Worth a grab if you want to be nihongo jouzu

日本語は上手ですね〜

Very fun! Me and my girlfriend are looking to move to Japan in a few years but I haven't been as serious about learning the language as her. However, this has turned that around. It's a very fun game and understood easily. You really don't need any amount of Japanese to play - it's fun regardless. The game also proves the power of simply using context to get around when you're in a foreign country! I would recommend especially to those interested in starting Japanese.

TLDR: I've tried the first couple chapters of this game, and I like it quite a bit. If that opinion changes I'll return and update this review. Would love to see controller support added. Disclaimer: As noted above I'm still pretty early in the game, and that's because it works quite poorly with a controller, basically just letting you mimic a mouse with R3, which aggravates my wrist amost immediately. I'm not in a position to use a mouse for a bit, but I did not want to wait to post my recommendation since this is a brand new game. Two slightly separate reviews: As a game: Not a lot of actual gameplay here, but it does what it says on the tin. Audio is great, visuals are simple but executed well. Nothing in the first two chapters required moon logic or heavy mental lifting, other than matching japanese to english. As a learning tool: This game, like every other Japanese learning game I've seen to date, is essentially flash cards in a more engaging wrapper. This one is, in my opinion, a pretty fun way to do your flashcards of words you already know and/or mine some new vocabulary and kanji. If you want to actually learn and remember what you pick up here, I recommend you create outside flashcards for review. (If you need an easy way to do that, I recommend looking up how to generate Anki cards via Yomitan.) Or I suppose you could play the game over and over. I also recommend you learn hiragana and katakana before you play this and turn off romaji in the settings, thereby also giving you reinforcement in reading and remembering the kana. Quick aside for context on my perspective: I'm not yet to N5, having done a bit more than half of Genki 1, KKLC, Tango N5, and vocabulary mining in Anki from places like Supernative and Duo. The vocabulary and Kanji in the first couple chapters were already known to me so this was just review, but scrolling through the levels I do expect to pick up words I don't know yet.

Awesome! 10/10 But I'm gonna need a DLC just in case a 彼女 invites me to a ラブホテル

I find this game incredibly confused about why it was made and who it was made for. It's overwhelmingly tedious for puzzle game players, and it's borderline point-and-click nonsense for other players. It looks more like the devs want to showcase their shiny particle slicing algorithm rather than making a game actually fun or provide a learning experience to players. Let's see the various fundamental problems in the game none of the other reviews bother to mention:

Bad gameplay loop

The game is, fundamentally, 99% dragging highlighted particles around to match them. The problem: 90% of the time you're matching stuff that doesn't actually matter, because you have to match fundamental particles like -です and -ます for every single sentence, which is equivalent to having to go through "is" in "This is a tree" every time you see a sentence. Moreover, the game fails to provide novel objects to learn from. Why am I matching "Parking Spot", "Tree" and "Train" 40% of the time (which, by the way, "Parking Spot" requires 2 matches to finish because it's a compound word)? The game has a handful of objects that repeat way too frequently, and too many objects that appear too infrequently to make them matter. This happens hundreds, possibly over 1000 times throughout the whole game. The game is too slow, repetitive and tedious as a result.

Incomprehensible game logic

Part of the game is to match particles with one another; the other part is to find the particles in the first place. (This happens especially often in later chapters). The way the game provides you with the necessary particles is, frankly, point-and-click incomprehensible. Here are some examples: 1. -か question particle matching's gotta be the most insane thing I've seen. There are no particles around it you can find anywhere: the only way you can match it the first time is by dragging the "?" in the translated sentence row (which is showing as "?" because it's not finished yet) onto the -か. WTF? 2. You want to match 注意 in "大きい車に注意" (Be careful of big cars). Where do you find "carefully"? Nowhere except when clicking on a car coming by, as it says "The car is carefully entering the narrow road" (highlighted particles in bold). "The car is carefully entering" is completely different in context from "Be careful of big cars". 3. In chapter 3/4 suddenly the game throws at you いないいないばあ (peekaboo), after you get the いない particle. Are you sure this is actually about learning, and not just blinding matching patterns and clearly stuff brute-forced? 4. 押ボタン式 denoted 式 as "operation", which in this place should be "type" instead. 5. 小学 and 大学 are elementary school and university. They're being treated as if they're "small school" and "big school". This is something that only make sense if you know they're named that way in Japanese: 中学 means secondary school, but it's "middle school", and middle school means something completely different. (Not to mention "high school" is something that exists) 6. In a later level, you have to find a particle to match となり. It isn't available anywhere at first glance. So where are you finding it? By matching a sentence with 横 (side) first, get "next" from the translated sentence (which contains "next to"), and then use it to match となり! 7. Another example: there's a later level where you need to find "do" particle. You have two choices: - take the "do" inside "do not" from -ないで phrases earlier - Find the sentence "病院の外では、マスクをしてください" in the stage. Match して with "wear" (since in this sentence, して means "wear"). The "particle translation" beneath the kanjis/katas will show "do", which you take to match other things 8. There are also words with the same kata but different meanings (e.g いる can be 居る, 入る or 要る), and sometimes they match each other, sometimes they don't.

