One thing I feel strongly about is, if you enjoy video games, you should play old games. Especially if you're a zoomer or a millennial like me, you should play games that came out before you were born.
This isn't me being like "the games I played as a kid because those are the GOOD games", like some kind of nostalgia freak. There's a lot of modern games out now that are legitimately fantastic, and do things that those old games could never do. There's just value in knowing what path games as an art form have taken over the years.
Video games have their own art history, and as far as I'm aware, this is largely ignored in the broader conversation about them. Often recommendations to play old games are pushed back against due to being "clunky and ugly", and by modern standards that's kind of true, but I think it's not fair to dismiss them off hand like that. A good understanding of the games that inspired your favorite modern games can help you appreciate them more.
Diablo* was a game I played a lot as a childe, and one I revisited as an adult. One of the main differences between my first playthoughs and my more recent one was that I had been introduced to the roguelike genre, and more specifically Nethack. Suddenly I became aware of direct lines of inspiration from Rogue in Diablo**. It gave me a new appreciation for Diablo's*** mechanics that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
Also play games made in flash, because those have been far more influential than you'd think, considering how completely out of the mainstream conversation they are.
I just think video game history is as important to the medium as art history as is to paintings or whatever. And it's kinda sad that this older stuff gets neglected, even if it's for reasons I understand. Also this is a way for me to indirectly encourage more people to play games I love, that they might ignore otherwise
It's a fairly controversial take within the world of game localization, but coming from the Japanese>English side of things, my advice to new translators for years now has similarly been to study up on Japanese game history. Like, don't just play games in Japanese, as in, ones you could voluntarily play in English instead. I mean get into the weeds, actually study the games and genres that have impacted devs and players here and continue to inspire them, because I can assure you, if you're only sticking to the portion of Japanese game history that was deemed sellable enough to bring overseas, you're missing out on wide swaths of trends and conversations that have taken place. Not only is it just intellectually enriching in its own right to do those deeper divers and see what Japanese games have gotten up to over the years when they're only talking amongst themselves, but believe it or not, your work will suffer at times from that lack of fluency. Not necessarily catastrophically so or on every project by any means, but more often than you would think and in some surprising places, speaking as someone who moonlights as an editor and proofreader on games myself.
I know that sounds daunting because where do you even begin? And that's completely fair and by no means is my own knowledge ever going to be as complete or exhaustive as a native expert's! Ultimately, it's about maintaining that state of mind of continuous education so as to avoid complacency and assuming you ever know truly everything there is to know about that part of the industry. My suggestion is just, pick a direction that's always interested you, go explore that, and then let the tangents guide you from there. In my case, I started with a series of pachinko-themed RPGs because I just so happened to notice one of my favorite developers was in their credits and was just too damn curious to not find out what the hell they were doing on something like those. At any rate, it's a journey that'll sincerely pay dividends over time, but one that's best undergone organically in order to maintain that momentum long-term.
But if I had to give advice on more specific things to study in Japanese games? Study old PC games, both the non-smutty and the smutty variety (really). Study game libraries for consoles and handhelds that never left Japan. Study the RPGs from celebrated development houses like AlfaSystem that never saw the light of day elsewhere. Study old arcade games like Tower of Druaga that inspired developers to turn single-player games into communal experiences. Study newer arcade games like Gundam Extreme Vs.1 that have established new kinds of multiplayer and how cooperative games can be played and structured. Study adventure games in all their wild permutations. Study novel games, both visual and especially the sound ones that came before them. Study character raising games. And, yes, study dating sims and how they repurpose familiar mechanics to different thematic and emotional ends. You knew I was going to tell you that much, right?
There will always be more to study; I've been seriously engaged in this work for over a decade now and I'm still constantly finding plenty of stones left unturned! But if you want to help these games put the best foot forward that you possibly can when it comes time to translate them, then you owe it to them, their developers, their audience, and yourself as both a professional and a creative person to put in the time and truly learn them, where they come from, and what they're saying and to whom. Many of my colleagues would advocate for a more balanced approach and I'm not saying you should feel the need to do such extensive exploration completely at the expense of engaging with anything else. Obviously developers are inspired by plenty more than just the games in their immediate surroundings. At the same time, being a complete jack-of-all-trades only benefits you so much if you're not going to actually work in all those trades and I think it's high time we as a professional more widely consider that those of us who intend to specialize in this as our primary medium perhaps need to spend those skill points differently in order further advance our art and best advocate for our games and the wider Japanese industry.
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I know the last couple of these games have gotten localized, but it's still making this list because it's a subgenre of fighting games that's slowly taking root overseas and the paradigms such games are built on are unique enough that their playability to foreign players can very much so hinge on how knowledgeable you personally are about those mechanics and their overall design philosophy.
