Great Game

[-★- sevenfoodsandwich -★-]

I finished the demo, it was fun. I'll wish list it and hope for a sale soon.

Here are my thoughts/questions/suggestions, though some may already be addressed in the full game.

There weren't many let's plays on youtube of the full game, but I saw that it's got more voiced lines and Japanese than the demo. I understand if the explanations stay in English, but will the entirely of the story itself be Japanese on hard mode?

Control over learn speed and encounter rate is awesome, but I wish there was somewhere between the two highest settings. For awhile I had set it for every step, which was great for learning, but it hurt the enjoyment of the game so I turned it down one.

The encounter bar doesn't fade out if it's maxed, unfortunately, and not during cutscenes either. Playing with it maxed leveled me so much that every battle that probably should've been important ended in one hit.

The game crashed a lot more with it maxed, too, so I needed to save often to avoid losing progress.

Could certain opponents have a minimum amount of hits needed to defeat them, such as every attack on Lenore being capped to 20% HP at most? One hit killing bosses feels disappointing and 5 or more hits would feel more natural. Learning a lot is awesome, but being over powered isn't.

Currently there is 3 steps to the hiragana learned words dialogue where it goes voice+hiragana>romaji>english. To practise our listening skills could we have it in the following order of voice>hiragana>romaji>english by breaking it down into 4 steps?

On a side note, it amuses me that there's katakana in this games name. The bridge troll was also a funny way to break immersion and tell me the demo is finished. Thanks for making this, I'll come check out the kanji version on the discord when I've bought and finished it.

[studybunnygames]

Hello, thanks for playing the demo! I'll do my best to answer your questions!

More and more of the dialogue will change to Japanese as you go (based on what you've learned), but I don't attempt to make everything in Japanese. The game teaches 240+ words and a lot of grammar, and that allows for the majority of the later part of the game to be in Japanese, but not quite all of it.

Thanks for your comment on encounter rate. The game is designed to let you play the way you want, but there are benefits to using the standard (middle) encounter rate. Namely, as you go there are grammar lessons and explanations that cover the usage of many words you learn and if you get too far ahead then there's more chance for confusion about why certain sentences translate the way they do. So if you play the full game, I'd encourage you to ease of on the battles a bit.
Another thing you could do is change the learn speed. In the main menu, select Learn Speed and set all the "Streak to Level" values to 9. This will let you do a lot of battles while slowing the pace that words level up and become more powerful.

The encounter bar doesn't fade out when maxed because there were several cases where players accidentally maxed the rate out at the start of the game and didn't realize what was going on. This resulted in lots of frustration. There are very few reasons to have the encounter rate maxed, so I just leave it up on the screen when this is the case. Maybe I'll find a better way to deal with this in the future though!

If you are defeating enemies with one hit, it's meant to be a signal to ease off the battles and continue forward in the game so that you get the appropriate lessons to help you better understand many of the new words you are learning. So again, I'd recommend easing off the battles a bit as I think it will help you get a more balanced learning experience. I will say there is a new game+ mode if you play the game a second time that institutes a policy of 6 hits to defeat any enemy.

Game crashes are the worst. I don't know if the game is just closing out or if you're getting a specific error message, but if you are able to send me the error message/s you are getting I may be able to address the issue. I'd also be interested to know if the crashes started happening around the time you started one-shotting enemies? The demo has some limitations and given you are one-shotting enemies I wonder if you've pushed things so far that its causing unforeseen issues to occur.

I like your suggestion of adding a new mode:
voice > hiragana > romaji > English
I'll write this down an add it to my list of potential future improvements. Thanks for the suggestion!

Appreciate you wishlisting the game!

As far as sales, I believe the game delivers great value at the current price, especially considering how niche it is. It's cheaper than popular Japanese beginner textbooks (which tend to run from $25-$40) and it has many features that such textbooks can't match: conversations with pro voice acting and full context; a system that adjusts dialogue to your level; a story with colorful characters, comedy, and music; and a battle system to help drill you on new words and hiragana.
The game's content is especially valuable for anime fans because it covers many relevant topics usually ignored by beginner Japanese courses (casual and slang speech, dropped particles, etc.). And there's lots of it. A typical playthrough lasts 16-20 hours and there are many features to make a second playthrough worthwhile and convenient.

The demo is exceptionally long (3-4 hours for most people) because I want everyone to be happy if they decide to purchase the game. I'm so happy that you gave the game a chance and are considering purchasing someday! I wouldn't say never to a sale, but I haven't had a sale so far. My preference is certainly one great price all the time for everyone! :)

Lun

[-★- sevenfoodsandwich -★-]

Thanks for answering, Lun Calsari. It's an awesome response. I wanted to get back to you sooner, but felt it better to reproduce the crash first.

The new game+ system 6 hit policy sounds good. To be honest I got overpowered because I wanted to quickly get to words I hadn't learned yet. I already knew the letters, and many formal words. After that, I left it on for the challenge of frying my brain.

I reproduced the crash for the error. I think it's to do with leveling up and unlocking words too quickly in one session. Can't seem to reproduce it in my 12 hour save so I spent 35 minutes on a new one until this happened.

Here's what is says:

#<Errno::EBADF: Bad file descriptor>
"Bad file descriptor"
["Section030:53:in `write", "Section030:53:in `puts", "Section030:53:in
initialize", "Section021:1346:in 'new"", "Section021:1346:in
update_phase5"", "Section021:795:in `update", "Section021:525:in
"main", "Section021:514:in 'loop", "Section021:586:in `main",
"Section041:336"]

It's an understandable stance about sales. I'll buy it for sure eventually, but when my finances are more comfortable. Lets see how Christmas goes. Even if I surpass the intended target level by then, it's still nice to have media I can enjoy in my target language at such a low learning level.

The balance of learning and gameplay is excellent, it's one of my top 3 in that area.