit complicated. I am trying to keep this list a personal list of games with my own opinions and notes. For this reason, I cannot guarantee that I will accept all or even most of external contributions

However, this does not mean that contributions aren't welcome either! If you feel strongly about contributing a certain game to the database and it is a game I recognize and am familiar with, and also if I end up agreeing with your judgment, I will gladly accept your contribution to the list.

I know it's not very welcoming to ask you to go through all the effort with a chance of being rejected anyway, but it is how it is.

Alternatively, the project is fully open source and if you feel like it, you can fork it and even host your own version of it.

The database is just plain text files you can find here and all you need to do is to just regenerate the json table using this python script. Incidentally, the process to contribute a new entry is very similar too. You can take a look at the template file to see how the data format works (it's very rudimentary). You can remove any rows in the table (except the title) without breaking the format too.