Are there any RPGs on Famicom that are in English?

[P]

Oh wow two years of Mandarin then you shouldn't have much trouble learning kanji! Yeah the stroke order is pretty much the same but there are some small exceptions here and there. For example 右 and 有 have a special stroke order in Japanese. Both have the upper vertical line drawn before the upper horizontal line while in Chinese they are drawn like you expect them to (左 however is drawn like normal in Japanese too). I also noticed that sometimes some kanji have one more or less strokes then it has in (traditional) Chinese. So there are some small differences but it probably won't be a problem when you are reading.

What you can do if you can't find a kanji with radical lookup or by drawing lookup on an electronic dictionary is to look it up in a Chinese online dictionary  and then copy & paste it to a Japanese online dictionary like jisho.org, it usually works.

Edit: You can start by learning hiragana and katakana if you don't know them already, it should be a breeze for you. It can be learned in your free time in two weeks or so if you spend a few minutes on for example http://www.realkana.com/ every day.

[vv52]

Oh wow two years of Mandarin then you shouldn't have much trouble learning kanji! Yeah the stroke order is pretty much the same but there are some small exceptions here and there. For example 右 and 有 have a special stroke order in Japanese. Both have the upper vertical line drawn before the upper horizontal line while in Chinese they are drawn like you expect them to (左 however is drawn like normal in Japanese too). I also noticed that sometimes some kanji have one more or less strokes then it has in (traditional) Chinese. So there are some small differences but it probably won't be a problem when you are reading.

What you can do if you can't find a kanji with radical lookup or by drawing lookup on an electronic dictionary is to look it up in a Chinese online dictionary  and then copy & paste it to a Japanese online dictionary like jisho.org, it usually works.

Edit: You can start by learning hiragana and katakana if you don't know them already, it should be a breeze for you. It can be learned in your free time in two weeks or so if you spend a few minutes on for example http://www.realkana.com/ every day.

Awesome, so the stroke order is very similar, that will be a lot of help. The website you linked to is great, I would have never found that, thanks! I already have ten hiragana characters memorized after about 5 minutes!

[P]

Good job! Continue to do that every day and you'll recognize all of them very soon. Then you can start reading Japanese words you encounter here and there just for practising reading. Famicom games have lots of kana you can practice on even if you don't understand anything. Heck you can even look up words in menus and such when you can read them (full sentences is another question though). As soon as you have learned kana you should avoid romaji at all cost. For example avoid dictionaries with romaji (romaji-input on computers are perfectly OK though, it's even used by the Japanese). It's slow in the beginning but you will be thankful you did later on. I know someone who always wrote down glossary and even full texts in romaji even after several years of study and he had some real trouble reading kana, especially katakana. It can be compared to always using pinyin when reading and writing Chinese.

You could also try practicing to write kana on a paper (stroke order can easily be found online). The stroke order rules are the same as for kanji and I think the only exception is も (mo). It has the vertical line drawn first.