izigame.me

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.