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The first entry of the Learn Japanese to Survive! series sports randomly-encountered turn-based battles, with the playable cast squaring off against a number of hiragana-based antagonists.
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The narrative isn’t anything spectacular, with the main playable cast and villains largely underdeveloped, alongside occasional grammatical errors in the English text, but it’s certainly far from a game-breaker, and there is a cliffhanger ending that likely ties into the next game in the series. Hiragana Battle follows a group of students and their teacher, the former sporadically taught Japanese hiragana characters, including stroke order and pronunciation, necessary to defeat animate hiragana symbols that serve as random encounters (and in the parallel world, the romaji represented by said characters), summoned by an evil wizard. In my continuous quest to conquer the Japanese language, I would discover a series of RPGs released on Steam that teaches Japanese, the first of which is Learn Japanese to Survive! Hiragana Battle, which is generally an enjoyable title regardless of age group.
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I was largely unaware, until elementary school, that education and gaming could mix, and remember growing up on edutainment such as OutNumbered! that enhanced mathematical skills in addition to being an entertaining game for young students.
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