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Well designed teaching game

Background

This visual novel was made by an english teacher living in Japan to give to students in their class. It has a mix of Japanese and English text, and voice acting for most of the English and some of the Japanese.

First Impressions

The game opens with a bilingual title screen, followed by an introductory sequence in which the self-insert protagonist (represented by a silhouette in place of a face image) is going to a new school.

You get to enter your own name, or if you just pressed 'enter', you'll be "Charlie" (which is a gender neutral name in British).

A mysterious storm teleports you and you wake up in a corridor of a British school, where the rest of the cast are introduced. Magic is a good a framing device as any other as to why you'd be an exchange student without necessarily knowing much English.

The teaching bits

The visual novel choices are used to test your understanding of the English. Often this is picking a response in English, but sometimes you'll have to choose one of the options in Japanese to show you understood what just happened.

Particularly early on, there are comedy bad answers which you'd only get wrong if you're picking at random or want to see what happens.

"What's your name?": "My name is Charlie" / "I like apples" / "I'm from Shimonoseki"

But there are some subtle cultural stuff in there as well in the opening scenes.

"What sports do you like?": "I like soccer" / "I like football" / "I like chicken". Both the first two answers are considered correct, but you'll get gently corrected if you say soccer.

The more typical answers are of the pattern:
correct english / minor grammatical errors / you misunderstood the situation

A lot of the grammatical and spelling errors look like the sort of mistakes a native Japanese speaker would be likely to make. Presumably the author has seen a lot of homework and fed back common errors into the game.

Throughout the game there's a "english points" score displayed in the top of the screen, which increases every time you pick the correct answer.

Misunderstandings lead to bad ends

Often, making mistakes gets you coaching, but sometimes you'll insult or offend (or take mistaken offence) and that's the thing that breaks friendships in this game.

Michelle, one of the British characters, tries to learn Japanese and makes lots of newbie mistakes for the protagonist to correct. This is perhaps reassuring to the student who is struggling with the English at that point in the game (having passed a couple of filters, the English gets a bit harder)

There are lots of endings, to get the good ending, you need to answer a quiz by typing in answers to questions that show you not only understood the question, but also what happened earlier in the story.

Each ending has a number and a password - the passwords don't seem to do anything, so they might have been for a classroom situation.

Conclusion

For what it is, this is good. Recommended for TEFL teachers or students who are native Japanese speakers. It's not really designed for teaching Japanese to English speakers but you might enjoy exploring the game's systems.

I'm rating this 4 stars according to it's own aims, even though it likely has limited appeal to most users of RMN.