Shujinkou is an edutainment game that teaches Japanese through the medium of a jRPG, which is such a clever idea I’m surprised it hasn’t been tried before. I’m always a bit skeptical of edutainment, but it can be effective when done well, and given how much Japanese media I consume, I figured it would be worth trying out.

Educationally, the game is solid. A central mechanic is that your characters fight with kana characters, and striking an enemy with a kana from their name does more damage, which is a great game-mechanical incentive for understanding. Additionally, it’s possible to highlight most items and game terms to convert them between English and romaji (or kana, if you’re a more advanced learner), which is very helpful for learning those words. Unfortunately, the game itself is weak; it falls into many standard jRPG pitfalls while also making a number of questionable aesthetic choices that work against the educational goals.

The first issue is something I’m genuinely shocked no one on the development team noticed: font choice. The fonts used for the kana selection menu, kana in dialogue, and kana in enemy names are all different, sometimes creating significant differences in appearance.

These show the same character (き). In the kana selection menu, it is clearly in two separate parts — the bottom stroke is disconnected from the top. But in the enemy name, the disconnect is removed and the bottom stroke is heavily stylized, making it look like a different symbol entirely. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is extremely bad for learning a new language, especially given that many kana differ in appearance only slightly (ぬ and め for instance). Memorizing not only all the kana but also their alternate font forms was a headache.

(This is compounded by the fancy distortion overlay effect used in battles, which forces me to strain my eyes to make out symbols on the edge of the screen. Sometimes you gotta hold back on the fancy visuals, guys.)

The second issue is that the game mechanics… don’t actually teach you very much, aside from kana. More complicated topics such as adjectives, verb conjugation, and participles are taught only through optional one-time infodumps, not through mechanics. I appreciated reading them, but I didn’t retain them well because they weren’t drilled into me like the kana were. I’m given to understand there are mechanics related to these later in the game, but I didn’t get there, because…

The pacing of the game is glacial. You need to complete the first dungeon (which takes multiple hours!) before you even get the ability to switch equipped kana in battle, which is the core gameplay mechanic. You don’t even collect all the hiragana until midway through the second dungeon (another several hours later), and you don’t unlock negotiation mechanics (one of the few ways in which more complicated language topics are taught) until most of the way through the third, and then the demo ends. This applies to gameplay mechanics too, as you don’t unlock magic abilities until after collecting all the hiragana in the second dungeon, which is really bizarre when the game throws help popups about magic and negotiation at you right from the outset. This is frankly ridiculous; everything should have been moved up by one dungeon at least.

This is exacerbated by the game being deliberately grindy and tedious, as most jRPGs are. Most sidequests consist entirely of “Kill X specific monsters from a dungeon you’ve already cleared,” or, worse, “Collect X monster drops,” both of which are luck-based because the game uses random encounters. Every monster has unique drops that are used for crafting, and I wasted enough of my life on that particular slot machine in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, thank you very much. To make matters worse, you have limited inventory space that fills up with monster drops very quickly, so you have to dump some of them with no knowledge of if you’ll be kicking yourself a few hours later when new equipment requires 5 of them or whatever. While I appreciate the monster drops as a way to learn additional words, they should have simply been vendor trash and the crafting mechanics dropped altogether.

My playtime clocked in at 30 hours for the demo, which promises it’s only about 5% the length of the full game, and, Jesus Christ! The full game is really expensive, so I get wanting to assure players they’re getting value for their money, but even the thought of playing a game that long is exhausting, especially if it continues to be so agonizingly slow. If your demo is as long as most full games on Steam, that’s a sign to maybe cut back a bit!

I suspect that part of this is that the game tries to have its cake and eat it too: It tries to appeal to a broad audience by promising that the language-learning components are entirely optional and it’s possible to play the game as a regular jRPG if you so desire (via an alternate mode that removes the educational elements). I assume this is to avoid the stigma of edutainment games, but I can’t help but wonder if this is why the game mechanics are so bare-bones — if, as per usual, attempting to please everyone required watering the product down to the point it could please no one. I think the game would have been much stronger if it had fully committed to the educational aspect, and the success of Cryptmaster implies something like that would have been viable.

The other half of this is that I had hoped the game would teach me about Japanese culture in addition to the language, as culture and language are intertwined. Unfortunately, even from my novice understanding as a white American with access to Wikipedia, I can very clearly tell the game does not do this.

