Tired of pointing your phone to the screen with Google Translate or Google Lens? Maybe you tried using software like VNTranslator, Sugoi Toolkit, Game2Text, Translator++ or Universal Game Translator, but they were too complicated to use, required technical knowledge, or weren’t accurate in their OCR or translation capabilities?

You can try Kamui, a game translation app that works directly from the web, with zero setup and configuration needed, featuring the highest quality OCR and translation technology, making the task of scanning Japanese text and translating it much simpler and more convenient.

Overview of Kamui

Although originally designed with Japanese learners in mind, this app is just as useful for those that want to play untranslated Japanese games in their own native language. Kamui lets you select any game window from your computer, and you can scan the text in it with the click of a button. Using “Translation mode”, you can automatically translate any text that is scanned, either with Google Translate or with OpenAI GPT-4.1. Extra settings allow you to be more precise, such as scanning a specific region of the target window, filtering furigana, and more.

Kamui is also available as a desktop app, which will let you scan using a hotkey without needing to have the Kamui window selected, and it also includes the very powerful auto-OCR feature, which will automatically detect new dialogue from your game and scan accordingly, so you don't have to manually trigger a scan every time.

This app places its focus on being easy to use. You can get started in under a minute, without any complicated setup, configuration or tutorials. As long as you have access to a browser it will work. On top of the UI being very simple and convenient, the accuracy and speed of both OCR and translation are as good as it gets, using Google Cloud Vision for OCR and GPT-4.1 for translation. You don't need to bother with technical things like API keys or prompts, all of this works out of the box!

How to use Kamui for Machine Translation

1. Go to https://kamui.gg/ and click the "Try It Out!" button.

   

2. Enable “Translation mode” in the Settings.

3. 

   Click the "Select Window" button.

   

4. Select the window of the game you want to translate.

   

5. Click "Scan".

   

6. After a few seconds, the translated text will show up in the main panel! Press "Scan" every time you want to translate the text in the game.

   

You can customize the translation provider (Google or GPT-4.1) and the language you want to translate to with the dropdowns next to “Translation mode”.

Also, check out the "Settings" tab for some extra options that allow you to customize the experience. Particularly useful is the "Scan Region" feature, which lets you select a particular region to scan text from in the selected window. This can be used, for example, to limit the scanning to a dialogue box, and avoid scanning UI text and other unnecessary bits.

Keep in mind you’ll need to sign up if you want to keep using it. Signing up will give you 500 free scans. After you use up all your free scans, you’ll need to subscribe, which will allow you to use as many manual scans as you want.

Conclusion

Although other tools might provide a high degree of customization for tech-savvy users, Kamui is much more accessible for those that just want to get MTL running without worrying about the details.

You can start using Kamui at its website. You can leave feedback or ask any questions at its Discord server, to help improve the app and make it better for everyone.

This might be a bit long, so if you want a quick rundown, you can skip to the conclusion.

Is it possible to learn Japanese from videogames?

Not only is it possible, but it's also one of the best ways to go about it.

There are two main activities in the realm of language learning: input and output. Input consists of consumption of the language, be it through reading or listening. For a language learner, a portion of this time is also spent looking up words you don't understand from what you're consuming, reading up on how certain grammar constructions work, and so on. Traditional language instruction makes it seem like language learning works like math, where you can learn the rules through textbooks and homework and you'll be fluent in the language, but it doesn't work that way. A language is an unfathomably vast thing, not just due to its vocabulary, but to the complexity of the language rules themselves.

Think about it: unless you're a teacher, you're likely unable to explain a lot of concepts from your own native language (here's an exercise: try to explain what the word 'that' means, assuming your native language is English), and you yourself didn't learn these concepts from a teacher, but from constantly consuming the language for years on end as a toddler. The inner workings of the language are embedded into your brain, and not in a logical manner, but as something instinctive, kind of like walking or swimming are (which are also things you need to acquire through years of constant practice). If you have practiced an instrument or a sport for a long time, striving to improve, you might be aware of how it's imperative to develop correct muscle memory, so you stop thinking about each thing you do, and instead act on it by nature.

