Hiragana Pixel Party is an educational rhythm game that is designed to teach you hiragana and katakana, the two main alphabets of the Japanese language. Learning these two means that you will be able to at least read a lot of Japanese text, even if you don’t know what they mean… It’s designed as a memory game, disguised as a rhythm game, with an 8bit theme to its graphics and music.
There are 192 levels in hiragana and 192 levels in katakana. The basic gameplay is that the character will run along the screen and will need to jump over boxes. These boxes are represented by the character that you are currently learning and you will need to time it right. A NPC will pop out and voice the next few characters, then you will press one of the four buttons that corresponds to that character to jump over those boxes that are in the way.
The gameplay sounds easy enough but unfortunately, you only get a short amount of time to get the initial prompt of the next pattern of characters. Making it even harder is that every single set of characters will remap the characters to different buttons. This means that at the same time as memorizing the pattern, recognizing those characters, you also need to look at where those characters are now mapped to which buttons. This is extremely annoying and frustrating, and it artificially, and pointlessly, makes the game much harder.
You get a score at the end of each level, and a rating out of three. Levels unlock in blocks of three, and you need a certain amount of ratings in the previous block to unlock the next block. New characters are introduced with little context or pattern and you will eventually get through the whole alphabet. To be honest, after the first two or three levels, the game already becomes repetitive. It doesn’t help that there is limited variety in the level design. Some will use Japanese characters, some will use the romanization, and others leave it blank to test your memory even more.
A level isn’t too long as it takes a minute or two to complete. Despite this, ten levels in and you feel like you already want to close the game and move onto the next one. It can be a slog, with weird difficulty spikes. One level will be absurdly easy with the characters showing onscreen with the boxes. The next level will have everything blanked out and you must commit several characters in succession in the correct order, which might sound or look very similar. This lack of polish in difficult curve makes the game feel rough.
Perhaps worst of all is that the game is not great to learn Japanese characters at all. To be good at it, you need to already be familiar with it. However, this game won’t be the one that will train you to become better. Giving you less than one second to memorize the pattern, translate what you hear into the character, and then finding it on the mapping with no further hints is not good design. This ends up being more of a memory game than an addictive and quirky rhythm game.
And you can fail a stage. There are birds flying in front of the character. Each time you get a wrong prompt one of the birds drop off. Each time you succeed, a new bird appears, up to a maximum of five. Get too many wrong and you will have to restart the stage. There are occasions where the rhythm aspects come into play and you can feel that the prompts matches the music. Most of the time, the music doesn’t match the prompts and every so often, you will hit a button too early or late and you are not sure why as you thought it was still within the tolerance.
There is a lack of any incentives to keep you going. It’s boring without any further unlockables other than the next three levels. There’s little incentive to keep playing and finish the game. The 192 katakana levels play exactly the same as the hiragana ones, but you will probably give up before you complete all 384 levels. Later levels in the game rapidly fires off characters that sound familiar, look familiar, and give you a tight time to get it correct, so good luck with that.
Overall, Hiragana Pixel Party is not a great game. It’s not a good tool either to teach you the Japanese alphabet. It doesn’t feel like much thought was put into how to effectively teach you the characters other than brute forcing it. This game is no better than flashcards but what makes it worse is the crippling game design. It’s like the developers never played it themselves and see what worked and what didn’t. it’s unfriendly, it’s unfair, it’s bland and it’s boring.
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