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LF a casual game with both English and Japanese players
Hey folks,
Long story short.. after five years of marriage my wife has finally decided to make the jump from console to online games (as I have come to develop opinions on clothes shopping). Now her English isn’t the best; we speak primarily Japanese at home… lived there for 9 years and all. However games (online games particularly) can make great language learning environments. Thus I am looking for a nice casual MMORPG (e.g. AFK baby agro is acceptable, and we can duo together or she can solo ) to try out with her.
Now naturally an international community is desired. The only MMORPG I know of offhand which has both nice populations of Japanese and English native speaking audiences in FF11 (which albeit I never tried, though I hear its more akin to EQ1 style grouping and perhaps a bit too ‘hard core’). My guess is a nice F2P (though my experience here is limited to say the least) would be a good intro into the realm of online gaming. Still, as a P2P guy since pre-POP EQ1 I have scary jitters concerning the maturity of populations of F2P along with the inevitable money traps which they drive players to. While this may be an archaic view of the F2P model, though I am trying to keep my mind open here, I was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions for a nice JPN/ENG friendly game. As far as console games she loves the Mother and DQ series as well as the “Tales of” (naturally all JRPGs).
Cheers and thanks in advance
Comments
What about Guild Wars? Yeah, i know that is not as popular as before as many people are waiting for GW2, but it´s a B2P game, cheap, you can switch the language and the server easily and almost everything can be done soloing or with a friend.
Being a strictly english speaker, it's kind of hard to determine what language people are speaking exactly, can't tell if it's korean or japanese, but some f2p's off the top of my head to investigate further would be:
http://www.returnofwarrior.com/index.asp (more non english than anything, but again could be korean, unnoticible cash shop as well)
http://us.tqdigital.com/en/ (this is a global company, which I know for a fact has some japanese players in Conquer, sure their other games do as well, cash shop is pretty overpowering though.)
http://atlantica.ijji.com/center/default.asp (very jrpg inspired, turn based similar to final fantasy games, bound to be other japanese players within it, last time I played the cash shop wasn't too noticible)
hm.. i'm blanking already.. but if all else fails you can always learn to use proxy servers to mask your ip so you can join games you are blocked from. I don't know the first thing on how to go about setting that up, and I hear it can be risky, but it's always there as a last result.
i thing only came up to my mind when i click on this topic, it's ffxiv
if your wife is gonna make her 1st time jump into an MMO, make sure she have the best 1st experience, and if anything, it will be ffxiv
it will describe all of your points, except for the F2P part
ffxiv is gonna be casual a MMO, way more than ffxi, especially if you could only log on for only 2-3 hours a day. it will be the perfect jump for your wife and you,
if you like crafting, it will be a plus, because the crafting in ffxiv is gonna be very fun and complex in a way
i play a little of ffxi before the jump to WoW during BC era, i truly find the differences between the community at that time as well
and again if community maturity is what you are after, if anything out there, ff fan base should give you that
oh and the best thing is, you wife could still stick to console while playing an MMO ( if ps3 is what you guys own )
So What Now?
well i remember finding some japanese ppl playing Perfect World, and for some reason have some appeal to women, so your wife may like =p
now: GW2 (11 80s).
Dark Souls 2.
future: Mount&Blade 2 BannerLord.
"Bro, do your even fractal?"
Recommends: Guild Wars 2, Dark Souls, Mount&Blade: Warband, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Hey everyone!
Thanks for the great responses. Yeah I agree that FF14 looks like a good choice for the future. I will check out those F2P games and look up GW Japanese support. Thanks again for the helpful tips and advice +)
Is it confirmed that FFXIV will have japanese and english players sharing servers? Cool.
My linkshell in FFXI formed when a group of tarutaru's formed a static with a random japanese school girl who could play the game far better than any of us. Good times
Currently Playing: The Game
Yeah, just like FFXI the game will support multiple languages, probably have some sort of translator, and let players play on the same servers internationally with no IP ban. It's one of the things I love about Square.
I know quite a bit of Japanese (I'm still learning it though), and I can tell you that you will have a hard time finding a good amount of players who can speak Japanese on English servers. Most F2P games (as well as most P2P) have specific servers for particular languages if they even support Japanese, and worse yet they typically have IP bans in place for people overseas so you won't be able to play with someone from Japan. You might find a few anime ethusaists who can type out a few words of Japanese in romaji on anime inspired F2P games, but I doubt you are looking for people to converse with in that Naruto-obsessed kiddie culture. Servers that support international gaming don't seem to have a huge (if any) Japanese population - you'll find lots of people find Europe and a few from other parts of SEA, but not Japan.
Stick with FFXI for now. Yeah, it's more of a hardcore game, but they've done quite a bit to make it more casual friendly. I'd recommend playing it on a console too, as it's a bit easier to get into then having to setup on the PC and deal with controls that weren't designed for a mouse and keyboard. When FFXIV comes out that should be the perfect game for you and your wife to play, since it seems to be designed with the casual player in mind.