It's the same thing with languages. You don't learn logical rules and think them through every time you read or speak, but instead you get yourself exposed to the language for a very, very long time, until the it forms new circuits in your brain that make you think in the same way as a native speaker. The rules do serve as an scaffolding to get you to greater heights when you're just starting out, but they're just that, a means to an end, and not the end in and of itself. Having explained this, I can now make a very concise point: input is the most important activity in language learning, it's what should be taking up 90%+ of your time. There is no understanding and no ability to speak fluently without massive amounts of input first. Kids don't learn to speak before they can understand what their parents are saying, and it's no exception with adults.

How do I start consuming if I don't understand anything in the first place?

I did make an emphasis on the importance of input above all else to clear out any preconceptions about language learning, but of course reading secondary materials like dictionaries and grammar guides is encouraged and generally necessary. I mean generally because depending on the native language of the learner, the target language, and the individual's innate talents, they might end up getting to a high level with nothing but plain input and output, but it's not the case for most people. Even if you do have that ease, using external materials can considerably speed up your comprehension and make your output more accurate, so I recommend their use.

How do you go about this for Japanese? Well, Japanese is a fairly complex language. In fact, they say it's the hardest language to learn for native English speakers. So if you expect to just jump in and start looking up words in a dictionary like you would with Spanish or French, you're gonna have a bad time.

I believe it's practically a requirement to first learn how the writing system works, what the different sounds and their pronunciations are, and how the most fundamental grammar works. These things have been extensively covered by many people on the net across the years much better than I ever could, so I'll be brief and mostly just make reference to these resources.

One such resource is Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese. The first few steps of this guide cover the writing system and the sounds, then it moves onto grammar, going from the most basic stuff and ending in some more intermediate grammar. If you read the whole guide, you'll be more than ready to start consuming content in Japanese

If you want a more brief explanation to jump into the action sooner, the MoeWay guide is fairly in-depth while being shorter and more pragmatic. I will refer to it a couple more times since it gathers many good explanations in a single place.

I'm ready to start consuming native content, what's next?

You shouldn't think about it too hard, just pick a game you want to play in Japanese and go for it.

…That being said, you'll find that's easier said than done. Reading Japanese will at first seem like a herculean task, no matter how much preparation you've had. You need to understand that we're very used to Western languages, which share not only the writing system, but also the grammar, sentence structure, word roots (like how most Western languages come from Proto-Indo-European, or Latin and Greek), some of the pronunciation, and sometimes even whole words. So even if we don't "know" one of these languages, we can somehow make some sense out of a text. Even if we can't, we get the illusion that we can at least "read" the words since they're written with the same characters we're used to, and it feels like it's natural to read it and we just don't know the words.

In Japanese, you have none of these shared elements, and no illusions of comprehension. Japanese has pretty much nothing in common with Western languages. The writing system is completely different (and orders of magnitude more complex and extensive at that), the grammar and sentence structure is completely alien, the sounds are thought of in terms of syllables (or morae, technically) instead of letters, and there are no Proto-Indo-European origins to save you. It's a completely different language from the very foundations.

So naturally, when you try to read Japanese, your speed will be excruciatingly slow, and your comprehension will be practically null, since you're familiarized with absolutely none of its components. And that's completely normal. If you try to play guitar when you've never done so, it will take weeks before you can even play a single chord correctly, let alone a whole song. People who can play make it look easy, but once you try to do it, you realize pressing metal strings between your fingers and a wooden board isn't actually a nice feeling. You will need to play frequently, consistently, for a long time, until you get calluses on your fingers, so they stop hurting and they let you press on the strings with greater force, and only then will you start making some real progress. It's the same thing with Japanese.

