I started playing visual novels heavily when I was in college (majoring in Japanese, as a matter of fact). My formal studies gave me a strong grammatical framework and pushed me to improve in areas not needed for getting through a game--i.e. writing/composition, conversational skills, translation, etc.
But honestly, playing games actually did more to expand my vocabulary and my reading ability than anything else. I used AGTH initially, and it made a huge difference. My advice to anyone starting off with a text hooker is to force yourself to look up individual words. Don't rig it so that it spits out machine translations, and don't copy-paste entire sentences. Just keep looking up the compounds you don't understand, so you have to think for yourself about how those units of meaning fit within the overall context of the story/dialogue/sentence. I would say that you need to have at least an intermediate understanding of grammar for this method to be relatively frustration-free, though.
Everyone learns differently and is motivated by different compulsions--in my case, I have always been a huge bookworm, and that simply carried over into being super motivated to read Japanese novels and visual novels, even when I had to look up tons of words and the going was slow.
I do think that visual novels + AGTH are an amazing learning tool! You can start off with stories that are closer to your level of vocab/grammatical ability (not to mention your supply of patience), and gradually work your way to more esoteric fare. Attractive CGs and great music keep things interesting even when your reading pace is slow. Voice acting + accompanying text really helps build up listening and reading comprehension skills at the same time. Text generally appears a few lines at a time, which is less overwhelming to beginners than giant paragraphs or full pages. And it gives you a minor sense of accomplishment each time you click to the next section of text.
The most important part is that you can hook key words/kanji, and look them up quickly enough that it doesn't interrupt the flow of your reading. Browser extensions like Chrome's rikaikun have a similar function and are great for trying to read online articles or stories (although this kind of material is less immersive than a game).
When I started playing games with vocabulary totally outside the realm of anything I'd learned in class (e.g. fantasy/sci-fi/historical stuff), I'd create lists of unfamiliar words/compounds/phrases, especially ones that came up repeatedly. This was an interesting exercise, but I never really studied from the lists. Instead, I found that I learned new vocabulary (and quirks of speech/grammar)
without making any conscious effort. I didn't play games feeling like I was studying; I didn't try to memorize every new word I came across; I was simply obsessed with getting to the next part of the story. Along the way, because I looked them up over and over, I absorbed the meanings of frequently recurring words. It was a sort of learning by osmosis that felt virtually effortless, because it happened naturally in the process of devoting hours to one of my favorite hobbies (reading). I learned the most frequent--and therefore, the most arguably important--words the fastest.
Eventually, the passive, organic expansion of my vocabulary/comprehension enabled me to stop using text hookers and start reading print novels etc. without having to bother to look up words.
tl;dr--
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Originally Posted by Hemisphere
If you're interested in learning Japanese, don't think about it and just do it. By that I mean, find something that you're passionate about/can get passionate over that's JP related, then slowly work your way up in learning the language.
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Ding ding ding ding. My sister became amazingly proficient in Korean in a very short time span by obsessively watching K-dramas while starting to study Korean in a formal context at her university.