Learn Japanese kanji in this interactive role-playing game! No experience needed – start reading and writing in Japanese!
Very Positive
2 Steam reviews
| LANGUAGE | AUDIO | SUBTITLES | INTERFACE |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Y | Y | Y |
I good game to learn ♥♥♥, however surprisingly poorly optimized for something that looks so simple. The deeper you get in the game the longer the load times. Maybe it's a bug the developers won't fix for over a year.
An okay learning tool, but a glaringly flawed, frustrating disappointment.
Hiragana Battle and Katakana War are both miles better. My gripes don't lie in how it handles teaching, no; my gripes lie in the RPG system, believe it or not. You might think RPG systems would be irrelevant for an educational game, but they really impede the entire experience.
My main complaints are thus:
The enemies all scale to the level of the main character. Fine in concept, but only if you account for this in other areas. The devs did not.
For some reason, the devs had the ever-so-bright idea to disallow non-party members from gaining experience. Okay, so let's take that level 1 character to the starting area and - oh! She took double her maximum HP in damage, from the game's easiest enemy, no less. And what if she survives? Well, she gets like 3 experience which, for some reason, fills her level 1 experience bar up by like 2%. Yes: the experience needed to level up is based on the main character as well - EVEN IF THE CHARACTER IS LEVEL 1, YOU NEED TO BRING THEM INTO HIGH LEVEL, DANGEROUS AREAS AND WIN *SEVERAL* FIGHTS, KEEPING THEM ALIVE, JUST TO BE ABLE TO GET THEM TO LEVEL 2. To think the only way to get a level 1 character to level 11 is to get your level 20 main character to level 30 is just mind-bogglingly stupid. Furthermore, trying to balance the time you spend with party members leaves you with a far weaker party no matter who you select, in the end. I almost feel like it's a way to permanently softlock yourself IN AN EDUTAINMENT GAME. Come on!
It's atrocious design, and the more I think of it, the more angry I get: the prior 2 games had potential solutions to this mess:
Experience tables that were based on that character's current level. You know - basic stuff.
Crystals that increased your character levels, which could have easily been re-implemented in such a way that you could spend orbs etc. to bring low-level characters up to scratch, but no such thing exists.
This abysmal progression system pretty much forces you to pick a party from the beginning and stick with them. When a new character joins the party, they match your level, so if you'd rather they be in your party, immediately replace someone, and never return to the replaced party member again.
Aside from that, there's a bunch of questionable things about the game, such as the lack of achievements, enemies pretty much always outscaling the party in terms of speed (always going first), power increasing damage despite enemies always dying in one hit (so what is the point of damage numbers???), stores allow you to buy top-tier armor and weaponry the moment you unlock a tier-2 shop (which can be incredibly early), the list goes on.
It's a crying shame, because so far the story is interesting, and the characters are likeable, but knowing that you can't get invested in most of the characters (or see their affection cutscenes) if you're trying for a stable, smooth experience with the game, yeah this is such a bummer.
Kanji Combat is proof that rotten game design can utterly banjax something as simple as a basic RPG designed to help people learn something.