Just like you start out small with a few simple chords, it's better to start out with simple texts to get your feet wet. That being said, there are many recommendations for what to read when you're a beginner, but the truth is everything will seem impossible at first, so my advice is to just go with whatever makes you most excited, and keep at it for a while. If you get bored or feel stuck, just move on to something else. The most important thing is that you keep consuming content consistently. Some months will pass, and before you know it, you'll go back to the first thing you ever read, and feel like magically you suddenly understand everything. That's when you realize you're on the right track.

It's also recommended you use Anki or some other SRS software to memorize vocabulary and kanji faster. It's not necessary, but it will greatly speed up the rate at which you learn new words, and especially kanji, so there's little reason not to use it. This section of the MoeWay guide explains how to get around to this.

How to make reading easier and more productive

Going into reading with no other support might end up feeling fruitless. That's because reading for the purpose of learning a language is not quite the same thing as reading for entertainment. When you read for learning, you should try to dig deep into what you're reading, be merciless with each sentence, look up the words you don't know, the grammar you don't understand, and try to formulate hypotheses on what this one sentence is actually saying.

Of course, sometimes you will barely understand what the text is saying. A useful skill to have is knowing when to just skip stuff you don't understand, and focus on consuming the language in quantity. The point is, language won't go into your brain by osmosis just by gliding your eyes over incomprehensible squiggles, but hyper-focusing on a single thing you don't have the knowledge to understand yet isn't productive either. Use discretion and change your reading strategy accordingly.

Repeat this consistently, and slowly but surely your comprehension will increase, and this increased comprehension will allow you to decipher more texts, further increasing your comprehension, so you can read harder texts, then your comprehension will go even higher, and this will create the snowball effect that causes you to become fluent within a few years.

In order to facilitate this kind of learning-focused reading, there are many tools available. In my opinion, the most important thing is to be able to quickly and easily look up words and kanji you don't know. Unlike a language that uses the alphabet, it will take a long time until you can just type out words you don't know. That's why it's important to have the text available as something you can digitally select and search. As you may realize, this is not possible with most videogames, since they don't work like other computer programs and you can't just select the text. With console games, this becomes even harder. Fortunately, fellow learners have been working on solutions for years, so this keeps getting easier and easier to do. Check out a detailed analysis on what tools to use in this post (short version: use Game2Text for visual novels, and Kamui or Yomininja for everything else).

Another must-have is a popup dictionary. It's a kind of browser extension that lets you quickly check definitions and readings for Japanese words simply by hovering over the words with your mouse, simplifying the process of lookups so you don't have to search on Google or a dictionary website every single time. Yomichan/Yomitan is what most people use, since it's the most feature-complete and most importantly, allows you to add any word to Anki with one-click. This is crucial for what's called "mining", which consists in adding words from text you're reading into your flashcard deck, as opposed to reviewing cards from a pre-made downloaded deck. 10ten Japanese Reader is another cool popup dictionary, but it doesn't feature Anki integration, so you can't easily use it for mining.

Don't you have to learn all kanji first before doing all this stuff?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Despite what some sources may lead you to believe, kanji don't exist in isolation, but as a whole, together with the language. Sure, you might be able to get some information about them in isolation, but that won't help you with creating holistic knowledge about them.

Each kanji has many readings, many meanings, and their meanings can't be summarized with a few English words, since they're part of a completely different language whose speakers' conception of reality greatly differs. Thus, the best way to learn them is not by memorizing separate units of information, but by reading, learning the words they make up, and understanding their multiple functions and ways they can be used in within the context of the actual language, creating new knowledge for a new language, completely separate from preconceptions your native language made you hold.

Kanji study in isolation might seem like a shortcut to read faster and understand more once you actually start reading, but the truth is it will only create a flawed understanding based on a language that has nothing to do with Japanese, the language these kanji actually belong to, so you'll not only have wasted time you could've spent just reading, but you'll also have to relearn how to think about kanji entirely, since you never learned how they work in real language.

So if you want to learn fast and have fun, do yourself a favor and start reading from the very beginning. Yes, it will take a long time to learn kanji, but it's a natural process and you don't have to rush it. Like the proverb says, 急がば回れ (if you're in a hurry, take the long path). Simply enjoy the ride.

