I'm thinking of localizing my game to Japanese, does anyone who lives in Japan have an estimate of how many gamers you think read English? Not just able to kludge through some menus, but read a whole RPG type story in English and fully understand it. My thought is most are able to get through basic menus but I have no idea how many fluently read English.
It's funny you should mention this because I have a word game that's in English (Stacword - Shameless plug) and don't do any language conversions or localizations for it at the moment. It'll be interesting to see what impact this has for you in Japan. I find that with my game I get a small spread all around the world. Countries such as Singapore, Japan and China I think are all interested in developing their English language skills.
That's why I wonder, the Chinese market is big enough to do the translation for, the Japanese market is not very big though, but even so they have a lot of gamers for how many people they have so I figured it may be worth it.
They teach English in grade school. They are not totally illiterate as you might believe. And how fluent do you expect them to be to read a simple word on a menu button? And storylines are just fillers. Even English users will blow past them, and not read them in detail.
As stated in my question my concern is not a simple word on a button, but being able to understand (and enjoy!) a full blown RPG story. I also think you vastly underestimate the importance and appreciation for a good story as well.
I live in Japan and my wife is Japanese. The average Japanese person can understand written English well enough, but they are very poor at speaking and listening. I would say that the average Japanese gamer could certainly muddle through an English RPG, presumably with a dictionary at hand. Now, I dont mean to be rude here, but consider this: why on earth would they want to do that? There are a gazillion JRPGs that are suited to their tastes that they can read easily.
I visited Tokyo for a week and all the young people spoke great English, the middle aged people had enough to get by, and older people spoke none.
I was surprised (and pleased) where my game got downloaded. I think the main issue would be for Japanese review sites and promotion. I believe quite a few of them or more happier with games that overcome the language barrier.
