Reviews accurate or no?

[Taicho Beardo]

I'm curious how accurate these reviews are. I see a lot of good reviews, but I was curious about the bad reviews. Especially the ones saying there's no dictionary or explanation. The preview pics literally show an instance where you can get an explanation of the meaning and how the symbol came to be. I'm approaching N2 level, and looking to up my Kanji knowledge for Twitter and Twitch conversations. Are these people just delusional, or were these features not actually implemented? I noticed a few reviews commenting on the lack of explanation, but the previews seem to show otherwise. Curious on people's thoughts/ experiences.

[ramsza]

It's been about five year since I played the game, but here's what I remember:
There isn't really a dictionary ingame. There is the study guide DLC, which I found to be lacking, as you can tell from my DLC review.
But there are explanations ingame. Basically it goes:
1. A bit of story
2. Get a lesson on bunch of kanji. It includes things like readings, translations, mnemonics and stroke order, if I remember right.
3. Dungeon exploring / combat / training
4. Use loot to expand the village.
5. Back to 1

For all three game, I used a notebook to take notes during the lessons and create my own 'dictionary'. And it wasn't only to look up things later, Creating those notes helped me learn/remember the kanji a lot better.

If you haven't played the other two games in the trioloy, I recommond playing them first. Otherwise you won't catch the references to the earlier games and the story will make less sense.

Edit: Thinking about it again, I think you can repeat older lessons when you are in your base. But it will always be the full block, you cannot jump straight to a specific kanji.

[Taicho Beardo]

Hmmm interesting. I appreciate the response. Based on the pictures, it seems maybe some things were updated since playing. Do you think the other games are necessary because of words they teach? Because I already know hiragana and katakana. I'm more of trying to increase my vocabulary, recognize kanji, and better my grammar. It's been difficult to find anything that fits my learning needs, so I've been searching all different options.

Noun Town has been pretty fun, but I'm not always in the mood for VR, and it really requires you to stand; which I'm not always up for after a long day at work. It also isn't super helpful in explaining sentences, but more of teaching various words in the environment. It provides translations, but doesn't help you learn which words are which. As someone who has studied for a few years on and off, I can recognize what some of the words are, but the more complex sentences offer no education on what's what.

[ramsza]

Just from the learning perspective, if you already know hiragana and katagana, you won't need the two older games. They teach some words, but I doubt those are necessary for the kanji game.

In your case, you would mainly play the older games for their story, and a bit for hiragana and katakana refresher. As I wrote before, without playing the older games, some aspects the story will be probably more difficult to understand and you won't get the significance of some events, e.g. a main character from Hiragana will also play a role Kanji. But I think it's not absolutly necessary to play the older games first.

[Taicho Beardo]

Cool cool. Thanks a bunch!