Learn Japanese To Survive! Katakana War

An instant improvement over its prequel 'Hiragana Battle'. Hiragana Battle was extremely basic; it did what it needed to do, and it worked well, but its UI elements felt clumsy and its character progression was lacking. Katakana War fixes that with a clean user interface; neat and tidy answer windows; better RPG progression; and a degree of focus and polish the original sorely needed. As soon as the game starts, being prompted to enter your own name, class, and select a preferred gender tells you just how much more effort they're putting in right out of the gate, but my experience was something like that of a rollercoaster. There's voice acting for the characters! Yay! But they're all Americans claiming to be Australian, or from European or Slavic countries, with absolutely zero accent. Boo! There's more than four stock characters! Yay! But they (including the protagonist) total 8. Progressing the game even at a slow pace means that if you're looking to max out everyone's affection, since YOU cannot leave the party, there will always be one character left out, who you'll just have to grind with for an hour whilst the finale patiently waits for you. Boo! There's more than one music track for battles, including fun little special versions of those tracks when fighting certain bosses. Yay! But music tracks don't loop well. Boo! There's a variety of special effects and magic spells to be had. Yay! But there was no consideration put into audio stacking (getting much louder) when affecting more than one enemy, resulting in having to turn the volume down. Boo! Anyway... It's nice that these characters - accent-starved as they are - get a lot more banter between eachother, but my opinion vacillated on whether I liked them or not. I know 'annoying human with no concept of actually *being* a human' is a common anime character trait, but the game seemed to be making your party members juggle endearing qualities and loathesome ones from scene to scene, and I went back and forth between laughing and cringing. Speaking of laughter, it is a funny game with a lot of charm, and altogether has a salubrious effect, but what's important is that it works. It helps familiarise Katakana just as effortlessly as Hiragana Battle did with Hiragana, but since Katakana focuses on loan words (foreign words taken from other languages), the game often seems to run out of material, and takes the time to teach you Hiragana. I really, truly don't see why. So many of my notes (you WILL need a notepad, trust me) contain me having to confusedly specify that the game swapped from Katakana words to Hiragana words for no real reason. I think a more strict focus on Katakana would have been appreciated. A scant few words are in both Hiragana and Katakana, but the game doesn't explain why both are used in the same word. But yeah, I walked away happy and confident that I could revise both alphabets well. I know Kanji, vocab and grammar are Japanese's real threats, but just like Hiragana Battle, Katakana War is effective at effortlessly making its subject matter easy to digest. I really recommended Katakana War, with the caveat you finish Hiragana Battle beforehand. It's a wonderful program.

💋

记录：25/10/23入。 并不支持中文的日语学习游戏。——25/11/18

Game is nothing grand, but so far I think it's working and it's entertaining enough even if the story makes no sense if you think about it even a moment. Good: Basic RPG (16bit style) set up is overall fun. Maybe slight "dating sim" style get to know your teammates. Entertaining enough way to learn Katakana. Eh: There seems to be class types (mage/fighter at least, I haven't unlocked magic yet) but it's not clear at the start what they are or who is what class. Unlike most RPGs where its pretty easy to tell (or sometimes flat out told to you immediately) who is meant for what job in the party. Bad: The story makes no sense. You're in Japan and need to learn the language but then monster Katakana characters arrive and somehow only ONE Japanese native realizes you just need to speak the character to defeat them? Would make more sense if you were in maybe Europe or America and this happens and you stumble across a Japanese English teacher on vacation recruits you to help with the same set up. Also at the start they're like "oh everyone ran off in fear" so you just hijack an entire apartment building and the next day randomly got a dozen people wandering around town? The sound QC is also pretty bad. When attacking it all is kind of hard to make out. When they're speaking (which sometimes they'll say part of their dialogue, sometimes all, or sometimes none) it's clear each VA recorded their stuff on their own. Some sound fine, others a bit metallic/tinny, and some you'd expect it was a 10 dollar PC mic from the early 2000s. Yes my Bad is longer than the good, but I still think the good outweighs the bad! UPDATE: Heads up it says controller not supported, but been using my X-Box controller on this just fine.

