I personally dislike Pokemon as a suggestion for an early video game to work on your Japanese skills. The no-kanji mode is fine for native speaking children (who learn the language in an entirely different method and order than adult JSL learners), but it is not only more difficult to use for JSL students than the age targeting would imply, but it's also not particularly useful experience since nothing is actually written that way outside of...well, Pokemon. Turning on the kanji mode (not available in earlier gens, probably since 3DS era?) is fine of course, but bumps the text difficulty up significantly, making it a lot less suitable for beginners. The real issue with trying to use kanji-mode Pokemon to learn is that the DS/3DS screens have such atrocious resolution, that you have almost zero chance of being able to look up kanji you don't already know. Entire radicals are condensed to single pixels due to the resolution constraints; it's fine and perfectly readable if you know your kanji already, but if you don't, it's truly awful to try and learn via anything on the DS/3DS.

Basically, you're forced to choose between the poor learning tool of no-kanji mode, or the unintelligible kanji rendering on the DS/3DS. Once we get Pokemon on the Switch, I'm sure that'll be a great learning tool, however.

As for what I would suggest as video games for early learners, something like Puyo Puyo Tetris (on anything but the 3DS, of course) or Taiko no Tatsujin V have story modes with elementary school/beginner-level dialogue, but they sidestep the issues Pokemon has. They use only very basic kanji (grade 1~3ish), actually have the resolution to represent them, and use furigana quite liberally. Their story modes are unfortunately quite short when compared to something like Pokemon, though.

Finding elementary-school level content that is both useful and engaging for an adult is always a struggle. It kind of sucks, but the best advice I can really give is to push through as hard as you can to middle-school level kanji and grammar so you can dig into something like a Tales RPG, which should be both a lot more interesting, and a lot more useful as a learning tool than a game aimed at little kids. I managed to get to that point after about ~6 months of studying for 1-2 hours a day, although I'm sure you could get there faster with more time invested.