Koe (声): Part 1

Before we begin, this review will have quite a bit of negativity but overall I am positive towards the product. The idea of a Japanese learning RPG is nothing new. We have seen several of them before and personally I believe it is a good format. Makes sense to use a genre that has a lot of repetition. In most these games, the Japanese is implemented into the battle system as a translation challenge when attacking. Koe does it slightly differently by having players choose a word as the attack itself, with each syllable of the word gaining experience but needing a rest between attacks or it is weakened. The problem with the attacking is that it doesn't require the player to do any translation. When selecting your attack, you just look at a bar that shows how strong the attack will be. At the start you might need to plan a little more as you have few words you can use but as you gain more, it leaves little reason to plan attacks. Choose a word with an element the enemy is weak to and that hasn't been weakened. At no point have you had to do any translation or reinforcement of the word. You might not have even looked at the word you used. Then we get to the way words are learned. The very first word the game gave me was 飛行機 (ひこうき, hikouki). This is a useful word but it is not a starter word. The word is made of three common kanji but two of which are quite complicated with many strokes. The game makes no effort to break the word down or present it to the player when they are ready. This leaves the game as useless for Japanese learning. Does that mean you shouldn't play the game? That will depend on how you use it. The game is not a learning tool but instead a consolidation tool. The player needs to have a reasonable understanding of kanji before playing, at that point the exposure will be of benefit. So where does this game fit best into your personal Japanese learning journey? My belief would be as you start to get into native Japanese material. One of the hardest parts is how exhausting it can be to first try native materials. This game can ease that transition due to having a decent amount of Japanese but it doesn't overload you. Other ways the game provides exposure to the language is that all dialogue is in spoken in Japanese. All dialogue can also be shown in Japanese. This is great but badly implemented. The dialogue box will always be in English. Even when you have the text in Japanese, it will put the text above the dialogue box with no gui element. This leaves both the audio and Japanese text as background noise as the player will naturally end up looking at the English. Changing the dialogue box to display Japanese will help a lot, then the player will be reading the Japanese as the dialogue is spoken, reinforcing both. Then have the English display with a button press when the player is ready. I've only focussed on the Japanese at this point but what about the game itself? It's okay. The random battles are far too frequent, making the open areas to be a pain to explore. I haven't played enough to comment too much on the design on the areas but thus far they are completely uninteresting. Graphically the game is a mixed bag. The environments look pretty good but the character models are ugly. The 2D portrait art is especially bad, not up to standard for a professionally produced product. Annoyingly the game has great pixel art but is reserved for loading screens and occasional transition screens. The engine is also not the best. Game areas are small which lead to constant loading. Occasionally learning prompts will pop up for no reason as the screen transitions but they are too quick to have a proper read. The game appears to be missing basic options such as inverting camera directions horizontally and it is reversed by default, leaving it feel terrible for players who prefer the opposite.

I do recommend this game for learning Japanese and reinforcing words/readings this game is pretty good. You do have to make a conscious effort to ignore all the English but after a bit I was able to do it. The combat is a bit weird because there is no reason to learn the reading or what the word means to win. Chaining words also doesn't really matter like if you were trying to respond or make coherent sentences. There are a bit of graphical glitches but nothing absolutely terrible (characters floating, gliding, poping in and out of existence, weird animations), I'm sure that the majority can be patched out. What I would like to see tho, having the option to remove English all together and have the Japanese be in the box. Or better yet, the ability to have the text swap places. Have the English be floating outside of the box but having the Japanese be the focal point in the box. Overall I like the game a lot! I do recommend it and I hope that some of these ideas get implemented and bugs worked out! EDIT: The ability to switch what text or language you see in the dialogue box can now be changed to anything you want! Japanese in the box and English on top or just Japanese! This is such a fast update! Even more reason to support!

Waited 8 years for this game, worth the wait.

I can tell that a lot of love and dedication went into making this game. Initial vibes feels like I'm playing a Persona game with an emphasis on the Japanese language. A lot of the dialogue is voiced in Japanese and very early on you can access all the hiragana and katakana for any individual study. I'm not that far in yet, but I am excited to see how much this game has to offer. This will definitely be a fun way to supplement Japanese study! Everyone, good luck in your studies. がんばってください！

Never heard of this before finding in discovery queue--bought instantly, glad I did. I completely forgot this was an edutainment game--the atmosphere is great, and it's clear the developers put in the effort to make a solid, polished JRPG, not a "vocab-tool-shaped-like-a-JRPG". The immersion is actually immersive; The Persona 5 style intro/overworld (haven't gotten that far yet) works well for naturally acquiring vocab. Honestly, I was enjoying the story/characters/combat even if it was just a normal JRPG. Also, the battle animations/spells are the greatest thing ever--casting "Airplane" and "Person" was worth the price of the entire game by itself. Really well made, looking forward to finishing it.

Hello from Ukraine! 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦 Waited this game long 10 years...hah, if I wasn't so lazy can already become fluent in Japanese by this time and I can't say that I didn't try some different ways. So, play a little to this moment and sure that definitely can recommend this game as additional immersive income method to activate different type of memorization by gamefication involving style. It's not a magic pill, but, You have all tools for achieving dream. I saw some graphical issues, like NPC fly instead of walk, but it doesn't matter, because I see that all details was included in all things that connected with characters, learning stuff, etc. I appreciate author goal and dreams make this really hard idea to exist and do it playable for us, people ho have this dream, learn one of the hardest language in the world to understand more of it's sides and think widely. I wish good luck for us all in this and glad to have opportunity to support and be part of this. Do your'e best, and guys , 頑張ってくだ さい ！

This is a game I wanted to enjoy playing so badly. Given how rare Japanese learning games are I thought this might be a hidden gem. However the gameplay is incredibly slow and starts out at first as a visual novel then tries to introduce a battling mechanic whereby you use the words you learned to do combat. Graphically the game is alright, it's definitely showing it's 10 year old age but I'm surprised how jam packed with environmental art and characters the game is full of. However the actual gameplay was lacking and the battle system wasn't clear on how you're actually learning the language. Also it doesn't gradually introduce you to the language, it throws you right into it. Despite taking a year of Japanese I could only recognize about 50% of the words introduced to me.

Koe is not such a bad game overall, but it's not a good resource for learning Japanese (maybe only good for intermediate or advanced Japanese speakers who have been seriously learning for 2+ years), the only reason I bought this was because it could help learn and practice, and it kind of does but not well at all. The game does give vocabulary and Kanji as you progress, but it's not much really and the order in which it teaches some things doesn't help. There are many conversations through the game in japanese, but it's pointless because the game has an extremely slow pace teaching things, and the level of japanese used in conversation is hard. The overall difficulty of the game doesn't really work, it was patched to make it easier at anytime to fix that. There are opportunities to fix some things, and to add many more japanese lessons from the teacher, and a way to review stuff learned with exams, but I'd say the result after so many years is quite disappointing, the main thing in the game was supposed to be teaching japanese.

Added to my wishlist in early 2017. "Released soon" it said. It is better than I expected, and it helps keep my Japanese level from dropping. Recommended.

The general idea is great but the execution is lacking, especially for the price. The biggest issue is memory performance. of the 3 hours I played, I was staring at the loading screen for 2 hours. Most cases are just scenes without any game play or interaction. You just press A to continue and then its loading the next scene for like 2 min. Also the fighting system makes no sense and does not help with learning. The game could really have done better. Games like Fun China World have set a really good standard for interactive game play when it comes to Asian language learning. I fell like at least partly this could have been done with this game too but I have no motivation left in me to stare at the loading screen.