Terra Alia: The Language Discovery RPG

I wish it worked. As an ESL teacher, I'm constantly looking for ways to integrate video games into the classroom. I’ve tried this game a couple of times with my students. They enjoyed it during the first 10 minutes of gameplay, but then it got boring. The plot is okay, but the gameplay is repetitive. The combat mode feels pointless, and there’s no real language learning involved, even though that’s supposed to be the main focus of the game. Combat mode happens far too often. Completing missions is tedious—it takes way too long to travel from one place to another just to collect an item and progress in the game. The characters lack depth. They greet you, and then suddenly, you’re forced into a fight. The game relies too heavily on translation, which is detrimental to language learning. You can’t control the camera, so it’s hard to look around. On the bright side, the graphics are good, but there are some bugs. All the tasks involve matching words, which quickly becomes repetitive—there should be more variety. It's a great idea, it just doesn't work. If they used all the development power they have to make a flashcard, word matching, sentence completion, memorization vocabulary app, it'd so much better than what the game currently offers.

Tried to learn Japanese (English as main language) [i]Disclaimer: I learned Japanese for several years and wanted to train my vocabulary with this game.[/i] [h1]tl;dr[/h1] + Good tutorial for people with no gaming experience at all + Mostly intuitive controls + Simple but cute art + Lots of opportunities to see words and repeat them = I liked the turn-based fighting system, but didn't see a connection with learning words - Lots of bugs (no game breaking ones, but very annoying stuff) - Unpolished pronunciation system (every word is pronounced by a different speaker in varying qualities) - No explanation of word building or other script (Kana/Kanji) - No explanation of sentence building or grammar - [b]Wrong translations[/b] (this should not happen since language learning is the core of this game!) Bugs I encountered: - Starts minimized??? - Starts with 0% master volume - Bugs in the menu - Minimizes itself every 5 minutes I'm not sure if it's better suited for a different language combination, but I'd only recommend it to learn and train vocabulary if you already know the other language a bit. Learning another language from scratch with this seems impractical to me.

EDIT: I even went on their discord for help but they ignored me. They don't care about the PC port anymore. DON'T BUY UNLESS ON SALE BUT EVEN THEN you can get SOFT LOCKED at the VERY END of the game and can't continue, and you are stuck in the area with no way to leave, reloaded, closed and open the game but still the Main quest won't continue, the last update was over a year ago so there is a little chance to them ever fixing it. The game is too tedious to even think about starting over from the beginning and trying again. Others beat it but sadly I could't, good luck to anyone else that plays this. ALSO THERE ARE NO WALK THROUGHS ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET AND NO ONE PLAYED LONG ENOUGH TO FINISH NOT EVEN THE DEVS. SO. YEAH Anyways, I may change my review if there ever is a fix which I doubt.

I got this game to learn Mandarin but the pinyin words don't include any of the tones. Mandarin is the hardest language for a native English speaker to learn, in part because of the 4 different tones. What's the point of learning vocabulary if you can't practice turning written words into accurately pronounced spoken words? I gave feedback about this and was ignored, and told my concern wasn't important, when this is an easy change to make. It's a waste of time to buy this game to learn Mandarin.

