izigame.me

All of my criticisms of this game have been implemented in Learn Japanese To Survive! Katakana War and I will be positively reviewing that game when I'm done with it.
DISCLAIMER:: I played 16 hours on PC, but then I copied the game to my phone and used JoiPlay to play it since it's an RPGMaker game. I have 24 hours in total as of writing this review. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cyou.joiplay.joiplay&hl=en_US&gl=US
I did not read keyofw's review (https://steamcommunity.com/id/keyofw/recommended/438270/) before writing a draft of my own, but we share many of the same points.
1. No Vocalization when Selecting Sounds
In Learn Japanese To Survive! Katakana War, attacking with katakana plays the sound of that katakana. In Kanji Combat, when you select a kanji, it plays the kun'yomi or on'yomi of the kanji. This is fantastic game design because every battle reinforces these sounds and you begin to associate the sounds with the kana.
This game does not do that. The only time it plays the sounds of each character is during the lessons. Since the sounds are already in the game, it shouldn't take the developers that much time to have the players play each hiragana sound when attacking.
2. List of Hiragana Attacks is Unintuitive
In Learn Japanese To Survive! Katakana War/Kanji Combat, there are 5 kana on each row. The game should have had something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#/media/File:Table_hiragana.svg
Instead it's:
a i
u e
o ka
ki ku
ke ko
ga gi
gu ge
go sa
shi su
se so
za ji
zu ze
zo ta
chi tsu
te to
da ji (d)
zu (d) de
...
You get it, it's a PAIN to scroll all the way up and all the way down. They should have used 10 columns with the dakuten and ん in rows below the main hiragana.
3. ん was not taught first
There are many words in the vocabulary that the game cannot properly teach you because it didn't introduce the most basic Hiragana, ん, first, but rather last. For instance, it taught that senpai is し-n-か-n-せ-n. No one is going to go back and actually re-learn/re-read the proper hiragana you're just going to have to learn it by hearing the word.
4. Hiragana enemies are not randomized
As keyofw pointed out, the groups of hiragana warriors are predefined instead of truly being randomized. Each group has the same hiragana so there's a weigh as to which hiragana you'll see most more than others, which leaves you with blind spots for the hiragana you see the least.
5. English enemies only show up twice
Reverse enemies only show up twice, once in the coffins and once on the boat. There should have been reverse enemies for EVERY stage of the game! I got very, very good at clicking ぬ nu, ね ne, no の, but if I just saw "ne" I couldn't actually picture ね in my head.
6. Small Gameplay Issues - Items and Map
You have to buy a mirror for a sidequest alongside several other items once you reach Tokyo, and none of the items seem to have a purpose other than you're supposed to guess which one is a mirror? It would have been better if each item had a purpose and then you'd have a need to memorize what the name of each one was. Doubly so, Ramune and other items should have been called Ramune (らむね) as a way of getting you used to the Hiragana characters before you encounter them.
When you leave Snowmass Village, you leave from the top but your characters spawn at the bottom, so if you hold down the Up button you just infinitely go in and out of the town. Several other locations are like this and just a complete pain to get in and out of, like Tokyo and Mt. Fuji.
7. The Plot Was Lacking
Without spoiling anything, what was the dynamic between Noburo and his sister? What were their individual objectives? If Noburo had said, "I want to make the world fear and hate hiragana!" that would have been more convincing as a bad guy. Or it would have been even better if he said, "I've been sent by Japan to conquer your country!" and then you find out once you travel to Japan that he's a lone actor. Basically could have made it where Noburo is carrying out false flag attacks and you have to prevent war by revealing it. Instead you get... *spoiler*.
8. No "Castle"/"Treehouse" or Endgame Content
Once again, in Katakana War/Kanji Combat, there is a a castle/treehouse where you can battle it out with all of the kana that you've encountered this far. This is NOTHING close to this in Hiragana Battle. There's no place where you can test your skill against each and every single hiragana that you've encountered. The best you get is Grim Tower where you fight whole words. The first level or two of the Grim Tower should have been random assortments of hiragana. I found that once I finished learning all of them, I started to forget all of the k-, g- s-, and z- hiragana, or confuse them for each other. I could have used a refresher towards the end.
Also, not all of the vocab words even show up in the Grim Tower.
Lastly, after you defeat Noburo, if you climb back to the top of The Grim Tower you cannot face him in combat again to test your knowledge of words, and your four spirtes are stuck on the top floor like doppelgangers. The game also deletes all items from your inventory (but not weapons or armor). Clearly bugs and quite depressing. I'm glad I didn't override my save from right before I beat him.

tl;dr: If you want to learn Hiragana, grab a book and write each character once a day for several days while verbalizing them. You will learn Hiragana very quickly, much faster than playing this game.
This game has potential, but after 6 years it very badly needs an update. The audio files for each hiragana are already in the game so the devs could fix that, and they could also fix the UI to allow better selection of hiragana.
For those who say this is too much criticism for a $7 game, this game is for all intents and purposes a prequel to Katakana Battle and Kanji Combat, and should be played before the other two, so I have to review this game.