Terra Alia: The Language Discovery RPG

Mandarin Chinese pinyin transliteration has no tones. I think it is useless for beginners, for whom the game is intended, without the tone markings — those are absolutely necessary! I'll change this rating, if tones are implemented.

I really, really wish Steam had a Mixed category for just this game. I almost always write a review only after completing the Main Quest - I don't think I'll ever finish Terra Alia. The game is beautiful, the story feels compeling, but the combat is out of place with the language learning, and the language learning discussions feel out of place with the setting. The game feels like good ideas on their own, but when mixed together, it doesn't blend well. It doesn't matter you made a wonderful lasagna and a magnificent ice cream - mixing both in the blender won't result in something good. Why the negative, if I only have said good things, only that they don't mix well? Well, I bought the game to help in language learning, and the game fights me against it making with a combat system that only slows down the learning process. So, thumbs down because the game hinders its own objective.

Whenever any game tries to be educational, it's either sort of a good game but bad at teaching, or good at teaching, but a bad game. Terra Alia takes a middle of the road approach and becomes mediocre at both. I sort of like it though. If you make yourself get invested, you can sort of get into the open world exploration. Sort of interesting turn based RPG It does try various novel ways to teach you vocabulary and conversation which can probably teach you a little bit. It's very clear that it could of used another year or so in development.

be aware that the chinese you learn here is Simplified Chinese.

Pretty fun language game. You can learn a few interesting words and phrases here and there. I was doin' some French and I was like :O Je ne parle pas français!

This is a good idea but bad execution. The 'game' part of this RPG is very unclear and there is no way to change difficulty, which is something I don't think I ever saw in an RPG yet. Yes, you can learn basic vocabulary in several languages, which is cool, and all of it is voiced, which is also helpful. But the difficulty is so uneven that I am stuck with a final boss that basically 2-3 shots me, while I can barely scrape 5% of its health, and there is no way to even understand how to level up my character efficiently. Also, I can't find even one guide for this game on the web, which is saying something. This is basically helpful when you are trying to get your A1 kind of level for language - I suggest getting a text heavy turn-based RPG instead, with lots of dialogue, like a cRPG.

Le jeu à un bon concept au départ : découvrir du vocabulaire en explorant l'environnement. Seulement pour la mémorisation on pas exposé régulièrement aux mots découvert, il faut aller sur une borne pour aller faire ses révisions ... A côté de ça les combats sont du tour par tour classique sans faire mention de la langue a apprendre. Il suffirait d'intégrer le vocabulaire au système de combat pour le rendre plus utile à l'apprentissage.

It's challenging and it's definitely got some inefficient/cumbersome features but I'd say it's an enjoyable tool and actually a decent enough game. It's essentially a fairly fun and quirky way of gamifying language learning. I'm using it for mandarin and it's pretty fun. Obviously it doesn't baby you as much as Duolingo making you feel like a language god as it can be quite fast and throw you in at the deep end but making mistakes has no huge consequences. You can essentially do things again but failing drops your friendship with characters so you try your best each time and go back to talk to them more often and improve your relationship more after messing up with them. The way they feed the story into the language element is interesting and so far it's feeling interesting, challenging and overwhelming (but in a "I've a long way to go but I can do this" kind of a way). I'd recommend it and I'll update my review once I've got solid data on how long gameplay and what levels of learning it takes you to but so far, so good.