I'm asking because MLB Power Pros is one of my favorite game series of all time due to the quirky success mode.  The RPG, Cutscene choices, Baseball combo is just to off the wall and great.

Want to play more of it, so i'm considering getting Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2012 and a Japanese to american dictionary and just struggle through it, writing down what i can when I get to it.

Seems like it might be super time intensive and a pain though, so I'm wondering if anyone else has tried it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8hNjm1WYBU&feature=youtu.be

It would be an utter nightmare. Don't do it.

I remember when I had only been learning Japanese for around two years or so and tried to play some rpgs (Tales of the tempest and A.S.H) in Japanese and it was such a hassle that instead of enjoying the games it simply turned into a laborious work exercise.

Firstly you won't just need a dictionary. You will also need a grammar dictionary. As simply knowing what the main words in a sentence are could still mean you get the opposite meaning.

If you don't read Hiragana/Katakana or any Kanji then looking things up you are simply going to have to go by how they look which will take an eternity.

I don't know how extensive the story mode in that game is, how much dialogue etc. However if there is even a reasonable amount and you want to actually understand the gist of things then it will be less like playing a game and far more like work.

If you do decide to go ahead with it then I would recommend downloading a program called Wakan. It's an utterly brilliant free Japanese - English dictionary for your computer.

EDIT: Am watching the video you posted. Kinda hard to tell how much dialogue etc is in the game from it. If most of it is just set menus then you can probably manage it as learning a limited amount of words is quite easy. I would strongly recommend learning Katakana though. You can learn it in a few days and it will allow you to read the foreign words put into Japanese. For example power becomes pawaa, Slide becomes suraido etc.

I don't know how words are listed in Japanese-English dictionaries, but if it's like in a regular Japanese dictionary it would be a poain, because it is listed by alphabetical order even though they don't use the alphabet. So when you look at the kanji you have no idea of how to pronounce it and therefore you can't look for it.

In a kanji dictionary the kanji are listed by number of strokes, but that would also be a pain, plus you only get the meaning of the isolate kanji, whereas the whole word may contain several and it would be difficult to guess the word's meaning just from each kanji's meaning.

Perhaps in a Japanese-English dictionary there's a much better way of finding stuff though, I don't know.

Also, since it's about baseball I guess many terms are in katakana, which can be read easily. Each "letter" is a syllable, so you can learn it quickly and most baseball terms would be in English.

It's pretty much ALL dialog, but it's like a short scenario of dialog... essentially I can play through the mode I play in a single day.  Most of it repeats, but there are some random events that happen rarely... and differet sideplots.

I figure it'd take about 8 playthroughs to get everything down, so about 16-42 hours in already translated time.

As an example I played that mode enough times to fill about 6 baseball teams in the last english game.

It'd be more "suffering through it" the first couple weeks to enjoy it for the next few years.  (Still playing power pros 2008 today.)

Example of a lets play, so mostly text, but done to set the groundwork, if possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOZutu3POpU

oh konami kinda did a westernised version of their baseball for xbox live I not sure if it is available on any other platform

http://www.konami.com/games/mlbbobbleheads

Yeah, i saw that.  Unfortunitly it's missing the signature Power Pros mode.

Yea that's a lot of speech man. Even just getting a vague idea of it would take a huge amount of time. If you just ignored the speech it would be quite doable. With that stuff you are looking at utterly comical amounts of time. 

I don't think you are quite grasping just how difficult it is to read a different language you don't know. Especially one not based around the same alphabet. I mean just try and read an article on a Japanese website without copying any text using an automatic translation tool etc. That's what it will be like on a console. 

I mean when a kanji comes up without any furigana on it what would you do? The easiest way to look them up is by knowing the radical and stroke count. However neither of those things are obvious if you don't know them before hand. Often some things that look like two strokes are actually one etc. 

No, but i played Star ocean blue sphere without a dictionary which is much worse

Sounds quite a daunting task. But if it works out it could be a good way to start learning proper Japanese.

Why i asked.  With the same alaphabet it's pretty easy.  Different letters wasn't sure.

Ah well.... worse comes to worse maybe i'll just try and learn the whole language.  Have had awful expeirences with it before, but a different alphabet might make it easier for me.