LogFAQs > #976557634

Learn Japanese to Survive: Hiragana Battle (Steam)

I've had these in my library for years but I recently got the itch to start studying a bunch of language-and-related stuff again for miscellaneous reasons and they very much fall into the "try everything and see what sticks" wheelhouse. This game definitely doesn't do much of anything to differentiate itself from its perception as a rather lackluster meme game, which is superficially evident by virtue of basically all the assets being pre-made RPG Maker stuff and the writing for the "plot" being nothing special.

One of the complaints I saw the most while superficially looking into this game was that it was "too grindy"; in my experience it wasn't grindy like Dragon Quest where you HAVE to grind to survive and progress, more grindy like Mother 1 where the encounter rate is too damn high so even if you're not worried about dying the battles start feeling like a chore.

This relates to the system the game tries to use to teach you hiragana, which is selecting the equivalent latin script syllable from a list to attack the japanese script enemies. Since this includes the entire hiragana syllabary including all the dakuten/handakuten variations, the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. The game kinda gets around this by just focusing on the latest stuff you've learned, which kinda defeats the purpose, and even if you really wanna keep practicing this way there's no good way to ensure that you'll get encounters with the characters you want to focus on. Aside from hiragana there's a few basic vocabulary lessons sprinkled in, though given that the game doesn't include any kanji or mention the different on'yomi/kun'yomi readings, it feels kinda pointless in the grand scheme of things, even if the final dungeon switches things up by making everything vocab focused even though by this point there's a good bit of vocab piled up with no prior opporunity to practice it.

Oh yeah, and you better save often because there are random crashes.

I guess I'll try the others which I've heard are an improvement. Unsurprisingly though this one rates pretty low in the japanese learning tools I've tried so far.