In the beta a friend received for free, you could not click past the start screen. This was patched four days before the release day, I am pleased to say.

Ohayou! is a game that supposedly teaches you Japanese.

What it instead does, is gives you flashcards. There are some "games," if you can call them that, associated with these flashcards. A tired woman will either cackle maniacally as you do well, or depending on what mode you enter, sleepily pronounce singular letters and sounds. EEH. OOH. EEHH...

Provided you are internet connected, I've checked.

Price of unruled index cards: $0.49~$1.00 for 100 packs.
Price of a sharpie marker: $1.50~$1.90.

Combined with a search Engine and phrases such as "Learn Japanese," you will have infinite more content than this game and possibly less hearing damage for close to half the price.

The images in game barely react or alter in any capacity -- there's more life and style in the achievement icons than there could ever be in the soulless sprites of the actual title. And subjective though it may be, I regret to state my understanding of Japanese due to the constant OOH, OOH, AHs may have in fact regressed by having installed this title.

Finally, while it claims this is a work in progress that will receive DLC, I've done some digging into this "Finger Gun Games" company. They produced a title called Stone Shire for the Wii U in 2015 and it too promised DLC and future updates that, upon looking into it, seemed to never manifest. This could be for entirely benign reasons, game development can be costly on startups, but... if you're buying Ohayou! with the idea it's going to evolve down the road, understand this is actually a port of the subsequent Wii U game in 2016 [along with iPod, iPhone, Android]:: Ohayou! Beginner's Japanese. And -that- never received DLC or substantial content updates. What are the odds this will? Not great I'd wager.

Bottom Line
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So my advice is, -maybe- buy this when discounted to a dollar. And only if you want your 5 year old child to do something fairly repetitious while you ignore them. Ideally they're your step-child in a loveless marriage and you loathe them, so this is your way of punishing them without crossing into abuse territory. They'll remember you had them play this and won't like you for it but it'll seem innocuous.

The game offers you virtual study cards of each katakana and hiragana where you can check the pronunciations and how to write them.

Apart from "study cards", there are 2 mini games where you have to either match the japanese letter card to either its sound or its written pronunciation (か = ka, etc.). Beside this, there isn't much to this "game".

Some katakana and hiragana pronunciations were kind of weird. The letters that had "a" and "o" sounded too similar for no good reason and some others like "he" and "ho" were voiced in a way lower volume and from what it seemed to be a different person.


While the study material given in this game is useful to some extent, I have to make it very clear that it isn't something that you can't find anywhere else on the internet for FREE.

You could search "hiragana lessons" or "katakana lessons" in youtube and find playlists telling you in detail how to write them, how not to write them, how to pronounce them and on top of all that, some vocabulary using the letters you just learned. This game costs money and it lacks most of that.

Long story short, it isn't worth the money.

Very good game! A good way to get started with the basics of the Hiragana and Katakana alphabet. Comes with flashcards with playable pronunciation. Nice choice of options to learn with romaji or sounds. Would recommend for a beginner.;

Terrible UI and font choice. prologue to the game is way too long. The gameplay itself is not clear. There is a plenty of free mobile apps to learn Japanese ;-;

Educational game teaching you how to read Japanese, and understand its sounds. Currently only covers Hiragana and Katakana. Seems fun. Recommended.

This is one of my set of games to learn a bit Japanese because it shows you in what order you have to do the strokes. Along that it has some basic hints for some kana. Of course, this is not a full grammar course but helps to get into the hiragana and katakana alphabet. The "gaming" - aka practice is pretty reduced bit i like that you also have a "listen" test. So I would recommend along https://store.steampowered.com/app/997720/Lets_Learn_Japanese_Hiragana/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1018900/Lets_Learn_Japanese_Katakana/
and finally - for a real learning game - the awesome https://store.steampowered.com/app/1114950/Learn_Japanese_RPG_Hiragana_Forbidden_Speech/