A few days ago, my spouse and I got a Nintendo Switch. I had been wanting one since before it came out. This month we had a little extra money, and we decided to get one for ourselves for her birthday, Valentine’s Day, and my birthday combined. All three of these are in February, so it seemed a good reason to make such a big purchase (for us). I use games to work on my Japanese, and the Nintendo Switch is region-free. This means it will work on games from anywhere in the world. In theory, it also means that my spouse (who is not learning Japanese) can use it also to play games in English. It turns out that it works this way in practice as well. Here is what I learned in my adventures in setting up our Nintendo Switch for games in Japanese and English.

Set up your Nintendo eShop Account(s)

Before you even begin to set up your Nintendo Switch, it is a good idea to set up your Nintendo eShop account or accounts. You can get started without one, but if you are going to buy games online and access all of the features, you will need one anyway. You do this online on your computer. You may be able to do it on the console, but I could not work out how to do that, and it is just as easy to do it on the computer.

The site for the United States is here.

If you want to be able to access the eShop of another country, you will have to go to that country’s site. The Japanese eShop is here. If you want to set up an account for another country, you will need to say that you are in that region. Don’t worry, they will not check to see where you really live. If you want to set up accounts in more than one region, you will need to use different email addresses for each of them.

Set up your Nintendo Switch

Setting up the Nintendo Switch is really easy. You basically turn it on and follow the instructions. It will give you a choice of language and region right away. You will want to set up your region for the first account that you want to use. The language that you use for the console does not matter all that much. It will determine the default language that your games will appear in when you open them, but it is really easy to change the language of the game once you begin. I set most of my electronics to Japanese, but as I am sharing the Switch with my spouse, it is in English.

If you are only setting up one User account in one language, you are finished after this step. If you are sharing your console, or want more than one country’s eShop, you need to set up another account. Before you do that, you will want to be sure to set up your first eShop account on your console.

Add Another Account

To have access to more than one country’s eShop, you will need multiple User Accounts. You will also need to switch the region on your console, at least temporarily. In order to do so, follow these steps.

1. First, go to System Settings. That is the little cogwheel next to the Sleep Button on the main screen.

2. Once you are there, scroll to the bottom of the left-hand-column to where it says System, and you will find this screen.

3. Change your region to the one you want. When you change the region, you will be prompted to restart the console.

4. Set up your next user account. As you can see, there are three user accounts on ours, one for my spouse and two for me. I have two accounts so that I can access the eShop for the U.S. as well as the one for Japan. For reasons that I will explain later, you may want to have an account for the eShop of the country you live in even if you plan on only playing games in Japanese (or another language).

5. Set up the eShop for this User account.

6. When you are done adding User accounts, change your settings back to whatever you would like. Once the eShop is set up for each User, they will be able to access the eShop of their account, regardless of the region it is in.

Go Shopping

Now that you have your accounts, you are ready to go shopping. The Japanese eShop will be in Japanese, even if you have your console set to English. As I am buying games for the purpose of improving my Japanese, this is not a problem.

I did run into a different problem, though. The Japanese eShop would not take my credit card because it only accepts credit cards from Japan. I was frustrated and upset, thinking that I would not find anything to play (I have a personal rule that I do not play video games in English), and I would have to buy physical games from Japan…which would take some time to get, and I would have to save up for them.

But….

It turns out there was a solution. If you are looking for games from Japan, there is a site called Play Asia that sells pre-paid eShop codes for different regions. I tried that, and it worked just fine!

Added Bonus

When I bought my first game, Final Fantasy IX, I found there was an added bonus. It seems that the game I bought was available in several different languages, including English! Also, each user can play the game and save their progress in whatever language they want to without affecting the other User accounts at all.

There are other languages available on this version as well. For example, if my spouse wanted to work on her Spanish using this game, she would be able to.

For many games with multi-language support, you can change the language in-game. There are some, however, which will only play in the language that the console is in. You can change the language of your console in the same place that you changed your region. Changing the language on your console does require a restart, but it is easy enough to do. If you are sharing your console with someone else, you can always change it back when you are done playing.

Using Multiple eShops

As exciting as the discovery that my game was in multiple languages, I worried that perhaps I went through all of the trouble to get the pre-paid card and use the Japanese eShop for nothing. This is because I found that Final Fantasy IX was in the U.S. eShop as well.

You can actually find games with multi-language support in the U.S. eShop. For example, I found one called Cat Quest.

It turns out, though, that it was a good thing that I bought Final Fantasy IX in the Japanese eShop. Even though the Japanese version supports English, it turns out that the U.S. version does not support Japanese.

So, I learned two lessons from this:

1. Check the U.S. eShop first. See if the game is available and if it supports Japanese (or whatever your target language is). Unfortunately, the console will not allow screenshots of the eShop, but the supported languages of the game are listed right below the description.

2. If the same game is in multiple regions, do not assume that both regions support the same languages.

Enjoy your game!

The Nintendo Switch is really cool! You will have a lot of fun and improve your language skills as well. I am so very happy that Nintendo decided to make this console region-free!