Well, as I've said here before, being born in South America, with the exception of some releases from SNK and Sega through Tec Toy, I've played all games up to the beginning of the 7th generation without understanding a word of the languages used in it (be it English, Japanese or any other).
With time, one begins to understand that "はい" and "yes" are the equivalent to "sim" in Portuguese and that "いいえ" and "no" mean "não", but in order to play RPGs, some action games and even point and click adventures, we used to resort to huge magazines we called "Detonados" (or "detonated") that were step-by-step manuals explaining how to beat the game from begining to end (all spoilers included, haha).
As far as I know, the first console game released in Brazil fully translated in Portuguese since the mid 90's was (for some reason) Viva Piñata for the Xbox 360 in December 2006! I remember all the gaming websites and magazines making a huge fuzz about it back then.