On the PS Vita: What you can buy from the e-shop is determined by your account region. As far as I’ve heard, they don’t do anything to stop you from signing up for accounts in other regions. You can have multiple accounts, but you need to factory reset the Vita to switch between them, and keep a separate memory card for each account if you don’t want to lose all your save data. Physical game cards are not region-locked and can be played on any account, but the save data is locked to the account you started it on. And the gotcha I didn’t know about: games which come on physical game cards sometimes receive patches, but apparently a Japanese game on a UK account doesn’t receive them. I played Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth in Japanese on a UK account, and found out after completing the game that “New Game +” was missing…
Also on the Vita: Japanese games have the main two buttons the same way around as Nintendo, while Western games swap them. I’ve mostly been a Nintendo player, so the Japanese layout comes more naturally. I first played Cyber Sleuth in English with the Western button layout, felt it was a bit strange but got used to it. Months later, I started the game in Japanese with the Japanese button layout, and didn’t actually notice it had changed. Then when I opened up the English version again, I couldn’t use it. There is an option deep in the system settings to remap the buttons, but it swaps them for all games, so I’d need to go back in there and change it each time.
Now I’m considering getting a Switch Lite. Sounds like they also don’t stop you picking a different e-shop region; at least on the original Switch, you can use multiple accounts without losing your stuff; and alternatively you can also change the region on an existing account. Have people here done this and do you have any recommendations? Is there anything else I should know about?
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/22283/~/regional-compatibility-faq