Routine is important

When I used to go to sleep at 6AM, wake up at 2PM, and my room was a mess, I had a hard time understanding the purpose of routine.

Routine is very important to give some structure to your life. This structure is not to stress you out, but on the contrary, to give yourself emotional stability to achieve your objectives more efficiently, and to create consistency in the work you put towards these objectives.

Routine is made up of habits. Habits are tiny actions or activities that you repeat frequently, generally daily.

One habit that you'll end up building is Anki reviews. Doing Anki daily makes sure you stick vocabulary and kanji into your brain, so you'll progressively have an easier time reading, even if you don't read that much every day. It's very important that you do keep doing this daily. If you get overwhelmed with new cards, lower the number, or just disable them completely until you get a stable rhythm going. If you're too tired one day to do your reviews, make the extra effort and do them. If you let your reviews pile up because you didn't do them, you'll be even less motivated to do them. This will cause reviews to pile up further, and this might escalate to the point you stop doing Anki altogether. So make sure you do it every day. 15 minutes a day might save you several hours in the future!

Having a reading/listening habit is obviously very important too, as this is the main source of learning. Unlike Anki though, it takes a lot more time and effort, especially at the beginning. You'll even notice that you get very mentally tired at first, too. This is normal and not your fault. This mental exhaustion will go away as your brain gets more and more used to Japanese, but this will likely take several months or even years, depending on the complexity of what you're reading. So at the start, be compassionate towards yourself, and limit your reading time to what you can take. If it's only 30 minutes, that's fine. Your brain getting tired is a sign that it processed that much new information. It's better to go little by little than bite more than you can chew and burn out, which will tire you and demotivate you, and prevent you from keeping the habit alive. Remember, consistency, and not time or effort, is the most important thing. Here's another proverb: 継続は力なり (consistency is strength/power).

Make sure to at least read a few hours every week. Ideally you'd be reading a few hours every day, but you can leave that for when you're closer to an intermediate level and get less tired. Take in mind that in the same way that burning yourself out is not productive, reading very little, even if consistently, is not that productive either. Think of it like boiling water: you can put a kettle on the fire, and it will take some time to boil. You can take it out once it's boiled, and you'll be able to use it to make coffee or something for some time. If it's cooled down a bit, you can put it back on the fire and it will boil again very quickly. On the other hand, if you take it out before it has boiled for the first time, not only can you not use it for making anything, but it will also cool back down very quickly, and even if you put it back on the fire, it will take a considerable amount of time to reach its previous temperature, let alone boil. Make sure to reach a boiling point, and consistently keep the water boiling before it cools down too much. Deciding how much time this means, how often and with what intensity is up to you. Know your strengths and weaknesses and do your best.

Finally, I cannot emphasize this enough: SLEEP!!! Sleep is the mother of all habits. If you wake up tired, your mood is ruined, your energy is lower, and in today's society you rarely can afford to nap enough during the day to recover your energy. If you don't have this energy, not only will you be too tired to do anything, but you'll end up hating your life in general, since you're forced to do things even when you're tired! So before putting in any effort or building any additional habits, make sure you're sleeping well. Go to sleep at a reasonable hour and wake up at a reasonable time. Sleeping enough hours isn't enough, since our bodies are made for sleeping at night and being awake during the day. If you've had a bad sleep schedule for several years, you might have forgotten (or never felt) the difference, and think the time you go to sleep and the time you wake up at are irrelevant as long as you sleep enough, but trust me and try going to sleep at at least 1 or 2AM and wake up at 10 or 11AM for a couple of days. You'll notice how you go from being a zombie back to a real human being full of life. This is what it means to sleep well. This energy allows you to do absolutely anything, so it's important you conserve it! It's just like the proverb says, 寝る子は育つ (kids who sleep grow healthy).

