The Most Addictive Cute Little Japanese Learning Game

As a Japanese learner who’s also an avid gamer, I’m always looking for ways to video game myself to fluency. Hell, I’m mostly learning because I bought a bunch of Japanese games on a trip there and I want to experience them in the most authentic way possible. It would also make anime way better too. I’m at the point in my learning where I get Japanese but I gotta grind out the vocab and kanji. And lately, I’ve found the best method of doing that is by just playing my Japanese games and using an OCR to help me translate all the dialogue. This works pretty well but with character dialogue, it’s easy to get tripped up. I get bored with Japanese learning games a lot, so I need one that’s addictive.

Character dialogue is written to sound natural and naturally spoken sentences are not exactly examples of proper speech. If someone learning English were to read my transcribed speech, they’d be confused by all the stutters, misspeaks, references, and colloquialisms I’m using. They’ll also be concerned about why I’m swearing so much. So for someone learning, it’s easy to get frustrated. I could just study Japanese textbooks but they’re boring. What I need is something that provides Japanese vocab and grammar challenges while also having the fun that good games provide, in walks the cutest little Japanese learning game, Wagotabi.

Wagotabi

You’re a foreigner on a trip to Japan with no Japanese training whatsoever. Make your way through the airport, collecting Japanese vocabulary from the locals, and progress through the game by challenging yourself to memorize…. It’s Pokémon. It’s literally Pokémon but instead of collecting cute creatures, you’re collecting Japanese phrases and grammar and kanji. Even the music is a direct rip-off of Pokémon, obviously on purpose. They do everything they can to evoke the feelings of playing a Pokémon game. And it’s genius.

Nothing in this world is more addictive than Pokémon. I often get my Pokémon GO friends mixed up with my junkie friends. It’s worse than heroin. It’s worse than sugar. And if I could think of the fastest way to help someone get good at anything, it would be to get them addicted to it. Pokémon is the perfect template for something like this and the developers did such a good job of realising that fact.

Addictive Japanese Learning Game: On the way to Japan

Mechanics

So it’s a game about walking around Japan learning Japanese but what does that actually entail? Quite a plethora of fun little mechanics and games. What I like most about it is that it makes the NPCs fun to talk to. The core loop of the game is to practice reading Japanese sentences so every piece of dialogue can be considered as main content. As opposed to Pokémon where talking to NPCs is barely content at all. Wagotabi is the first game to have me actively seeking out dialogue with NPCs. And everything is delivered to you at a pace where you should be able to understand everything even though it’s in Japanese.

It’s so rewarding to understand a piece of dialogue as quickly as you would your main language. And it’s heightened by the fact that this is a skill that you can take out into the real world. You’re not just getting better at a video game. It also doesn’t feel like you’re studying a language. It’s found that perfect balance between effective learning and video game immersion.

You can click on any piece of dialogue for a reminder of what it means

The Text Evolves With You

One great feature is how the in-game text all turns into Japanese as you learn the associated words. So words will literally change into Japanese in the menus as you learn those words. This is such a fascinating idea because it’s trusting the player to memorize those words or else they won’t be able to operate the game menus. And as you learn the words of things in your environment, like trees for instance, there will be a note on every tree to remind you. It’s all centered around getting every word or phrase or piece of grammar locked in before you progress.

There’s a plethora of little minigames sprinkled throughout the game

Of all the Japanese learning apps I’ve tried, none even come close with their progression models to Wagotabi. The very fact that you are a character in a story pushes you to want to progress and to do that, you have to learn Japanese. It so quickly gets you used to reading full sentences while also going at a pace that would be comfortable for beginners. And there’s a reason to keep opening the game daily because it has an in-built spaced repetition system with its Smart Tests.

Addictive Japanese Learning Game: Every region you visit is a real location in Japan

Smart Test

As you learn new words, kanji, pieces of grammar, anything really, it creates a database of it all and grades you on each individual piece of language. Every day, it’ll test you on everything you’ve learned but in little bite-sized questionnaires that prioritize language you’re struggling with. As you get better at specific words, it’ll extend the duration of the next time it’ll test you on it. It’s a great system to naturally get words cemented into your memory. There’s an entire dashboard to monitor your progress with each word and a dictionary that gives pictures and example sentences for every word you learn. There’s everything to help beginners become familiar with the language. The only thing you would have to work on is your kana and kanji memorization. Luckily, Wagotabi has you covered with cute little addictive minigames.

Daily Smart Tests keep you sharp with everything you’ve learned

Minigames

Early on, you unlock a minigame called Ninja Kana. For those that don’t know, kana refers to the two phonetic Japanese alphabets: hiragana and katakana. They work the same as letters in the English alphabet, each symbol represents a specific sound. The only real way to get good at kana is by rote memorization. Wagotabi has made that fun. In Ninja Kana, a series of ninjas throw kunai knives at you in the form of kana symbols. You have to type out the correct pronunciation of the kana before it hits you. It’s completely customizable so you can just start with a few kana at first and slowly add more as you get each one down. You get a higher score for how many kana you get within the time limit and there’s a whole leaderboard so you can compare against other players.

Ninja Kana: I thought I was good with my kana until I played this

But Japanese has another alphabet, Kanji. It’s a much more challenging one, known as a logographic alphabet. Kanji symbols more than often have multiple readings but each symbol represents an abstract concept. Kanji are like puzzle pieces that when combined with other kanji or kana, create words. Wagotabi has a minigame for learning kanji called Saeki’s Kanji. It’s pretty much a card-matching memory game but it’s challenging so it’s fun. And it works. These games so quickly make all those foreign symbols feel like second nature. Wagotabi also has its own version of the Pokédex but for kanji called the Kanjidex. Collect kanji throughout the game and try to get them all. If people can memorize the whole Pokédex, kanji should be easy.

Saeki’s Kanji: they’re just not basic flash cards, they also have illustrations and stuff

The Letdown

It was always inevitable. I wanted to play this charming game all the way to fluency. But, alas, the universe hates me. While there is a decent amount of content in Wagotabi, it’s still very much in an ‘early access’ kind of state. There’s definitely enough to keep a complete beginner going for a while but for someone who’s already spent quite a bit of time familiarising themselves with these words, all it offers is a more fun way to revise stuff you already know. Wagotabi didn’t teach me anything new, but I definitely still enjoy it. I still use it to revise because it’s better than any other app I’ve tried. And I know that they’re working on more content for it so it’s worth keeping up with.

Addictive Japanese Learning Game: You get challenged just like Pokémon Trainers

At the moment, Wagotabi is only available on phones but they have a demo out on Steam and a proper release planned for the first quarter of 2025. I’m not sure if there will be much more content available then than there is now but I suspect they’re planning a big update to coincide with their Steam release. They’ve also got regions planned for all N5 and N4 content. I’m pretty excited. The extent of the game’s current grammar level is right where my level is so any new lessons added will be new territory for me. It’s pretty cheap so I recommend definitely trying it out if you’re even mildly interested in learning Japanese.