Then there's games where I want to play it, but can't get past a screen like the one in the attached screenshot:

[Alt text: Picture of Morrowind's custom class creation screen]

There's also untranslatable jokes.

There's the one in SaGa 2 that involves a student saying an English sentence, written in katakana (and in the DS remake, there's a grammar error of the sort only a Japanese learner of English would likely make); there's really no good way to translate that joke, so in the English version (Final Fantasy Legend 2) they had to make up a new joke that would work there (and I think they did a good job). (Side note: I think the English FFL2 is actually a good translation of its time, even if it does have the "Elixier" item, and it features illegal bananas that weren't bananas in the Japanese version.)

Undertale has jokes that would be difficult to translate. There *is* an official Japanese translation, and from what I hear, it's quite good, but that had to have been a challenging task. (They actually did so well that the Celeste devs hired the same translation firm to re-do Celeste's (originally horrible) Japanese translation.)

All rather reasonable.

This brought to mind the comic Office Box Poison, by the great Alex Robinson. (Mild spoiler)










One of the protagonists, who appears at the beginning as someone with some intellectual curiosity, starts working at a large bookshop. He starts suffering a severe burnout both with customers and, subtly implied, about books themselves

Those who read the book please refrain from spoiling it further for those who still are to read it... :)

Understandable.
Yes.

The choices that have to be made.

In a game like Morrowind, I feel like I don't know what skills the character will be using heavily until after the game is underway, so the need to choose right away leads to choice paralysis.

Also, Morrowind's leveling system (also used, in slightly modified form, in Oblivion) is just awful, and your choices of skill here is an issue.

(I think it would be better if these choices only affected the *starting* values of skills, not how quickly they raise or what skills determine character leveling.)