Shujinkou

Just get Wagotabi. It's more educational, fun, optimized, and feature complete. Unfortunately I have to give this a negative review. Especially for the AAA asking price of $60. There are broken things in the game, omission of important features, poor optimization, and janky design, and meh writing. There's nothing about this game that's really redeeming for any of the flaws. Maybe you could argue it's educational value, but even then it doesn't really have an effective or quick enough feedback loop to reinforce what I'm learning. Settings Not Working Properly: + The feature to set main display and selected display of furigana, Japanese, English, etc. does not seem to be functioning properly. I set it and it either doesn't change to what I set it and even when it does, it'll randomly unset Lack of mandatory quest notation / markers: + I opened up the game again to make progress in the 2nd city. A description of what task I have to do next (visiting the Ryokan) wasn't noted anywhere so I had to brute force every city option to figure that out Bad Optimization: + For a game that is purely 2D images, you would think it would be optimized enough where you can progress through UI sel…

I own this on PC and on Switch. I'm a beginner Japanese learner and a JRPG fanatic who enjoys DRPG's, but I'm rather particular about them. I've played A LOT of Japanese learning games. I've truly enjoyed only a few. As a product to learn Japanese I find Shujinkou to be a very unique case. Most of these games feel very centric to a learning tool and less centric to being an enjoyable game. Shujinkou feels much more like a game, to the point that on easier difficulties I didn't even really feel like I was learning a lot. The way the mechanics work though you learn through repetition whether you want to acknowledge that or not. It wasn't until just very recently I realized how many Hiragana I had learned and how many words and grammar points I've learned as I get to the next set of things to learn in the game. There's a lot grammar points on signs in the dungeons and some history about creatures which is really well done and includes voiced examples. You definitely get what you put into the game. Another thing I learned over time is that the farther you get into the game the deeper the mechanics get and the more options you have, which makes it hard to talk about the overall produc…

Shujinkou a game you'll love or hate and locking at how many hours I put in it I say I love it. At surface is a simple 2D JRPG with visual novel portraits and first person dungeon exploration. A simple and decent story with some memorable characters. The puzzles are ok and a little challenging latter but doable. Fighting can be tuff and challenging especially some optional bosses if you're underlevel gut you can grind verry easy buy doing sidequests since they give a lot of exp and you can do the main quests verry easy. Fighting is you're typical JRPG turn base attacks in first person, every character and enemy has a turn and it depends on each character speed if you want to attack first. Besides normal physical attacks you can use elemental magic (fire, water, earth, light, etc.), buffs, debuffs, special attacks and ultimates, verry standard JRPG. The difference is and is linked to the other main attraction of the game and that is learning japanese. When exploring the main dungeons you came across special elemental orbs that represents a letter from the 3 japanese alphabets. You can equip this orbs to your weapons and when attacking an enemy you have to form its name using this or…

[h2]Shujinkou Review[/h2] Amazing game, but it really gets most interesting after the main heroes get unlocked, around maybe 15-20 hours in. Amazing music, a story and world that is better than 80% of the jrpgs out there, and challenging gameplay. Will finish the second half next year!

I’ve known about this game since 2021. When I got to play the demo in 2024 and it released last year, I was excited to finally play it on the Steam Deck. An RPG that teaches Japanese was an interesting premise. As time went by, I decided to keep up with my studies with other material (textbooks, workbooks, videos, courses, etc.). Started learning Japanese when I was in college and picked it back up some time after graduating. Started learning Japanese again from the basics and worked my way up to reading books, playing video games, watching dramas. While waiting for this game to release, I feel as though my Japanese has improved and think of this as good review and supplementary learning. They also have a lot of animals that I did not know the names of in the game. Plus, there are some culture points here and there that I found interesting. (Tip: If you want to skip the guessing game of throwing out random kana orbs at an enemy, I suggest playing on easy.) MAIN STORY As of this initial review, I have completed the Genya Arc (aka Part 1) of the game. The story is good so far. I like the character interactions and how the characters in the party have personality. Even the minor cha…

Amazing tool for learning Japanese with an dungeon crawler/Etrian Oddysey style game.