Useless Dictionary

The dictionary is frustrating to use for various reasons: 1. There are too many entries inside to navigate the dictionary, because it keeps all compound sentences appeared in the game. Do we really need every -がない and -ではない suffixed form of nouns inside? This dictionary is the definition of combinatorial explosion. After chapter 3 it's already impossible to find anything inside manually. Not to mention, duplicates are not removed. Given how you keep matching certain things all the time, you can bet how many times they appear in the dictionary. 2. Dictionary search uses mysterious result ordering that make you wish you don't have to use it. If I search "ima" I get, in this order:

• しま (island)
• い (exist )
• いま (now)
• いる (exist )
• いない (not exist )

Kana search should match the romaji divided by kana boundary. Searching "ima" should not result in "shima" over other things, because it is actually "shi | ma", and dividing words over their partial pronunciation is literally butchering the language. Not to mention, いま is a perfect match and yet it ranked 4th. In any reasonable searching system exact match should go above everything else. A more problematic example: if I search "ano" I get, in this order:

• 7 (seven)
• 七 (seven)
• 女 (woman)
• 男 (man)
• あの (that)

In what way are the first 4 items matched by "ano", even over a perfect match? The first 4 items don't even have an visible attribute that would match "ano". This is just pure nonsense. 3. Last but not least, the dictionary doesn't hide information you're not supposed to know yet. If you search "naka" for 中 when you don't have this information yet, the dictionary will still you the result.

Weird matching logic

As mentioned above, the game behaves very poorly when it comes to matching exact compound words (e.g dragging a チケットうりば over チケットうりばです doesn't matching the entire thing in one go), which mandates spending many matches matching their individual particles. But there are also ridiculous situations where you can technically match a particle with another, but because you used a incorrect form you partially matched the particle, which gives rises to very confusing situations. Examples include matching いま (今) over きょう (今日) (you get きょう as a result), or matching ない at ないで. Notably, they're fake solve states: they don't actually make any progress until you drag a correct form onto them, and properly solve the particle. The game at this point has devolved into "drag things onto other things and see if blue highlight appears", which is more of a mechanical task of seeing what sticks, than a learning experience.

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Overall, I have to ask: Why is this game treating language learning as a pavlovian task? Why are we doing the same thing 100 times, when 5 times is more than enough to make the point? Is this even a desirable "learning experience"? Can't we just stop matching the trivial stuff after, like 5 to 10 times? What's the point of having to do trivial stuff at chapter 10+, when we're dealing with more complex grammatical concepts? I was already bored at chapter 3 (out of 18!), and had to plow through the remaining chapters in agony. This game failed to provide what it promised.

This learning software is simply fantastic. YOU set the pace and YOUR personal repetition frequency. You can review chapters ANY time, just in case you are missing a word, which happens all the time. It is BETTER than reading a book (missing spoken language) It is BETTER than watching youtube classes (you can't set YOUR pace, repetitions and interests = zero degrees of freedom) It is intuitive and rewarding, as you are learning by playing. Oh, and i fogot the most important thing: It is fun! I want more now...DLC expansions: When? ;-)

I recommend So to Speak.

It's a good support to learn japanese. You can get a few vocabularies and learn them through context. Also, a bit of basic grammer is also good to understand with this. But I advice you to use other ressources and at least a little knowledge beforehand to really work with this software.

I've been anxiously waiting for this game's release, contextual learning is the best way for me to learn personally. I love this. Please support the developer.