izigame.me

This game took a lot longer to get through than I had expected, since I was mainly after a refresher. The game plays like an old school JRPG, and knowing this I should have realised it wasn't something I'd beat in a couple of hours. Hiragana Battle is certainly not the most efficient way to learn or revise, but the game does ask you to get a pen and paper out to practise - which I did. The game does a good job of hammering the characters into your head through repetition.
There is one exception to this; the final boss battle. The game goes beyond just learning hiaragana writing and how it is pronounced, and includes some basic vocabulary and phrases too. Those might require a tool like Anki to help you memorise those, as you'll need to know a bunch of vocabulary to beat the game. Having said that, vocabulary is probably easier to learn than new characters for a lot of people.
As you would expect from an RPG, there are optional side quests that result in giving you even more XP (and extra vocabulary not used in the main quest). They didn't go stingy on content.
There are a few things I didn't like about the gameplay itself. The battles play out as follows: You have four characters, and there will be 2, 3 or 4 enemy hiragana attacking. On your turn, you need to decide the moves for all of your characters and execute them all at once. Hiragana warriors (the enemy characters) have health points, and you don't know how much health or precisely how much damage you will inflict per successful attack (where attacks are always successful but only if the correct romaji was chosen). No two hiragana characters on the screen will be shown at the same time. Additionally, you don't know the order your characters and the enemy hiragana will attack in - and sometimes it's a mix. eg. Two of your characters, then all of the enemy characters, and finally your last two characters.
Herein lies my biggest problem with the game; if two of your team members are attacking a hiragana warrior and the first one defeats it, the second one will send his/her attack to some other random character on the screen, which will always fail. since the answer was specific to the one now defeated. You'll get the message on the screen that the character was wrong and you did 0 damage with that attack, despite giving the correct answer. I would rather the unit simply guard, or even rather s/he did absolutely nothing and just stood there, rather than launch an attack which is guaranteed to fail and have the game tell you that you got it wrong.
The menu to select characters is also frustrating at times. The answers are presented in two huge columns that can require quite a bit of scrolling to go through to find the answer. If you have highlighted a column on the left column and press left again (or nudge left more than required on your gamepad), it will wrap to the right making selection accidents easy. However if you are at the top of the list and need to select something near the end, you cannot wrap vertically around by pressing up - you have to slowly scroll down the entire list.
Luckily the game remembers what your character had selected previously, and as you advance, hiragana warriors will more often require an answer from the end of the list. However if you selected something like `n` (a the end of the list) one turn, and then healed an ally the next turn, the turn after that will start you back at the top of the list again.
There are more little quirks of the user interface that I found annoying. For example, running (mapped to the right trigger on my SteamOS controller) only seemed to work if the mouse cursor was not at the edge of the screen - I always had to make sure the mouse cursor was completely visible. Fade-in transitions didn't work correctly and only partially covered the screen (I was running 2560x1440 in full-screen). This might be because I was using SteamOS and Proton (see the discussion forums on how to get that working as unlike the Katakana and Kanji games Proton does not work with this game without a work-around) but it's hard to say as I didn't play it any other way.
On my SteamOS controller, the Back key was mapped to the right menu arrow (normally reserved for in-game menus and the like) and both A and B seemed to be mapped to Enter. The left thumb pad did nothing, so you need to use the left thumbstick. The right thumbpad controlled the mouse cursor, which is completely unnecessary when using the controller anyway (but bumping it can move the mouse to the edge and cause running to fail). It's probably possible that this could all be changed through Steam, although I didn't spend the time to investigate. My point is that this game was not designed with controller support in mind, which is a shame because that's much more convenient when playing such a long turn-based game. Having said that, it can be made to work and that's how I played.
Equipping weapons, armour, etc. on characters was also slightly annoying, as each character can only use one weapon type. Since this is a fixed limitation of the game, upgrading weapons could have been made easier than it is. It doesn't help that there is also another quirk in the Equip menu whereby pressing back after equipping something backs you all the way out to the main menu, instead of just back one step to the equip character selection screen.
There isn't much of a story, and there's not a lot of depth to the characters. That's okay since the focus is on learning Hiragana, but also Japanese culture and lifestyle. It's great to see NPCs talk about different drinks, Japanese weapons, types of manga, explanations of what a traditional inn and hot spring (おんせん) is like, how to call people, etc. A lot of what was explained went well beyond Hiragana and was very interesting to learn.
The game music was actually pretty good (although that music on the main screen feels out of place IMO). The pronunciation audio quality unfortunately seemed very poor, and probably due to this, I had to question at least once or twice if the audio actually matched the text perfectly. There is a reasonable amount of reading in this game, and I only encountered a single typo throughout (and I 100% completed the game and all side quests). The text is often written in a way that aims to be entertaining.
I could go on, but I'll cut to the chase. Do I recommend this game? While it's not the most fun experience, it was enough to hold my interest and I wouldn't have spent so much time studying/revising Japanese if I wasn't playing this, so I'd have to call that a win. If you don't know any Japanese at all, I think this game could be a good starting point. I purchased the game very cheap at the 2018 Christmas sale, so I easily got my money worth. It won't teach you as fast as something like Duolingo, but it's more fun and more interesting. If you see it on sale, pick this up without question. You'll then be in a good position to continue on your studies using apps like LingoDeer.