If you have a lot of free time, you might find yourself in a situation where your sleep schedule isn't ideal. Say you try to build good habits, and finally get your sleep schedule in order, and one day you're reading Japanese late into the night, and get excited by how much you're learning, how well you understand, how good the story is and so on. You might think: "Guess I'll go to sleep late today, it doesn't matter anyways because I'm learning Japanese so it's justified, and I'll learn more if I read for longer." NO!!! You quit the game and go to sleep, it doesn't matter how much progress you're making. If you go to sleep late that day, the next day you'll wake up late, feel groggy, maybe a bit tired. You'll read less, and because you've woken up late, you might go to sleep late again. The cycle will repeat, ending with the catastrophic consequence of ruining your sleep schedule and your Japanese reading habit. Then everything will come to a halt. If you want to prevent this, then just SLEEP!!! Habits are not made through magic or being born a certain way, they're made by following them every single day, even if (especially when!) you don't feel like doing it.

Finally, if you go to work or school, breaks are the ideal time for study, especially lunch breaks. These generally give you a whole hour, which is a lot if you can make good use of it. Yes, this does possibly mean sacrificing time talking with coworkers or classmates, but when your time is restricted, you have to put your priorities in order and decide what you're going to put above and what below. If you really want to learn Japanese, it's inevitable that you're going to have to change something about your current lifestyle. This applies to any discipline that takes a consistent routine, like learning an instrument, studying for a big and difficult exam, and so on, so you might be more familiar than you think with this kind of attitude.

And this might not be morally appropriate advice, but studying Japanese during class or work is more than valid. Especially if what you do in those places is boring! If you think you can get by paying less attention to your responsibilities then it might be useful with a tight schedule, but it generally generates more anxiety and chaos than it's worth.

And obviously, there's the weekends. Prepare to sacrifice time out with your friends and family to study Japanese. When you have little time during the week, then this is pretty much the only way left. If you spend a lot of time playing games that aren't part of your Japanese learning, cut that out too. It's not necessary to stop doing it entirely, but if you play videogames that are not in Japanese 30 hours a week, and then you say you have no time to study Japanese, then you're doing something wrong. If being so disciplined all of a sudden is too challenging, ease yourself into it little by little. Start cutting out unnecessary stuff 30-60 minutes at a time. Make yourself some tea and get some cookies for your Japanese reading sessions. Post about your language discoveries on social networks. Make your study time as enjoyable as possible. Because if you're not enjoying what you're doing, then why are you doing it?

Conclusion

Read Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese or the MoeWay guide to quickly learn the basic building blocks of Japanese, then get to reading and listening native content, and do it a lot. Use tools like Kamui, Game2Text, or Yomininja for extracting text from videogames, and look up definitions and readings for words either with the tools integrated into these software or with a popup dictionary like Yomitan or 10ten Japanese Reader.

Use all tools at your disposal to break down the text you're reading, and try your best to actively understand it. Learning is different from reading for entertainment. You need to read deeply, not just a lot. But know when to shift your focus from needle-sharp to ocean-wide.

Use Anki to build a deck of flashcards out of the new words you come across, and do your Anki reps every day. Make sure you're able to do it every day, so if you need to lower down the intensity to catch up then go ahead. Also make a habit out of reading/listening.

Play games in Japanese at least a couple hours a week, and increase your playtime as you start getting used to the act of reading Japanese. Reading a little bit every day isn't enough, make sure that when you get to reading you make it count, and you are actually making an effort at understanding and learning new things with each reading session.

A lot of shallow reading isn't going to get you very far, but consistent learning-focused reading in any measure is sure to make you improve.

To keep these habits up, sleeping well is highly recommended. If you don't sleep well, you don't have energy to live, and any habit you try to build will quickly fall apart. However, if you sleep well, and make an effort of doing so every single day, you'll feel like you can do anything, even if it initially seems like you're cutting your study time short.

If you're on a busy schedule, set your priorities straight, and if Japanese is high on the list, slowly start cutting out time from the lower priorities and move it towards Japanese.

And above all, enjoy yourself.

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.

Textractor

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.

JL

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.

Game2Text-Lightning

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

Empty words coming from the mouths of those who don't know Japanese.

