Shujinkou PS5 Review and Language Learning Trailer

Shujinkou is an upcoming Dungeon Crawling RPG from Ricegames. It will be available on Steam and PlayStation on February 13th, and the big selling point of this game is that it tells an intricate story about a man named Shu as well as Jin and Kou. You will travel a world full of political intrigue, and real people just going about their lives trying to survive.

The game starts out with you playing as Shu, a retired samurai living with his little sister, Momo, whom he adores. Momo just wants to grow up and make tea. It isn’t long however before this peaceful village is shattered when an Omi attacks killing a villager and Shu is forced out of retirement to protect the village.

I won’t go into the story too much because there is a lot to cover, but I will say it is a solid story, far better than I ever expected from a game that says it is built to be able to teach you a foreign language, but we will get to that. The combat is built around a turn-based system like many dungeon-crawling RPGs. Every enemy name is given to you as “??” marks which denote how many kanas or syllables their name is. For example cat is “Neko” and in hiragana, this uses the kana Ne and Ko, which I do not know how to type on an English keyboard admittedly but I did find this pretty accurate image. If you are fighting a cat and spell this out however you will receive a significant damage boost permanently.

Now I am no expert on the language, going into this game I didn’t know any of this. The game does however teach you all of this, and at the push of a button you can literally just shut it all off. In fact, the game will ask you at the start if you are even interested. Outside of a few trophies, you aren’t even punished for not learning. The game is perfectly playable without knowing or learning any Japanese.

This brings me to one last thing, is this game fun to play? As great as the game looks and sounds, it means nothing if it isn’t fun. I am happy to say everything isn’t tossed at you at once. As you explore the dungeons you will come across new kana to learn and the characters will give you explanations of them. Sign boards will teach you sentence structure that you can study or ignore. The menus are in both Japanese and English so there is no guesswork or stress involved.

The game starts out with a message from Julian Rice explaining that he and his team made this game as he helped a family member through a medical issue and sadly she did not live long enough to see it finished. As one of the first people to have seen this message, I am happy to say that Mr. Rice and his team have succeeded in their goal. I won’t say you can fully learn Japanese from this game, no single source will teach you any language. This game will however absolutely give you a solid foundation. The game also succeeds in being a fun and in-depth RPG.

Originally I intended to review this on its merits as a game and as a learning tool separately. Instead, the game is simply a 9/10. What I thought was simply a gimmick turned out to be fantastically built into the game as an optional part of the experience that anyone can enjoy. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

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