When learning Japanese from videogames, it's essential to be able to easily access the text in a plain format so it can be selected, copied, and interacted with through dictionary browser extensions.
Since text is rarely accessible that easily from within the game itself, you'll need to use external tools to achieve this. Here I'll present all tools and resources I'm aware of that can help you get there. Take in mind that this is quite technologically challenging, and the accuracy of different methods will vary.
Possibly the most well-known software for extracting text from games, Textractor is what's known as a "texthooker," a program that directly accesses the memory the game is using within the OS in order to retrieve text in real time.
Textractor was specifically designed with PC visual novels in mind, so while it generally works perfectly for that type of game, you'll have a hard time getting it to work with anything else. Since texthooking is a very technologically complex thing, it's not very simple to just improve the program to make it work with more games, so it's mostly only compatible with the visual novel engines it was coded for.
Setting up Textractor takes some time and effort, but once you get it up and running, it makes it incredibly easy to look up text from what you're playing. This guide explains how to set it up in a fairly simple manner.
Pros & Cons
✔ Perfectly extracts texts from compatible games
✔ Highly customizable and configurable with extensions
❌ Limited compatibility with anything that isn't a VN
❌ Difficult to set up if you're not tech-savvy
❌ Can be buggy and act up even if you can get it working
🔗 Textractor
Game2Text
A complete toolkit for learning Japanese from games. It integrates OCR, texthooking, translation, dictionaries, and flashcard creation in one app. If you want to have every possible tool at your disposal, Game2Text is a good choice. It runs directly on your browser, so you have quick access to popup dictionaries and web search in the same place you're getting your text from.
One great feature of Game2Text is the game script matcher: it allows you to load in a plain text dialogue script of the game you're playing, and when using OCR, it will try to match up what it is scanning with the loaded script, to provide perfectly accurate results.
Pros & Cons
✔ High variety of tools
✔ Easier to use than most tools
✔ Game script matcher allows for unparalleled accuracy and convenience
❌ Not many game scripts available
❌ OCR is very inaccurate with non-standard fonts
❌ The sheer amount of features can make it confusing to get used to
🔗 Game2Text
Yomininja
This is the Japanese learner's dream app: it transforms your game so you can use popup dictionaries like 10ten Reader or Yomichan right from the game itself, without having to leave its window.
Although the OCR isn't perfect, and will most likely fail at any non-standard font, this is almost as good as it gets for anything where you can't use a texthooker.
Pros & Cons
✔ Makes it possible to hover over words with Yomichan directly within the game itself, making it the most convenient tool
❌ OCR is inaccurate for anything with a non-standard font
❌ Detected text doesn't perfectly overlay over the in-game text
🔗 Yomininja
Google Lens
This wasn't really made for learning Japanese, but many learners use it due to its relatively high speed and the accuracy of its text detection.
Google Lens allows you to point at any text with your phone's camera and get it back as selectable text. It will overlay the text over the original image, too, for more convenience.
It features the most accurate OCR, provided by Google. In the same line, it lets you translate the text with Google Translate right from the same app, so you get a powerful two-in-one toolkit in a very simple to use form.
Pros & Cons
✔ Most accurate OCR available. Works on practically anything
✔ The simplicity of taking real photos of text makes it easier to use than more involved desktop software
✔ Integrated translator
❌ Barebones feature-wise since it wasn't made for language learning
❌ Makes it very inconvenient to look up the text in dictionaries or make flashcards with it
❌ Having to physically take a picture every single time you want to scan text makes it tiresome to use
🔗 Google Lens
VN Translator
Although this was made mainly for translating visual novels in real time, the tools it provides are just as useful for getting back plain Japanese text from games.
It combines texthooking with several different OCR and translation services, and one of its most convenient features is you can have a transparent window over your game showing the extracted and the translated text, so you can easily copy it to look up words.
Pros & Cons
✔ Plenty of tools
❌ Interface can get pretty complicated, especially when you end up with 3 or 4 windows floating around
❌ Free OCR options are not very accurate, and the paid ones are complicated to set up
https://fazx.itch.io/visual-novel-translator
Kamui
New and modern browser app (with both a desktop and a mobile app in the roadmap) that aims to solve the inconveniences of existing solutions and the inaccuracies of OCR. Can be used directly from the browser, and integrates OCR, word separation & sentence analysis, dictionary and flashcard creation all in a single window, with no setup or technical know-how required to use it.
Uses Google Cloud Vision for OCR, the same service used in Google Lens, for the highest accuracy in OCR, getting perfect results almost every time regardless of the font or the text quality. This makes it ideal for games where OCR doesn't typically play well with, like retro games with pixelated text, emulated games with small or blurry text, and just about anything with a font that is more out-there.
It's like Game2Text, but with a simpler, easier to use UI, and much more accurate OCR, although it doesn't yet feature the full range of features found in Game2Text. It's also not necessary to select a rectangle region for the OCR, and it instead scans the whole game screen and separates different text blocks for you, then you can filter out what you don't want to see so you can focus on important text like dialogue.
Pros & Cons
✔ Highly accurate OCR. Same quality as Google Lens, but right from your computer, capturing the game window directly
✔ Very easy to use UI, everything can be done within the same screen, and no settings or setup are required to start capturing text and looking up words
✔ Fully automatic OCR with the desktop app
❌ Not free
🔗 Kamui
Others
There are several other tools available, but they tend to be hard to use, and if they rely on OCR then it tends to have poor accuracy, so I'll leave the links here just in case, but I find the other alternatives are easier to use and more performant at the time of writing.
Kamite
Extremely customizable all-in-one toolkit, but it requires a lot of technical know-how to set it up the way you want to.
Transparent overlay window that picks up text from your clipboard and allows you to hover over words in it to see their definitions and make flashcards from them.
Very different from the original Game2Text despite the name, works somewhat like Yomininja.
Conclusion
Depending on what you're playing and how many features you need, there are multiple options that could be considered the best. Here's a brief summary of what I consider the best for each category:
Visual Novels - Game2Text
In my opinion, Game2Text has rendered Textractor obsolete, since it incorporates the exact same functionality but with greater ease of use. This gives you the main advantage of Textractor, direct text extraction from visual novels, without the technical complexities, and all the convenience of a more sophisticated UI and a web browser. Along with the plethora of features like voices, flashcard creation, game script matcher and more, it makes this decision a no-brainer.
🔗 Game2Text
General Use - Yomininja
Hovering over text with a popup dictionary from within the game window itself has to be a dream for anyone who's been learning Japanese from games, and Yomininja is making this a reality. Although the OCR might not be that accurate or fast, Yomininja's convenience is unmatched.
🔗 Yomininja
Premium Choice - Kamui
If you're willing to pay for superior ease of use and OCR accuracy, Kamui is the go-to choice. It has the most professional-looking interface of all in the list, so you can stop worrying about how to use the program and start worrying about reading more Japanese. With its OCR being of the same quality as Google Lens, it serves as both a replacement for it and for other OCR utilities. If you want to play anything where OCR is required, but the text isn't getting properly detected, Kamui is a must.
🔗 Kamui
