izigame.me

3/10 - As a game, it's awful. As an educational resource, it's a little less than mediocre. Recommended for kids aged 6-9 or for people who REALLY need to have some kind of other activity to motivate them in their language learning journey.

And now... wamekitateru...

GAMEPLAY
This isn't the type of game you buy for gameplay. That doesn't excuse the gameplay being tedious and boring with clunky interfaces, godawful combat, a godawful world map, borderline pointless side quests, and a bare bones RPG experience, but it does mean the game has to BRING IT as an educational resource to be in any way valuable.

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE
And... as an educational resource... it doesn't exactly fail, but it also isn't amazing. The primary goal of this game is to teach you the Japanese hirigana writing system, and for the most part, it does that. Mostly through repetition. Lots, and lots, and lots of repetition. It's exactly the same type of repetition you'd get through using flash cards, in fact. So... why not just use flash cards? There is nothing you can get from this game that you can't get from any other resource that teaches the hirigana writing system.

The battles themselves aren't completely worthless, as they do give you repetition that can help you learn the hirigana, but I don't think the battles/repetition are as effective as they could be. As you wander around the map, you engage in random encounters with hirigana that you must get correctly. The problem is that there are maybe six or seven groups of 2-4 hirigana that you encounter on any given map, always in the same groups with the same other hirigana, and it rarely mixes it up by throwing in characters from earlier lessons. Add to this that the responses you give are always listed in the same order and you can pretty much just muscle memory some of the answers by remembering where they are on the chart rather than actually learning that the symbol stands for "ne" or "no" or whatever syllable it's supposed to be teaching you.

There are also some side lessons that can teach you Japanese vocabulary, but they exist more as study resources until the godawful endgame. There are no quizzes for the Japanese vocabulary lessons, and aside from a few side quests where they are actually important, you are almost never encouraged to engage with them through the gameplay. (Having to go to a shop to buy a manga and having all the shop's items written in hirigana was a notable exception, as it was VERY effective and something this game desperately needed more of.) Yes, the game presents you with the information, but it does almost nothing to help you learn that information. You'd get the same impact, again, from flash cards, or just buying a Japanese/English dictionary and practicing through repetition. There is no point to putting information in A GAME if the gameplay is going to do nothing to help you learn the information. The literal purpose of an educational game is to teach THROUGH GAMEPLAY.

THE GODAWFUL ENDGAME
Which brings me to the godawful endgame. Up to the endgame, the gameplay has focused on teaching you hirigana through repetition. Not necessarily ineffective, but very boring. It presents the hirigana and expects you to translate a single syllable into romanji, or it presents the romanji and expects you to translate it into hirigana. Aside from a handful of dull side quests which occasionally have you engage in a more meaningful way and lessons that show you Japanese words, and then don't have you do anything with that information, this is the gameplay.

Until the endgame. You are now expected to translate words written in hirigana... directly into English. I cannot overemphasize how awful this endgame is. Should you learn the basic Japanese words it's presenting you with if you want to learn Japanese? Yes. It's kind of a requirement. But THE GAME did NOTHING to help you get to that point aside from showing you the words and saying, "Study these on your own." Not only that... but the whole purpose of this game... IS TO TEACH YOU HIRIGANA! You would think that at some point before direct translation of hirigana words into English, the game would present you with the challenge of trying to translate full words into their romanji phonetic pronunciations, a culmination of everything you have learned thus far. But it doesn't. It just expects users to direct translate hirigana into English after doing the barest minimum of showing you what the word means in English once... ten lessons ago. That is NOT how an educational game should logically and rationally build up to that skill. If the game's goal was to get you to that point, it needed to do more interactive exercises with words to get the learner TO that point. Again, the purpose of an educational game is to use THE GAMEPLAY to teach, not to present the information and then say, "Study it yourself." If someone wanted to study it themselves, they would have just studied it themselves, they wouldn't have bought A GAME to HELP them learn it.

So once again, in its endgame, the game fails to be more useful than any other educational resource available for learning Japanese, and can be argued to be actively detrimental.

STORY AND CHARACTERS
Skkkkkiiiiiiiippppp... Never before have I been so enamored with the "skip" button.

THE GAMEPLAY INTERFERES WITH LEARNING
Not only is this game an awful RPG, but the RPG aspects interfere with learning. You can lose a battle not because you gave a wrong answer, but because you haven't bothered leveling up your character's armor and weaponry or you didn't buy enough health packs or revives. It has nothing to do with learning, you just lose because you can't be bothered to give a crap about the RPG because it's soooooooo mediocre and sooooooo bare bones.

There's also a problem wherein the gameplay becomes so repetitive and boring you actively don't want to keep engaging with it. It's not exciting to learn a new language when you defeat "ri," "ro," and "ru" effortlessly for the twenty-seventh f****** time.

GLITCHES
It ran fine.

OVERALL
I give this game a 3/10, which is a shame, because there aren't a lot of educational resources like this on Steam. Unfortunately, I love the idea of this game more than I love the actual game. To its credit... it CAN teach you hirigana. To its detriment, it's not a good game, and the educational aspects could be a lot more effective. I really only recommend this for kids aged 6-9 and people who REALLY need some kind of guided activity to help them study. You're not getting anything more effective here than any other educational resource out there.