Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography

The game is really cute and well made. I bought it with the safe expectation that there is more than one environment to explore, for how many words can you learn on a single tiny map. Well, I had to find out it is one map. There seem to be 145 words you can photograph, each one brings another three words on a flashcard, plus 30 pages (like a book) of phrases and grammar. 580 words isn't bad, but most words are on the back of a loosely related photo, you cannot use it to learn them in a somewhat organized way. Is it cute, fun and engaging? Absolutely. Will it make a difference in your Japanese learning journey? Most probably not.

I want to love this game, and I want to recommend it, and I want to *want* to continue playing it. But there is very very little replay value coupled with a very short time to completion, and it ends up feeling like just a fun little game where you can say you're learning Japanese, but not really getting anything long-term beneficial out of it on its own. This game DESPARATELY needs more content. It felt like I was exploring a starter area for a game where I was supposed to then leave and explore the rest of the game, except there was nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do. I have struggled for the last week or so on how I should rate this game. In the end I settled on a negative rating, but only barely. I truly wish there was an option for a neutral rating. I *really* don't want to hate on this game, because as a concept, and for the limited time that it provides, it is very enjoyable. But sadly, both as a game and as a learning tool, it falls a little short. What it came down to in the end was a very literal question: Would I actually recommend this game to anyone as either a tool or a game? The answer? Only if if was on sale for 50% or less. And not because I hated it or that I don't want to see it succeed, but simply as a matter of financial worth. I looked back at my transactions, and I paid just under $18 for this game. I don't feel like I would have paid that if I knew then what I know now after full completion. I don't want to de-value the developers either, because it is a very nicely presented game, and I'm sure that a fair amount of work went into it, but it just feels dramatically incomplete. I want more content, and thinking critically about it, I don't think I'd be willing to pay very much, if anything at all, for additional content until there's more built into the base game. Larger area, more words to learn, etc. Then perhaps I'd be willing to spring for DLC for a new area or something of that nature. At 5.9 hours of gameplay, I have 100% of the achievements and I've "mastered" all 134 words. Though it's difficult to claim mastery. I doubt I could recall many of them out of the context of the game, though if I encountered the word, I would likely recall the meaning as long as I heard it pronounced. It's highly unlikely that I'd remember the Kanji for words that I haven't learned outside of the game. It is somewhat likely that I'm going to go back and replay the game with the spoken words off, and possibly even as kanji only, but probably not immediately after finishing the game. The photo system is a very neat concept though, and I did enjoy taking the photos, and taking the photo and hearing the word together did create a decently strong connection between the spoken word and the image, but it feels like a one-way connection, where I can recall the meaning after hearing the word, but not necessarily see the object and know the correct word. I enjoyed using the filters to play around with an artistic presentation of the flashcards, and the borders were fun, but I feel both of them were poorly paced with the rest of the gameplay. The first filters came pretty late, but then they flooded in and I had them all in no time, and the borders came only after it had already felt like I fully explored the game and I was just finishing out the mastery. By the time I started getting borders for my flashcards the novelty of the photo system was wearing out and I felt little motivation to use them. Meanwhile, the gacha machines were untouched for the last 3 hours or so of gameplay. Put another way, for 60% of the time I played the game, I didn't have any reason for using the gacha machines, and the coins were just piling up with nothing to use them for. The review system made it hard to intentionally master words, I felt often at the mercy of the RNG to get a word to come up, or I was intentionally clearing favorites and then doing a favorites-only review to get them mastered. For what it's worth, I have also been using both WaniKani and Bunpro nearly daily for the last 6 months or so, WaniKani for even longer overall, but not contiguous or consistent until recently. The timing for reviews did not feel in any way like an SRS-based system that those other tools are using, but instead just felt like a weighted RNG. Fine for casual play, but doesn't feel like a serious learning tool.