Hiragana Battle is an interesting proposition, since it tries to facilitate the learning of hiragana through the repetition of battles typical of JRPGs. The exercise works, although one can regret a too rigid division: the hiraganas being traditionally separated by consonant group, some are absent from the rotation when one progresses in the game, to the point where those in n-, m- or h- can go out of memory. The addition of vocabulary is a pretty good idea, but it lacks application, so there is no requirement to learn them until the last dungeon. Mechanically, the title is a JRPG boiled down to its major platitudes, but you don't necessarily want more from such a game. The characters have the classic traits of the genre, even if you have to appreciate the fact that the main character is a reasonable and assertive woman, flanked by her two less valiant or intelligent male friends. Beyond the assets that are clearly recognisable as those of RPG Maker, the title commits a few faults of pacing and level-design: the fights can be quite long with the animations and the enemy pools are fixed, which prevents a real diversity of learning. Nevertheless, Hiragana Battle is clearly a welcome addition for those who are put off by the dry learning that usually takes place for Japanese alphabets, especially as the vocabulary snippets provide a bit of freshness.

Out of all my attempts to blindly jump in and try to learn Japanese this has to be the best one yet, but it isn't perfect and I feel that once a letter is introduced and has its dungeon it gets discarded until near the end of the game, meaning a lot of lessons aren't reinforced.

Also the RPG aspect can get tough even if you fight most battles, I feel the enemies should do less damage. I do like when the game mixes things up with things like the alternate dimensions and everything in the finale but I wish it did things like that more. Also enemy placement vs selecting them on the menu isn't the most natural thing.

The story is who cares but I don't think the game particularly cares about it either since its focus is on teaching ひらがな which I certainly know a lot more now than I did going into the game, so in my eyes it's accomplished what it sets out to do!

But I want to keep going