Recent reviews by Alex

They already patched the critical issue many negative reviews mentioned. VERY quick turnaround on that thankfully.

NOTE: The protagonist's voice is MUTED by default. You can unmute him in the settings, there's volume controls for each individual character.

The game that started Arrowhead's "Friendly Fire Is Fun" philosophy.

I've only played it a bit, but I can already see how it would be fun in a way its sequel doesn't completely replace. Will be coming back to it for sure.

We won, Helldivers.

TLDR: I'm exactly the target audience for this game and I loved it.

I just finished this game. As a beginner to the language myself with next to 0 vocabulary (a handful of words picked up from anime, nearly all of which this game also taught), I found it amazingly useful. It teaches 250 vocabulary words, and I finished the game and learned them all in two weeks and 20 hours of total play time. On top of vocabulary, it has grammar lessons to help you understand particles and sentence structure. They aren't strictly necessary to finish the game and you can skip them entirely if you find them overwhelming, but I found them incredibly useful.

The only downside is that the grammar lessons take the form of text dumps and an NPC that offers you quizzes when you encounter her. There's no other way to "practice grammar," and it might be impossible given that they'd have to account for all the possible ways you could form a sentence in order to grade you on accuracy, so you have to learn through the written tutorials and the language immersion offered by the dialogue.

The story is serviceable and I found it entertaining. There are a lot of silly moments that are aimed at giving you practice with specific vocabulary. Even villains will helpfully pause mid-chase to offer you a tutorial on the proper usage of a word they just said. There is a serious plot, but it never takes itself TOO seriously and clearly doesn't expect you to either. I enjoyed it.

You can personalize your learning experience using in-game settings, and I found this invaluable. The game defaults you to a maximum of seven "level 1 words" (words you've just learned that will level up when you get a streak with them in battle) and I found that just a bit too much so I dropped it down to 6, which was more comfortable for me. Similarly, I eventually turned off the voice acting and found that better for improving my reading skills because I could try to read a sentence accurately before the game read it out for me. With VA turned off you can press Z to hear the current line voiced, if it has VA, so you can still enjoy the VA by playing this way.

The game does have a New Game Plus mode, where you start over with all the vocabulary you've already learned so that you can see the early dialogue in hiragana and experience the early parts of the game with more Japanese text. Even with all the vocabulary learned, not all dialogue will be in Japanese - there are a lot of lines that use vocabulary the game won't teach you at all, and that's probably necessary to keep the game from being too limited by the number of words they chose to teach. I don't think that's a negative, but it's worth mentioning. With all the words known, dialogue will quickly switch between the two languages multiple times per scene, so there aren't extended periods where you're seeing nothing but English.

As exactly the target audience for this game, I loved it and I'd happily buy a sequel with more vocab to learn.