I learned Japanese almost exclusively from playing videogames, watching anime, and reading manga, and I'm here to tell you it's not only possible, but it's also the best way to learn Japanese.
I've met many Japanese learners across my journey, and the best all have one thing in common: they had fun while doing it, and they spent most of their "study" time (if you can call it that) consuming content in Japanese.

There is this excellent video by Game Gengo which goes into extensive detail on how to go about this, so I'll be fairly brief and focus on my personal journey rather than specific methods.

You can also read my other article, which focuses on specific methods and on lifestyle and mindset choices optimal for having a good time while learning Japanese.

Some 7 or 8 years ago, I had started realizing how bad a lot of game translations were, and how many issues were introduced in localizations, such as cut content and censorship. On top of that, I was finding out about all sorts of cool untranslated games, but I obviously had no way to play them properly without understanding the language. So fed up with this whole situation, I decided I better start learning Japanese.

After looking at some online guides on how to approach this venture, I went right into the action.

First, I memorized kana using a simple online tool that makes you type out their pronunciation. Grinding this for a few hours a day, for a couple days in a row is enough to get you started. Being able to read them fast requires lots and lots of reading, though, so don't get hung up studying kana just because you can't fluently read them. You'll get faster the more you read real text.

Then, I started reading Tae Kim's Guide so I could get a grasp of the basics of grammar. There is a lot of information in this guide, so you obviously won't be able to fit it all in your head at once, but it's not necessary. Skimming through the whole thing, while paying special attention to the earlier parts is enough to get you familiarized with the basic building blocks of Japanese, so you can get started consuming content as soon as possible. You will still not understand most grammar for a long time to come, but knowing about the existence of some of these things will allow you to more easily look up explanations when you come across them through reading.
It took me about 2 weeks of reading the guide for a couple hours every day to get through the whole thing. Even though I only knew kana, I learned some kanji along the way which show up in some of the explanations.

After all that, I was ready to actually start learning.
I began by reading Yotsubato, a manga commonly recommended to beginners (I recommend it, too!), and going through a pre-made Anki deck of Japanese vocabulary. The deck was called "Core 2k/6k", but there are likely some better ones nowadays. You can get some here.

I only read a few volumes of Yotsubato, but I soon started playing some games in Japanese. I was a fan of RPG Maker and Wolf RPG Editor games, since they were short, generally easy to understand due to their simple stories, and they were often compatible with texthooker software such as Textractor, which allow you to extract text from games live as you play it, making it very easy to look up words you don't know using a popup dictionary like 10ten Japanese Reader or Yomitan. Console games with furigana are also great, since they allow you to easily look up any kanji word even if you don't know the kanji. I spent many hours playing games on my 3DS in class due to this, but that's another story.

A few months after I began using Anki I had reached a sizeable amount of vocabulary from the pre-made deck I was doing, but it was getting pretty boring, so I decided to start doing what is referred to as "mining": building your own deck out of words you find in the content you consume, as if you were mining ore out of rocks.

This is where something like Yomitan, which I mentioned previously, becomes incredibly useful, as it allows you to add any word you look up with it to Anki with a single click. Putting many of these elements together, you can build yourself a nice workflow where you get text from games as you play them, add words you don't know to Anki with just a click, and do Anki every day reviewing the cards you yourself created from the games you were playing.

Here you can see a typical mining workflow. I'm using Yomitan with the Jitendex dictionary file, Textractor with the "Copy to Clipboard" extension enabled, and the Clipboard Inserter browser extension so copied text gets automatically pasted onto this site.

I kept learning like this for several months, although I didn't have a structured routine outside of Anki so I was on shaky foundations. After a while, I lost my impulse, and I stopped doing anything other than Anki and watching anime (with English subs) for a long time. I wanted to play these crazy console JRPGs that were never going to see the light of day in the West, but looking up words from them was too difficult and tedious, and the complexity of the story and dialogue meant it was pretty much impossible to learn through them without an easy mining workflow.

