PLAYNESE: Master Japanese

This is the only Japanese language learning game on Steam worth your money.

A single developer and a huge project... At this point in time and most likely for the next five years, Playnese will be useful not so much as a standalone tool which teaches everything, but as an additional source. The dev tries to include near everything for every level of japanese competency, from absolute beginners to N1. It has books, songs, questions for checking what you learned, ... as well as a game part. Doing any of these parts is a huge undertaking, most likely requiring teams. So do not expect that everything is perfect and a topic is fully covered. On the other hand, using it as I do, as additional source of training, makes a lot of sense. It does not yet have all that many training questions - but it has some, and they are different from the other tools I use. I has some texts, none of which I encountered before. and so on... getting more material from different sources and in different media is really helpful, I cannot stress this enough. And I really appreciate what the dev is doing here, even if I believe a team effort might make more sense.

This game is still in development, but so far it works quite well and so far it offers many amazing tools for learning Japanese. I am excited to explore more and further immerse myself in the language.

First of all I need to express my respect to the developer for executing such an ambitious project solo. Comparing to some other options on Steam this one has a lot of potential. For example, "Wagotabi: A Japanese Journey" is executed very well, there is a lot of good things about that language learning RPG, however the content is more suitable for beginners. Another one "WonderLang Japanese", I would not even consider that, feels like a Jack of All Trades and Master of None. The issue with a lot of these type of learning game software is that they rely on the story in not the target language, so in the end the player/learner is spending time not in the target language, but in his/her native language or familiar language. In this software, I like that there is a lot of content just in Japanese, and also genuine Japanese vocals. Maybe some of the vocals in the songs is AI, but I must say, some of these Japanese vocal AI models sound so natural, it really can be very difficult to tell the difference. I really like the musical aspect of this project, and the way songs are used to teach language, that is a huge PLUS! Also, I love the fact the developer bothered to include the entire …

great, can learn from the basic to the advanced level

Liked: I enjoyed that I could choose a variety of things to day from playing a speed game, listening to some music, or answering JLPT like questions. I can choose what I want to do to work on learning. It is helpful as a suppliment to learning Japanese and so far it has been updated/expanded fairly often. Dislike: The character movement graphics are not my favorite. I can sometimes get a bit of motion sickness walking around with the movements. I think it is from the awkwardness of the arrow keys but trying to move in a rough 3D world instead of a more 2D movement. At least there are quite a few options I can just go to and camp on a stable screen and feel better. I also feel a bit confused on how to do things. I ran out of health and it took me a long time to find a basket of herbs to make a sleeping potion to sleep. I would like some output/sentence building practice and more grammar learning games in the future. Note: You are not likely to learn Japanese from scratch to being fluent from this. You can learn but it needs to be part of a group of things you are studying from. If you are practicing Japanese then this is one of the games I recommend. I have als…