r/gamingjapanese

I can’t believe I’m finally able to post this.
After years of hunting, upgrading, replacing missing pieces, and slowly rebuilding what I lost over time, I’ve finally completed my 100% CIB Nintendo produced Zelda collection. That includes the Tingle games too.

Zelda has always been my favorite Nintendo franchise, and it’s right up there with Final Fantasy as one of my all time favorite series. My love for Zelda goes all the way back to before I could even really understand what I was watching.

I was born into a house that already had an NES with Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. I was too young to remember every little detail, but I still have vivid memories of watching my mom play both of those games. The sound effect and the music stuck with me. Even as a little kid, I was obsessed with those two games.

When the Super NES and Sega Genesis came out, my parents got me a Sega Genesis, and I fell in love with Sonic too. That’s another story for another day. But my cousin got the Super Nintendo, and he had A Link to the Past.

That game changed everything for me.

I spent so many weekends at his house playing A Link to the Past, and I remember thinking it was the greatest game I had ever seen. The world felt huge, the music felt magical, and every little secret made the game feel endless. Looking back, I think that was the moment where I truly became a video game fan for life.

That’s why this series means so much to me. It’s not just because the games are so damn good. It’s because Zelda takes me back to a time when things felt simpler. It reminds me of being a kid, sitting on the floor, hearing that music, watching my mom play NES games, going to my cousin’s house on the weekends, and growing up with friends and family as every new Zelda release became an event.

A lot of these games have been with me since childhood, but over the years I lost a lot of boxes, manuals, and games during several moves. For a while, I thought I’d never rebuild it the way I wanted.

The final push started after I let go of an extra copy of Twilight Princess, and from there I just kept rolling that momentum into the remaining pieces. Eventually, the missing games, boxes, and manuals started falling into place.

My goal was to finish this collection in time for Zelda’s 40th anniversary year, and somehow I pulled it off.

There are definitely bigger or flashier collections out there, but this one means a lot to me. This collection is a tribute to my love for Zelda, but also to childhood, family, friendships, and all the memories that made me fall in love with games in the first place.

Now I just need Nintendo to stop releasing Zelda games for five minutes so I can financially recover.

This is the sales data for the game on Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES. As you can see, the game absolutely wrecked Sonic 1 over there.

I used a site named Pico Pico Encyclopedia. It's a relatively obscure little Japanese game site with sales data and other things. I learned about it from a certain sunlight toucher on youtube.

I have the famicom connected to my CRT thru a vcr. When the famicom is on channel 1 I get something at 8, but nothing at 95. It’s somewhat playable. When set to channel 2 I get a much worse picture on 10 and nothing on 96. From everything I have searched this doesn’t make sense. Anyone have any insight?

I've always thought that using video games to learn Japanese was less practical given there's no instant way to lookup a word.

However recently after picking up a Japanese copy of Persona 5 Royal, I realised it was better than I expected! The majority of the game has audio for each line of dialogue as well as the ability to open a history of past dialogue with repeatable audio. The repeatable audio is great because I can lookup words in romaji/kana based on what i hear, instead of always needing to lookup by kanji.

If a game is comprehensible enough I honestly think it's a great source of immersion, given some can be hard to put down 😅

What's your experience like learning Japanese through video games? I've seen it's possible on desktop to use a text scraper for instant lookups, but I also like the idea of being able to learn with something more physical like a Nintendo Switch.

Now I'll need to find me a sealed copy of Wind Waker.