Yotsubato - Good
White - Easy vocab, easy sentences. Don't listen to the "It has slang! You aren't prepared!", if the slang is common enough to show up in Yotsubato it's probably basic enough to warrant learning it.

Hanahira - Bad
White - There are like 5 lines in this visual novel that aren't spoken by middle school girls, which just about matches the level of Japanese you can expect from it. Don't cope about the colloquial grammar, it's just a bunch of ～ちゃう, you'll survive. Read this for a metaphysical boost in gains to the entirety of your Japanese journey.


Axanael -
Green - Haven't actually played this, but apparently it's like 95% voiced? Lots of action and snappy development, probably a fun read even if you're white.

Flyable Heart - SoL
Green - School life. Dropped it before the true route so I don't know if there were any advanced themes waiting at the end of it, but from what I've seen it's just extremely standard high school Japanese. You won't be missing much from going into it too early, so you might as well use it to level up to blue.


Rance Series - Masterpiece
Blue - Funny green man sexually harrasses cute anime girl gahahahaha. Has some of the best games ever made among its titles. Fantasy vocab might wreck you at the start, but that's really all there is to it. Do the whole series for N1.

Little Busters - Very good
Blue - 90% of it is SoL. It'll still clown on you if you aren't used to colloquial dialogues, but you might as well use it to acquire that exact aspect of Japanese. Not very punishing in regards to whitenoising. It does have a lot of sub-plots with missable plot strands and details, but that won't have much of an impact on your understanding of the main-plot.


Subahibi - Very good
Orange - Definitely one of the harder school-centered works, but still a school-centered work. I guess you can read it as a blue if you don't care about Scaji's philosophy (but then why are you even reading it?). Pro-tip: engage with the text, actually look up references and at least make an attempt to understand what it's trying to convey.

Sakuuta -
Orange - Same as above, also by Scaji. Easier than Subahibi thanks to a lack of schizo scenes, but not the kind of work you want to treat like some random piece of native material to study Japanese with.

Dies Irae - Very good
Orange - Not too bad for the most part, just a lot of chuuni dialogues and the occasional verbose action scene. If this is your first chuuni work get ready for a lot of non-standard speech patterns you haven't run into before.


Muramasa - Masterpiece
Red - Hard vocab, advanced (but 'proper') sentences, some technical (dry) parts. You can read this before red, but don't bother if you're just going to whitenoise past sentences you don't understand. It's philosophical fiction. Go for 100% comprehension or read something else.


Astelight - Good
Purple - Both the vocab and grammar are about as hard as it gets. Mareni is a prose stylist, he writes the exact opposite of 'proper' Japanese. If you aren't used to stuff like 「～を食べた、らその目を～」 and periods used for commas you're in the wrong place. The only 救い is that the subject matter itself remains fairly non-abstract and even maintains an impressive lack of schizo-ness, all things considered.

By this point the bottle-neck behind what you can and can't read becomes more complicated than just "Is your Japanese good enough?". There might be a red who could read Mishima while some purple couldn't. Remember that literature is more than just vocab and grammar: some works expect an understanding of the 当時 zeitgeist, some expect an understanding of mathematical metaphysics, some expect an understanding of continental philosophy. Even in the linguistic department you get niche specializations like kanbun, stream-of-consciousness rambling and highly specific technical vocabulary. Language branches out and proficiency becomes difficult to compare linearly.

Tl;dr: Figure out what YOU want to read and stop worrying about what it means to be "good" at Japanese. You'll quickly reach a point where you can read books many natives couldn't, and it'll have done nothing to prove your Japanese ability's superiority over theirs.


and dont ask me about listening or speaking im probably worse than you