Life of Kanji Island

Basically, the game revolves around loop of turns, varying from day and night turns. On each turn, you can choose one from 5 random cards, which will produce an action. For example, if I pick the card for tree, I'll get something out of the tree, like wood, while, if I click on an animal card, I'll enter a fight to kill it. A card can lead to various outcomes in terms of items, like killing a rabbit can give meat, skin, bone or something else. Items can be combine to form items. Each of the cards is primarly shown in japanese, in kanji, with option of hearing it, though there is a translation keyword. Some cards allow you to move to another biome and change the general cards to pop up. Also, the only difference during day and night is that, at night, you can't see the cards, unless you have a lantern on hand - and don't expect to get one so soon... Therefore, it seems a lovely game to learn animals and nature vocab. Don't expect much further that. The game says that setting game to run in japanese will make you get a lot more of japanese vocab exposition. However, when setting the language as japanese, there is no aid for the player to understand what's written. It becomes just a general japanese game, which loses the purpose of the game itself. By the way, I feel the need to point something up. The game says it uses common vocabulary. While it is true, much of it isn't top 2k. You'll see names of plants, gonna learn the japanese kanji and word for pig, bush, moth, mosquito, bone, and many other things. But many of those animals aren't considered to be top 2k. There are more essential things to learn when learning japanese, especially verbs, adjectives and particles. Animals can come in second place. For the price it is, I don't recommend it. The game has a lot of potential, and the cards-actions are a really fun mechanic to learn with (I wonder if the company could do something similar with verbs... It'd be quite helpful). Hope the company will produce something soon that targets more directly verbs, broader vocabulary and especially top 2k vocabulary.

This game took me a while to understand, even after reading the author's guide on the store page. It is indeed fun, but the first (lots) attempts were quite difficult. I could not find a way to get food, once my food depleted, I started losing, every time; not giving me enough time to use the torch to light up the kanji's in the dark. Once I got the torch, I started trying to find food. If you don't have the torch, as much as you search for food, you die once it becomes dark. You have to use the guide in “製作” as instructed, and realized the easiest way to get food is by making rice. But before getting rice, and the torch, you have to do the “焚き火” in order to cook the rice. Positive : It is fun once you get a hang of the mechanics. The kanji relationships are also nice to absorb while playing. It can become addictive. Negative: It takes a bit to build up to the point where you enjoy it, so you might die many times before you reach to that point. Once you do, then it can become addictive. I would first play it in English to get the relationships between biomes, food, insects, etc. (Oh and clicking on the dog tends to kill you fast.) Then, try it in Japanese only.

There is no tutorial and I couldn't figure out how to play this.