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My cousin mentioned he beat a Japanese language RPG using the Google translate app. As I understand it, you hold your phone up to the TV and it "sees the Japanese" via your phone's camera & translates the text for you.

Any one else try this? I bet it's not perfect, but I found this very interesting. I've never heard/seen it brought up in relation to games.

I tried it for fun.

As someone who speaks some Japanese, let me tell you...

Game dialogue will not translate properly. Not even close. You'll get a "machine translation" that will not pick up on the nuances of the language.

However, it can help out with menus, item lists, and the like. In fact, I used the app in item shops during my last playthrough of Xak I & II. Helped clarify some of the sword names and whatnot.

Interesting. I'll have to ask him in more detail. He spent a few years in Japan often while in the military so maybe he speaks/reads more than I realized.

Sounds like it'd be good for games with English voice overs & Japanese menus. While not a RPG, Deep Fear Saturn JPN NTSC release immediately came to mind.

Your millage is especially going to vary with older games. Particularly with 16-bit (and god forbid 8-bit) stuff that has the more complex characters very pixilated, the camera feature is going to have a really serious problem reading most of them, and I'd imagine even a problem reading some of the stranger fonts of the more simple characters. I'd imagine you'd probably be fine with most newer games though, at least as far as actually recognizing the characters onscreen is concerned.

Like Bone said, it's going to be very far from perfect even in the best case scenario. For stuff like menus you should probably be alright, but as far as understanding what is going on at any given point, it's probably not going to give you either the clarity or the actual character recognition needed for something like that, unfortunately