>>11818364 (OP)
For me, it is buying japanese versions.
For whatever reason, my autistic ass really wanted to play SMT Devil Summoner for the Sega Saturn when I was like 13. I had to rely on poorly machine translated guides from jap sites back then and I understood jack shit, but somehow it clicked for me.
Roughly one year later I decided to learn japanese ( first casually by myself, then took lessons for 3 years ). Afterwards I continued buying exclusively japanese games through ebay. In 90% of cases any RPGs are cheaper in their jap form ( all final fantasy, dragon quest, megaten ). Due to this, I could get games such as Chrono Trigger and Panzer Dragoon Saga for pocket change coz almost no one cares about jap versions outside japan.
Now I'm 25 and roughly at N2 level vocabulary wise and maybe N3 speaking skills wise. There are still moments where I might stumble a bit with certain kanji in games , but the experience was overall very rewarding and made me experience things that most EOPs would never experience ( games like Tengai Makyo 2 and ore no shikabane wo koete yuke games ).
For example, I have roughly 50 super famicom games in my collection ( all sorts of games, FF games, castlevanias, metroid ... ), and in total all those games cost me probably around 200 bucks. I can assure you that those same games in their american form would've costed double , or even triple than what I paid for the jap versions.
