izigame.me

I want to be as transparent as possible in this review so some disclaimers and notes first of all:
- I didn't complete this game. I think I got about halfway in? For anyone that's played it (very minor spoiler), I got to the part just before you leave on the boat to Japan.
- I already knew hiragana before playing this game. Why even play this game then do you ask? Because I'm still a complete newb in my journey of learning Japanese. I thought this game would be a good way to help me continue to memorise hiragana. I also heard the game teaches some vocabulary, not just hiragana, which it does.
- I will mostly be reviewing this title from the viewpoint of it primarily being a learning tool, rather than a game. But I will touch on its actual gameplay value a bit as well.
Anyhow, now we've gotten that out of the way, let's get onto the actual review.

How effective is this game for learning hiragana?

Everyone learns things differently; some methods may be more effective for some people, and those same methods may prove nightmarish to others. So it's always kind of hard to grade just how effective a certain learning tool or method is, because some people may find it difficult, others may find it enjoyable and easy to understand.
This being a review and all, I'll be judging its effective based on my own opinions and experiences. So your mileage may vary.
The way the game teaches you hiragana is primarily by showing you a character, describing how it's pronounced (accompanied by a rather robotic voice), and how to draw it. The game seems to expect you to be actually physically drawing these characters into a notepad as you go along.
I personally do NOT think this is an effective way of learning hiragana. I personally found it a lot easier to grasp by having mnemonics associated with each character, and using a SRS (spaced repetition system) with flashcards to drill into my head how each character was pronounced. I used a site called Tofugo for this, though there's probably other sites that have mnemonics for each hiragana character, or you can maybe even come up with some of your own if you've imaginative enough.
If you're unsure what a mnemonic is or want a visual example, then picture this: The hiragana し (shi) looks a bit like a eld, with an arm sticking out the right, holding it up.
But pushing aside my own views on what's the "best" way to learn and memorise hiragana, there's some issues with how the game presents its hiragana lessons.
First of all, as I already mentioned, it plays a very robotic voice to give you an audio demonstration of how each hiragana is pronounced. It can actually be quite hard to understand at times, sometimes it says things far too quickly, and being robotic, it just doesn't really sound natural.
Secondly, it displays a different font when showing writing animations for the hiragana. This can be confusing, especially when some characters look different as a result. For example, り is shown being written with a break at the top. Think of it like the number 4 when written with an open top (like on an old school calculator). It's not incorrect, but it can be a bit jarring for a complete beginner, especially since it doesn't explain these differences at all.
Thirdly, the game does teach you some vocab along with hiragana. A lot of this is learnt via doing side quests, which you can completely ignore if you so choose. My main issue with them though, is that a lot of them just give you the romaji translations for these words. Which isn't terrible early on, but the sooner you can actually read these Japanese words in their native characters, even if it is just in hiragana (as opposed to kanji), the better.
And finally, when the game does teach you some vocabulary in the mandatory, non-optional side quests part of the game, it has a weird tendency to teach you words with characters it hasn't already taught you. So いぬ (inu) will become い-nu. It feels very unnatural and I don't really know why they decided to do this. Maybe this is just a personal pet peeve more than anything though.

The Gameplay

This is a cookie cutter RPG maker game. The game on its own, judging it simply from the viewpoint of it being a game is... Not very good. You have several atrocious looking maze areas, a rather high rate of random encounters, generic music, art and presentation, a lacklustre plot and characters, rather boring combat, and frequently having to back track through an area to get something you couldn't get previously until the game told you you can.
A lot of this can be forgiven because, at the end of the day, the game itself is just a tool to teach. The main focus is not the game itself after all, but it is still a game, so it's hard to ignore all its misgivings, especially once you've already logged a single digit hours into the game.
Anyway, as aforementioned, the game tries to reinforce the hiragana it teaches you in its lessons through the battles you face in random encounters. The concept is simple: You see a hiragana warrior that corresponds with the English translation NA (for example), so you browse through a catalogue of these hiragana translations, select the correct one, select the correct warrior and bam, you can deal damage to it. Get it wrong? You do zero damage.
How it usually works is: The game teaches you a set of hiragana characters, and then thrusts you into a new area where you have to do something or other, maybe defeat a boss at the end, and like any standard ol' RPG with random encounters, you'll encounter battles throughout these areas. The enemy hiragana warriors in each area usually correspond to the most recent hiragana you've learnt.
I did encounter a very glaring problem with this though. The "enemies" in random encounters seem to be preset groupings. I thought at first maybe it was coincidence but it happened far too many times for that to be the case. Say you encounter a group of へ, は and ぴ hiragana characters... But then you encounter this exact same grouping, in the same order no less, in the next battle, or maybe the next battle after. This becomes a recurring problem, and it often ends up you just mashing the exact same buttons you did in a previous encounter, in the exact same order, over and over.
This becomes kinda old, kinda fast. And with how frequent the random encounters were, sometimes entering a battle every 3 steps, and the game loves to waste your time with its horrible twisty maze areas that you have to navigate almost in their entirety if you want all the chests, you will be encountering the same groupings of hiragana over, and over, and over. It didn't even feel like I was really looking at the hiragana and recalling their English translations after a time, it was just going through the motions of clicking these same "attacks" (the English translations) on the same characters and then moving onto the next encounter within the next 5 seconds.
It became so tedious that I ended up dropping the game. I didn't really feel like I was learning anything any more, and certainly wasn't have any fun. This is my primary reason for the negative review.

Conclusion/Should I buy this?

If you're interested in this game because you're looking for a fun game or a fun way to learn Japanese, you'll probably find yourself very disappointed (especially on the former by itself).
If you're looking for "fast" ways to learn hiragana, then definitely steer clear of this game. And if everything else I've described about it doesn't appeal to you, then that's another reason to probably avoid this one.
If what I described about how the game teaches you DOES appeal to you, then definitely check it out, but it goes on sale a lot, for dirt cheap, so I recommend buying it during one of its many discounts.