Shujinkou Review (Switch eShop)

In all the world, few things are as powerful as language. We use it to communicate all our hopes and fears and inner thoughts to each other. Words have a power all their own, which is why Shujinkou struck me as such an interesting concept; a JRPG that aims to teach players the fundamentals of Japanese. While I applaud the ambition behind that lofty goal, the Switch port of Rice's dungeon-crawling-focused RPG held some technical missteps that keep it from truly shining.

Like many JRPG fans who don't speak Japanese, I’ve always had an ambition to learn. After two years of lessons, I could count myself as conversational; I was able to make my way around Japan on multiple trips without embarrassing myself, but couldn’t call myself anywhere near fluent. Shujinkou doesn’t seem like it is going to help anyone reach fluency — the lack of voice acting so you can hear the words and symbols you are learning prevents that (although you do have the option to hear male and female pronunciation models via explanatory signboards in the dungeons) — but the aim here is to hammer home the basics, and that is something the game does remarkably well.

The plot is as linear as you'd expect from a JRPG. You move from dungeon to town to dungeon, with the story unfolding in cutscenes that consist of floating character portraits accompanied by text. Where it does feel like it deviates from the traditional formula is that it starts with Shu and his team investigating the Akuma monsters who are attacking people and it never really strays from that vein. While the danger does grow in scale, it all feels like the same plot thread.

I was expecting to start with small stakes in a coming-of-age story before we set out to punch a god in the face, but that isn't what happens here. Which is fine, of course, but the plot didn't scratch the itch I was hoping it would. Not that it was bad - just that it was simple. As you progress through the story, Shu is joined by Jin, a fox spirit whose mischievous behaviour can be a bit jarring for how seriously the rest of the game treats the plot, and Kou, a princess masquerading as a ninja.

The base version on Switch takes you up through the 'Genya arc'. That arc alone is probably around 30 or so hours if you just focus on the plot and don't worry about any side content. From there, you can pick up the separate Sabaku arc DLC to take the game up through its conclusion. The reasoning behind splitting the game here is to allow Switch players to have a good (and cheaper) entry point into the game. The Genya arc doesn't end on a big cliffhanger or anything, but it does feel like you're meant to go somewhere else next to finish the story.

Combat in Shujinkou, the core and best part of the game, centres around Japanese words. Creatures pop up at semi-random intervals and attack your party. You can fight them with your swords, but early on, you unlock the power of Kanakae Orbs, each of which contains a symbol from one of two Japanese syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. Each character can equip up to five of these Kanakae Orbs and choose one per turn to attack with. If the symbol you attack with is in the enemy’s name, you’ll do extra damage.

This is a fun mechanic, and it will help you learn the names of the animals you come across. The first dungeon, for example, is filled with cats (neko), dogs (inu), birds (tori), and demons (oni). Remembering the Japanese word for these common creatures is essential to getting through the many battles you’ll face in the game. The game also throws in some vocabulary in the menu and in dialogue, giving you the option to have a translation of certain words as they are dropped into conversation.

I will note that some of these translations are less helpful than others. While it is useful to know that 'chizu' means map, it is somewhat baffling that it offers a translation of 'shogun' as simply shogun or 'daimyo' as daimyo, with no effort to explain the English equivalent of those terms. It was a small detail that struck me as humorous, considering how much effort went into making the language lessons a core part of the gameplay.

Battles take place in dungeons scattered around the map. Fans of the Etrian Odyssey series will immediately spot the influence here. While towns feel like something out of a point-and-click adventure like Monkey Island, dungeons switch to a first-person perspective. A map is given and must be filled in as you travel through it, complete with one-way passages and doors. Most monsters appear randomly, with a symbol in the lower right corner giving you an indication of how likely you are to be attacked as you explore.

These battles can be difficult enough, with some deadly enemies coming out of nowhere (even in the first one) to deliver a devastating party wipe, but the real danger comes from the larger enemies that roam the map. In Shujinkou, these are called Yajuu, but Etrian Odyssey fans will recognise these as reskins of the iconic Field On Enemies (FOEs) from that series. They pursue you around the map and are significantly more powerful than the standard enemies you run into. When you first encounter them, you should avoid them at all costs, though you’ll probably want to grind in each dungeon until you can comfortably take them on. I spent a lot of time running through the dungeon, jumping back to town to heal and upgrade my equipment before setting off to try my luck again.

There are several big difficulty spikes in the game, usually about halfway through a dungeon. Even lowering the difficulty to its lowest level had me grinding and risking a party wipe if I ran into the wrong random encounter. This was honestly frustrating, especially later in the Genya arc when I was nearing the end of the story. I came to dread the moment when I ended up with each dungeon's mini-boss, which was (thankfully) usually visible before I walked up to them, allowing me to save right before.

You can use the touchscreen to click on items in the battle menu or navigate around towns, but it isn't necessary. In fact, it feels slightly counterintuitive to do so. The place where the touchscreen controls are most useful is in the optional vocabulary minigames.

If you want to practice your Japanese a little more, there are six minigames in total (including fishing — fish-slapping — and a type of pool), all of them focusing on a different part of the language. These are useful if you want to focus on learning, but I struggled to find them fun. There is a bubble-popping game that is a bit more fast-paced, and a memory game that focuses on sentence structure. As learning aids, these aren't bad, but they feel very separate from the rest of the game and, again, I struggle to call them 'fun'.

The combat in Shujinkou is better than the rest of it, unfortunately. The characters and scenery are all flat, standing there doing the gentle swaying that I usually associate with a Flash game. The graphics are simple, but they work during the also-simple cutscenes; where I struggled was in navigating through the towns. Because everything is 2D, towns become awkward to move around in. Trying to remember where anything is becomes a chore, especially in areas larger than the starting town.

The actual enemies look better, with an almost watercolour feel to them that fits with the world Shujinkou is building. Similarly, the music is very Japanese-inspired, with a high-pitched whistle at the start of combat that feels straight out of a samurai film. It is a little predictable but, again, it works within the world. The soundtrack is extensive and does what it sets out to do - it sets the mood, pulls you into the setting, and then fades into the background. I certainly wouldn't call it bad; I was never annoyed with it and never found it jarring, but it didn't stick out in my mind at all.

Some small questionable narrative choices (we’re expected to believe that Shu retired as a samurai at the age of 24, for example, although the reason is revealed in time) are forgotten thanks to the unique combat system that centres language-learning without making it feel like an educational game.

My biggest complaints from my time with Shujinkou are things that I expect are only present in the Switch port. The non-combat inputs aren’t intuitive, so I found myself opening the party menu when I meant to close the map constantly, and I would have given anything for a quick save feature. There are also long load times that are thankfully infrequent but still frustrating. Since launch, a patch has addressed various issues, and a new Visual Fidelity option improves how things look, especially on Switch 2.

Language is at the heart of Shujinkou, but it is much more than an educational game. There is a solid, unique dungeon crawler in here, which is refreshing considering how underrepresented the genre has been in recent years. A unique combat system ultimately defeats somewhat basic art, counterintuitive controls, and frustrating town navigation.

[Note. Following feedback, we have expanded the text above with further impressions and discussion of Shujinkou's mechanics and features, plus some minor corrections to the original text.]