Right from the outset: The protagonist dual-wields katanas. If you are not familiar with katanas, they are two-handed weapons and for good reason; they are fragile precision instruments, not things you can just swing around in a wild dual-wielding fighting style. Additionally, no other types of swords are mentioned, perpetuating the “all Japanese swords are katanas” stereotype.

This may sound pedantic, but it’s not. Technology is inextricably interwoven with culture. The material properties of katanas required the development of a particular fighting style that emphasized precision and sudden death, and that fighting style in turn influenced samurai culture. The fragility of katanas and the care required to maintain them is inextricably interwoven with the animism of Shinto; there are reasons why samurai considered their sword to be their soul and these are those reasons. A culture that produces swords durable enough to dual-wield simply would not produce samurai as we know them.

Speaking of Shinto, the game goes out of its way to tell us the setting is mostly agnostic, to the point of an entire scene where the characters make fun of monks for being reclusive weirdos, with the clear implication they’ve never so much as seen one in person. (And they never do, because the monks are conveniently all dead by the time we reach their temple.) We see one miko, but she does nothing but sell fortunes at the big city. There are shrines in houses and characters make reference to general “gods”, but they never perform any religious rituals nor even so much as name a specific god. Religion and spirituality are conspicuous in their absence.

The setting also treats samurai as a profession and not a social class, which is really bizarre given how fundamental samurai were to feudal Japanese culture. The main character is technically a ronin, as he renounced service to his daimyo, but he’s only ever referred to as a samurai. Despite samurai being nobility, his older brother is a blacksmith, and NPCs talk about training to become samurai like it’s a regular profession anyone can take up. Early on the characters bring up the shogunate only to tell us it was recently abolished and there somehow wasn’t catastrophic fallout from this. One NPC is a haughty noble, so nobility does still exist, but none of the main characters take him seriously and assume they can disrespect him without consequence. I have no idea how this society actually works.

And, just… look at this:

This screams, “I know Japan loves pink blossoms, but I don’t know why.” The reason blossoms are so valued in Japanese culture is because they are ephemeral. (And Japan values ephemeral beauty in large part because the samurai lived ephemeral lives, because of, again, the properties of katanas and the resulting fighting style!) An eternal peach blossom has the exact opposite meaning. It’s the symbol completely divorced from its significance.

This all gives the sense that the setting is just a generic medieval fantasy papered over with a Japanese aesthetic. And yes, most European fantasy settings are equally divorced from real culture and history, but I think I’m justified in holding an educational product to a higher standard, especially when it does teach players about some cultural aspects like tea ceremonies and holidays. Someone who takes this game as an authority is going to come away with a very warped understanding of Japanese culture.

And all this weirdness and ambiguity despite the fact that the characters talk. So. Much. I’m normally one to eat up all the dialogue and flavor text, but this game quickly exhausted me with just how much chatter there is. The main characters have to stop and discuss every tiny little thing throughout a dungeon, and towns have tons of NPCs with different dialogue at different times of day. I was willing to tolerate this if it was a vehicle to teach more Japanese, but it only does that very occasionally, and then only in one-time infodumps you won’t remember. Most of it is instead just tedious, vapid filler about the characters saying the same thing for the dozenth time. Yes, Shirouto is a nerd, Toushirou thinks with his stomach, and Shu is the voice of reason. I got that the first three times you said it, can they talk about something else for once, please? The game is also severely guilty of “everyone talks like they’re in therapy” syndrome, which makes conversations feel even more bland and samey because every interpersonal conflict is immediately resolved by everyone being perfect and reasonable.

There are also several hiccups where you’re clearly supposed to be viewing certain optional scenes in a certain order, which leads to characters referencing events or conversations you haven’t seen if you miss one. Town dialogue also references events from the conclusion of the third dungeon before it actually happens. (In my case this led to me doing a bunch of sidequests where Toushirou was buddy-buddy with Jin, which produced some whiplash when I went back to the dungeon and resumed the still-in-progress character arc of Toushirou hating Jin and slowly learning to trust him.) This is the sort of thing beta testing should have caught, and is inexcusably sloppy for a commercial product.

This all ends up leaving me with some very mixed feelings. I like the concept of the game and what it’s trying to do (and it was genuinely helpful for learning kana), but the execution just kept stumbling at every point. Maybe if I were less burnt-out on jRPGs, or if the writing was better, I’d be willing to power through the full game. But for the time and money it’s asking from me, I’d probably get better value from an actual Japanese learning course.