I got the game (like I get most games) when it was on sale for 75% off. So it was less than $4. That said, I can't really complain about the 7 hours I spent, on two incomplete play-throughs. [Edit: Finally finished! Rewarding ending - got all the achievements except multiple languages - but we're working on that next!] Gameplay: * The turn-based combat wasn't bad, but got boring after a while. [on my third playthrough it was easy to overpower enemies quickly, even with few skill/talent points to go around] * The world isn't huge, but fun to explore. [Edit: There's a third larger zone which includes a dungeon after the city, which plenty of walking] * Very hard to figure out what to do the first time around without a walkthrough. Language Learning: (Mandarin) * Suitable for beginners in the dialogues * As an intermediate learner, I picked up all the vocabulary fairly quickly, and there's lots of spots to review. For beginners you'll spend plenty of time reviewing in order to unlock chests and perfect focus mode. * There are a lot of words to learn, but after a really it's boring, cause there's not any new words to learn until you progress in the story [Edit: partially true as can be seen from the low completion rate in achievements - but once you figure out what to do it's easy to breeze through, but still takes a few hours of fun.] Which lead to my next point - it's a fun game in theory, and you can use it to learn a few words to random objects around you, but it's hard to stay engaged because the gameplay is so confusing and buggy. Currently soft-locked out of an area, and have to restart again because I didn't get the clue the dialogue said I should have received. And the first time I had to restart because I somehow deleted the shield and reveal options by unselecting them! Counter point to my last statement - once you do know what to do, and you restart the game (hopefully for the last time) you can breeze through the game very fast, and then I guess repeat it all over again in a different language. Specific complaints about Mandarin level: The characters were insanely small, even after turning the pinyin off. Luckily, there was audio to read the words. People complain about the lack of grammar - but let's be real, this is a vocab game with some easy dialogue practice - next they'll be asking for pinyin explanations. There isn't a lot of specific cultural words for Mandarin, it just felt like someone google translated all the terms and came up with content for all languages. The dialogues were good though, just very basic. All in all for $4 bucks, it's a nice test for an intermediate learner, or a challenge for a beginner to familiarize themself with a language. if the bugs were improved, there was a great walkthrough, and if there was more content - I could see myself returning to this game over and over. [Edit: Bug free run on my third playthrough - Persistence pays off! But also exploring and clicking everything is a must.] Finally, even though I said a lot of negative things, I still appreciate all the hard work that went into this game, and it's still the best RPG learning game out there (better than Influent). Kudos to the team that put it together. Give them support and maybe we'll get more games in the future. [Edit: On my third run through the game- when I actually finished it, I was amazed by the depth and quality of the story. I could feel empathy for the last surviving members and rage to the villains. It was a fun challenge to re-drill the vocabulary even though the character was so overpowered by level 9/10 that I had to shield my enemies just to get them to last to focus mode! Final gripes - moving around with mouse in this game was difficult at times, unlike with rpgmaker games, but I managed. 谢谢 was "please" for some reason, instead of thank you, and tiny other mistakes, but other than that- it was an amazing ride. I think everyone should play this game!]

Wary of the other reviews, I started an English game learning Russian, a language I already know. Without leaving the first room, it told me that a rock is Камень (correct, would be pronounced Kamen'), with the romanization Utes (grossly inaccurate, Утес is a cliff) Game may be fun to play for entertainment, but I would be massively cautious about using it to learn a new language.

Doesn't work well for Japanese. A lot of the kanji used right off the bat are N2-N1 level, but the game displays the pronunciation in romaji. When players pointed out that this is terrible, the developers added a feature to "disable" the romaji, but rather than replace it with kana/furigana, they just replaced it with the translation (lol?), completely breaking the game because now the translation is given up-front when it's being tested. As mentioned by others, the audio quality is all over the place, and some of the translations are just straight up wrong. Also when constructing sentences, sometimes words are cut off halfway. Another review said the game doesn't even support tones for Mandarin. It seems like the eastern languages were thrown in haphazardly, which doesn't really work because they're so different from the romance/germanic languages.

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I find most of the critical reviews sort of silly. Obviously this game does not teach you, from the ground up, a new language. It is more akin to a tool where you can improve your vocabulary, and repeat some of what you have already learned. I just finished it (for Russian), and I think it is adequate for someone at a A2 to B1 level for that purpose. It is an Indy game, so it does obviously not have the polish of a major studio, but it is overall very well done, with the bugs not being major, and a very responsive crew of creators that you can talk with directly on the discord. If you like to do a little bit extra in a language you learn without even noticing, this is a nice way to do it.

First two hours are okay but I got stuck in one section with an eccentric robot that would not trigger dialogue. I tried many different ways to trigger the dialogue by entering and re-entering the space and re-installing the game, however it never worked for me. Good game but it is buggy and clunky at times.