Learning Japanese is a difficult thing to do. Fortunately, playing video games isn’t nearly as hard. With this in mind, Rice Games is creating Shujinkou, a metroidvania game with RPG elements that teaches players Japanese as they go.
The 2021 sidescroller is currently being funded on Kickstarter and will release on all major consoles depending on certain stretch goals being reached. The game is about a world filled with demons that are erasing the Japanese language. The player will play as three protagonists who will use various hiragana, katakana, and kanji to save the language. While playing the game, players will be exposed to the language, and hopefully, finish the game knowing a bit of Japanese. The game is full of different abilities, minigames, and more to teach players as naturally as possible. Shujinkou isn’t the first game to try to teach Japanese, but it feels like its the most ambitious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDLdaG346kA
“We have been working on Shujinkou for around 10 months now,” says Julian Rice, Founder and Lead Programmer of Rice Games. “Initial programming and team recruitment began in late November 2018, and development was initially done on GameMaker Studio 2. We made the change to Unity in March 2019, and with a strong team of core artists, composers, and programmers, we were able to make significant progress in time for the 2019 Tokyo Game Show.” The focused development cycle and budget have led to Rice believing that the game will be ready for release in 2021.
While teaching Japanese appears to be a key piece in Shujinkou’s appeal, Rice’s priority is making the game fun. Learning Japanese should be a side-effect of playing Shujinkou. “Our game is not being designed to feel like the player is learning’ Japanese. Signs and NPCs located throughout the world will communicate with the player and provide hints about enemies and the player’s surroundings. Furthermore, optional mini-games are prevalent in towns and facilitate the learning of different components of Japanese,” says Rice. “This means that players that are already familiar with Japanese will also be able to experience a game that doesn’t necessarily want to hold the player’s hand if the player has a decent grasp of the language.”
Rice believes that his game stands out from other games that teach Japanese because his team focuses on everything that makes a great video game before anything else. “Shujinkou is a game that can be enjoyed not only by people who want to learn Japanese, but also those who want to play a game with a gripping story, sublime music, solid gameplay, and interact with deep, multidimensional characters.”
Those who are already studying Japanese won’t need to be concerned with too much handholding either. The characters in the game already know Japanese and are trying to save the language. “For those who have some command of Japanese, this means that you will not have to be ‘stuck’ in the first few levels learning things that you already know – the game is not trying to make you sit down like you are in a classroom for the sake of learning what the difference between あ (a) and お (o) is,” says Rice. “This has been corroborated by over 50 Japanese natives that came to our booth during the 2019 Tokyo Game Show after hearing about a game where you can use Japanese to fight demons. The feedback was excellent, and we had people saying that they had never heard of an idea like this before and that the gameplay was fresh for a platformer.”
Minigames are a key part of learning Japanese in Shijinkou. Players can practice and hone their skills in little breaks from the game, but the minigames are more than just lessons. “Each minigame is managed by a certain side character who has their own backstory and motivations for the ominous situation at hand, and the minigame that they manage also teaches a respective component of Japanese that is somewhat related to their backstory and personality,” says Rice. “By playing the minigame, not only do players learn Japanese in a fresher and more modular way, they also get to bond with the side character, which leads to greater immersion in the game and a stronger attachment to the plot and more thoughts towards what the world would really be like if its universal language was being taken away by formidable, alien creatures.”
By the end of the game, Rice believes that players will have a beginner’s understanding of the language. “We expect players to know a good amount of vocabulary, and have a solid command of hiragana, katakana, and N5 kanji from the main story,” says Rice. For those who aren’t familiar with the JLPT system, fluency can be measured in ranks from N5 to N1. N1 is considered to be complete fluency, while N5 is the ability to understand basic Japanese. ” For those who are genuinely looking to learn and explore the fleshed-out world of Shujinkou, players will likely be able to reach the N4 level.” Rice mentioned that more content is planned to help students reach higher levels like N4 or even N3. The specifics of this content is currently unknown.
I asked Rice about some of his favorite Japanese resources and his answer wasn’t surprising. “People. Definitely people. One can really improve their Japanese skills at light speed through interactions with native Japanese people,” he said. Rice suggested that downloading an app like LINE is wonderful for speaking to natives and grasping the language. Rice recommended trying out WaniKani or DuoLingo until Shujinkou comes out.
Shujinkou is certainly ambitious and is something to check out if you have any interest in the Japanese language. Even if you aren’t trying to learn Japanese, there are enough interesting mechanics in place to make this a game worth watching out for. You can learn more on the Kickstarter page here.
