About this site

My three main hobbies are studying Japanese, playing video games, and hoarding useless data — so over the past few years I've acquired a few Japanese video game scripts and text dumps that I use to generate study materials from. This website exists to host the dumps that I've created myself and to link to the resources and tools I use, in case they're useful to any other Japanese learners or interested fans.

What is a text dump?

A text dump is a raw list of text strings extracted from the files of a video game. It will inevitably include fun things like the game's script and other character dialogue, but is generally not presented in a logical order to tell the story, might not include information about who is speaking or where the text appears, and may contain a lot of extra garbage (such as game code, variables, and dummy text) that makes it difficult to read.

How do I learn with these?

While viewing a dump in your browser, you can follow along with a game as you play by Ctrl+F-ing a section of dialogue, and use a browser extension like 10ten Japanese Reader to segment sentences and look up unknown words. You can also search the dump for individual words or grammar forms you've learned in order to find in-game usage examples.

Because these texts were designed to be read by a piece of software and not a human being, perhaps their best use is as corpora for generating study materials from. I personally use cb's Japanese Text Analysis Tool to generate frequency lists of vocabulary and kanji from raw text dumps, and renshuu.org's Text Analyzer to identify grammar points. I also like to do searches of my whole dumps folder using Notepad++, as it will show all usage examples across all my game scripts at once and (in bilingual CSVs) will display the English translations alongside the results.