humble beginning for sure, there is no medium option so i have to go with not recommended

Eh.. It's a good idea, but the ui is clunky, and it's a pretty slow way to learn Hiragana. Mnemonics work much better

Hiragana Battle is language learning game hobbled by the limitation of the RPGmaker system more than anything else. It's a noble effort, but system mechanics get in the way of being an exceptional and effective learning system.

The way this game works is that if gives you 5 (usually 10 actually) Hiragana letters per lesson and uses those letters as monsters to battle NES Final Fantasy style. Where you need to have each character select from the menu of learned options and pick the correct one to deal damage based on the character's strength and weapon. As you learn more hiragana, this menu becomes quite cumbersome.

Additionally, the player has to gauge how much health of the 'hiragana warrior' has vs. the damage each character inflicts. Because a character targeting a defeated warrior will just attack the next one. And is almost never the correct letter. Thus a wasted attack.

Honestly, I think a game like this would work better more like the original Dragon Quest/Warrior game. With only a single character. I found myself lower areas trying to get more practice to familiarize myself with earlier hiragana only needing a couple of the characters to attack to defeat all the hiragana warriors. Yet, I had to navigate the menu for the whole party.

Fortunately, the game does have each character stay on the previous option they picked. Which is handy when the player miss judges the amount of damage needed. As well as each area tends to focus on a particular group of hiragana.

The game part is standard turn-based RPGmaker fair. The music is nice. The characters and gear are bare-bones. Which feels more like a feature to focus on the educational aspect. The game developers did a good job fitting the square peg of of learning hiragana into the round hole of RPGmaker. But it is clear the the limitations of that don't offer more effective learning than flashcards.

Which is where I ultimately can't recommend this game. If you enjoy retro turn-based CRPGs and want to learn hiragana, this game is okay. If you just want to learn hiragana. Just make some flashcards instead. I think your progress will be much faster.

Learn Japanese To Survive - Hiragana Battle is a good effort, but is too limited by mechanics to be a highly effective learning game.

I love the idea of gaming while also learning <3

I had difficulty continuing too far in this game as the game itself isn't very fun or engaging. The waiting times between learning are also quite tedious and if I remember correctly the chatting can't be sped up.

My issue with the game though is it is too slow and only teaches hiragana which is only one of the three alphabets the Japanese use. For a child this game is ideal but for adults I would recommend something else.

Definitely not a good way to learn Japanese. The sample pronunciation is too fast and sometime wrong. For example, there should be a clear distinction between the hiragana ど (do) and と (to). However in the demonstration, all I can hear is "do" for every word involves. There is no "t" sound in any of them. For beginner, their difference should be strongly emphasize.

The gaming part of this game is also a big fat fail. The enemies are way too strong, and they always go first in battle. I'm 3 hours in and my characters were dying in 2 hits. That means if there are four enemies in a battle, two of my characters would be dead before my first turn. The outcome of this was that I just ran away from all battles, defeating the purpose of learning Japanese through the game. This is so stupid.

3/5

This is not a good way to learn Hiragana. Too slow.

Honestly even duolingo is better than this.

Actually, let me elaborate. I clearly didn't play much of this. I got this game for a good deal, mainly interested in the 3rd part of the trilogy. I learned Hiragana back in highschool, but I figured I'd give this a shot though, maybe as a review, or a good way to practice my Hiragana reading. It's just way too much of a slog for me. If you want to learn Hiragana, there are so many good resources out there, just search "Learn Hiragana" online, Tofugu has a free downloadable book to teach you hiragana, complete with mnemonics to help you remember each kana. If that's not gamey enough for you, maybe try something like quizlet or Anki (though I think quizlet got a lot worse since I last used it). If you just want reading practice, maybe play the japanese version of a game your familiar with (pokemon is a common rec). And while I have my gripes with it, Duolingo is not the worst tool for studying. And if your interested in learning more japanese, maybe look into people like Dogen, or Yuta Aoki.

I guess if this game works for you, then more power to you, but there are so many other resources I would recommend before this.

I learned hiragana quite efficiently using textbooks, but figured I would give this a try to see how it plays. Sadly this does not feel like a great way to learn. It does a good enough job teaching the information, despite how dry and unimaginative it does it. The real problem is the gameplay. It feels like the only reason this is an RPG is because RPGmaker is the only source the developer had to make a game. The gameplay quickly devolves into you spamming through UI menus to click the correct attack patterns over and over, rather than focusing on actually learning. This would play much better if the game took player inputs and let you type your answer rather than having to thumb through a clunky RPG menu every 5 seconds.

Well I got what I wanted - something that makes the rote memorization of kana more tolerable (Because apparently grinding in a game is better than grinding irl). That being said, not really sure it was worth the price though.

For an educational game, it leans wwaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too heavily into the RPG mechanics - why would I want a skill that boosts the damage from attacks when I'm trying to learn characters not do strategy? And why do I have to hit the same character multiple times when I've already identified what it is? And why do attacks overflow - if I identified it right, there's exactly a 0% chance that the attack overflow helps.

But the main issue is the battles themselves. I'm not even going to complain about how insanely slow the battle animations get - the game is old and feels the part. But the battles don't even teach you hiragana very well. Several of the characters (Thinking of ne/re/wa) look very similar, and after playing this game, I still can't differentiate between them, because the game doesn't force me to since THERE'S ONLY A SMALL NUMBER OF ENEMY COMBINATIONS. I don't think randomization is that even that hard to implement, and there's exactly zero places in the game where you could practice with the entire hiragana set. The difficulty scaling is also weird - there seems to be no design for introducing a new set of kana, since you can pretty much be instakilled (even if you know the characters) if your gear isn't high enough for an area, since there's no introduction sections to new areas.

It also kills me that the final boss (Not really spoilers but will mark anyways) is a reading comprehension fight when literally none of the gameplay building up to that point tests your understanding. Like yes, I get it's important to understand the language but absolutely none of it has been building to this point.