For example, if I wanted to play a 3DS game that had no furigana, in order to look up kanji I had to use the drawing utility in Google Translate to manually draw every single kanji I couldn't read (or a radical picker utility like the one found on Jisho) then copypaste the result into a dictionary, and then add it to Anki. If I was doing this on my phone, adding a word to Anki was nowhere near as simple as doing it on PC, also.

And this is making the bold assumption I was able to draw the kanji or pick its components correctly in the first place. As a beginner you have no idea how these characters are composed, and you start out by memorizing the general shapes, so this makes it very hard to use a structured method to look them up. Even if you do have the necessary basic knowledge, sometimes the text on a game is tiny, blurred, pixelated, or all 3 at once, so it becomes impossible to make out the composition of the kanji unless you can already recognize it by shape and context alone.

Having lost my motivation, I almost completely stopped practicing reading in Japanese, even though I knew perfectly well that's all I had to do to get better. Nearly 2 years went by, and I decided I had to finish what I started.
Having a somewhat better level than what I had left off from, due to a lot of passive input, very occasional reading, and a year of Anki, I decided to start dedicating time to reading visual novels.

Visual novels are very popular for Japanese learning, since they mix together many elements that make them perfect for it:

• Easily hookable: Most VNs from the 2000s onwards are compatible with texthookers, which makes it very easy to look up words from them compared to other game genres.

• Lots of voices: Generally, the dialogue in VNs for all characters but the protagonist (and sometimes even the protagonist) is voiced, which is a luxury most videogames can't afford. This makes them like a mix of games, anime, and books, all in a single package, and it's very useful for practicing listening at the same time you practice reading.

• High variety and difficulty range: In this genre you can find anything from the most casual slice of life to the most hardcore political drama science fiction, allowing you to gradually expose yourself to harder and harder material within the same medium. Additionally, visual novels tend to make heavy use of narration (as opposed to dialogue), something not often found in games, manga, or anime. This type of text tends to be more difficult than dialogue due to its more literary nature, and getting exposed to this sort of text earlier can massively increase your comprehension of easier texts. It's like reading a novel in terms of difficulty, but more fun and easier to figure out what's going on due to visuals and audio.

The downside is that they tend to take a very long time to finish (especially when your reading speed is not that great yet), and since they're more like books rather than videogames, they often have no gameplay, which might make them excruciatingly boring for someone who just wanted to play games. Regardless, since I decided this was the fastest way to learn Japanese, I pushed onwards.

After some months of having restarted my Japanese journey, and reading and mining from visual novels (and doing Anki) every single day without miss, I took and passed JLPT N1, the highest level of the most popular Japanese language exam.

This took around 3 years, but I know it could've been done faster if I had a good routine and knew how to keep my motivation up. Although I don't think it's a competition, and there is little point to comparing times or speeds, I know that in my case, a lot of this time was spent worrying, being frustrated, and stressing out over not doing what I had to do to learn. If I had spent all that time actually just reading Japanese stuff, regardless of the difficulty or medium, regardless of whether it was the "fastest" or "most optimal", not only would I have gotten there faster, but I would've had much more fun in the process.

I believe that the best way to learn anything is by having fun, and the more fun you have, the more you learn. After seeing a friend going through the same struggles I had while learning Japanese, especially having trouble mining from videogames (and he really doesn't want to play visual novels either), I started exploring solutions, until it ended up in a project I named Kamui.

Kamui is an all-in-one toolkit for mining from videogames. It removes the complexity of existing tools by putting everything in a single place with no previous setup required.
With Kamui I want to remove the technological barrier to learning Japanese from games. You shouldn't need to do research for hours or days on end and download a bunch of weird programs and scripts just so you can mine from a videogame.
I also want to make videogame mining more accessible to all learners. Many, like myself, end up frustrated by the difficulty of mining from games, and end up choosing mediums which are easier to mine from, like books or visual novels, but this isn't always the most fun for them, and can result in a complete loss of motivation.

But, things can be more fun.

If you want to know more, you can check out Kamui by clicking here.

I wish you the best of luck at learning Japanese!