Learn Japanese to Survive! Hiragana Battle Review (Valliecane)
Let me first start of by saying the idea is fantastic, and it worked really good in the beginning. The story is a bit silly, but not too bad. I wish there were a bit more variety on the "classes", like a mage would be nice, but that doesn't matter too much.
So, why a negative review?
Beacuse while the idea is BRILLIANT, and works great in the start, at least for me, it quite quickly fell apart.
The combat works like this, the game plays like your basic RPGMaker game, however instead of normal enemies, you fight Hiragana, and the only way to damage them is by using "Attacks" that are their Romaji counterparts. So to attack "が" you would have to use "Ga", and so on.
While this is a genius way to learn it, there is one VERY big problem with the execution...
Every single Hiragana, and Dakuon variant, have their own seperate Attack.
This combined with that you have serveral characters, all of which you have to select the Attack with, means you'll be scrolling through Attacks more than you'll actually end up thinking and "learning", as your "Attack" list will be literally over 40 Attacks long.
A few ways this could be solved would be...
1. You usually face a select number of different Hiragana per map, so one way would be if you simply only had access to the Romaji "Attacks" that would be relevant on that map.
2. Again, since theres usually a select number of different Hiragana per map, some of the "Attacks" could contain 2-4 different Romaji, and then simply make sure most maps only contained a limited number of ones under the same attack. While this would still leave quite a few attacks, it would be easier to make than option 1 in regards to RPGMaker, and it would still cut the number of attacks and scrolling time in half, or more, which would be enough to make it feel worth the scrolling time.
If Option 2 would be too messy, to make sure everyone knew which Romaji it actually was, a way to make this easier would be to make the Hiragana's "Take damage" sprite show their Romaji, since you would only see if it you already hit it with the correct Attack. anyways.