I am fighting hard not to give this one a negative review. The reasons for that lie in technical and gameplay details. For the technical issue: The game has freezing bugs where it runs with 1 FPS occasionally. I tested this game on different machines and this issue occurs either at the end-of-combat screen or the max-friendship dialogue with a character to unlock his ultimate. For the biggest gameplay issue that I have: The dialog is extremely cringey to a point where I dropped the game and learned Katakana the old fashioned way. I then got back to this game to manifest the Katakana into my head and then decided to skip most of the dialog. By doing so I got to enjoy a fairly decent combat system that is improvemed from its predecessor, Hiragana battle. You can now see the battle order of each charackter and can plan your attacks accordingly. Additionally, the Kana table is now a table and not a one dimensional list anymore. This makes navigating a lot easier. A gripe that I have is that the game made the magic system a bit too strong for my case. With that you don't have to name the specific Katakana, but throw a spell at it or them (AOE is a thing here). This takes away from the purpose of the game, to learn the Katakana. At a later point Ultimates are introduced which don't even consume magic. For an easy ride you give Daisuke a Speed Ring and spam GALAXY VOID at the beginning of each battle to bulldoze through the game. At least the devs made sure you have to name the Katakana once to finish them. Otherwise they stay at 1 HP. The main charackter is also a nitpick. He is a generic noname who looks up to Daisuke but has nothing to add on each conversation that is going on. But he somehow still leads the group despite Daisuke being the true leader. It's weird. For the ending I praised the predecessor for its nice twist that it introduced before fighting the end-boss. This is sadly completely missing here. I would have liked to fight through vocabulary you learned through the game. The end-boss is half a copy paste from the predecessor as well. Nothing extraordenary to mention here. So why the thumbs up? Because it teached me the small vowel Katakana and provided me with a list of them. I wasn't entirely aware of this field, but the game made it easier for me to understand. Also the side quests teached me new vocabulary that differ from the predecessor as well. A last note: The game is playable without playing the predecessor or knowing Hiragana, however I would suggest that you learn the hiragana table first, because a lot of vocabulary this game offers is written in hiragana. That's about it. See you in the last game I'm most excited and afraid (in terms of gameplay mechanics like the dialog) about: Kanji Combat.

If you're looking as a beginner a good way to review katakana, I think this is worth the time. It's definitely not the fastest way, but if you're looking for something fun to push your katakana review, I think it's not bad. If I were to recommend order: Hiragana Forbidden => Katakana War => Kanji Combat and skip the basic hiragana game unless you're really struggling with Hiragana and need to have multiple games. But these games are much better as review/reinforcement tools, barring maybe Kanji Combat. The Good: 1. This is a pretty good way to review katakana. I'm not sure I'd completely learn from this game, but if you're looking as a beginner to just reinforce katakana this is a great tool 2. Some of the music is kinda a banger? There's a couple things that kinda get annoying after a while, but the weapon shop theme and the Obake world theme? Pretty dope 3. To be honest it's actually got a better JRPG system than I thought it would have. Is it amazing? No, but it did get me building a speed setup to go buffer => AoE mage => physical answers to finish off, which is cool that there's some level of optimization. That being said you can kinda just brute force if you want, there's not really a lot of stat or DPS checks The Neutral: 1. This is about the most standard JRPG story. Don't expect to be wow'd 2. The way music loops is kinda weird The Bad: 1. Some character side stories are just not very exciting 2. Weird bugs randomly, nothing soft locking but some animation slow down 3. Doesn't work on steam deck very well

Esta ayudandome mucho a mejorar mi japones

Yeah, you'll learn a some Katakana along the way. But what will it cost you? You will either grow or lose brain cells, and thats the least of your worries. LEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOYYYYYYY JAAAAANKINZZZZZZZZZZ

Very helpful game for learning Katakana. As someone who struggles remembering the characters this has helped me learn a lot faster than other language methods. I have had no issues with the game itself. I would recommend it.