I haven’t had this much fun learning since playing Oregon Trail back in 1983 on a Texas Instruments computer. Sometimes learning through games can be a blast. Even if the learning portion of the game happens to be about the Japanese language. What a unique experience.
Shujinkou from developer Rice Games Inc. is a fascinating journey. It has everything you would want with a JPRG delivered with classic 16-bit flavor. This package includes cool enemies, tough maze levels to travel through, and an easy-to-pick-up backbone that is far deeper than I anticipated. On top of it all, it delivers a fun way to learn the Japanese language.
Let’s get going through this maze of a review.
Simplicity with a splash of complication
On the surface, Shujinkou delivers a classic story that is wrapped in a dungeon-crawling JRPG shell. The story follows a retired samurai named Shu, who has been tasked with taking down a burdening cluster of Akuma that are ravaging his land. The baddies are trying to control animals, take out humans, and snatch/grab the world and its language.
The story of the game is classic because it goes along with a lot of late 80s, early 90s JRPG constructs. There is an overpowering force that threatens the world, and the player must put together a team to fight it, while at the same time growing together to become a huge fighting force to be reckoned with. This type of story and form harkens back to the days of Phantasy Star, where the gameplay was a slow burn but complemented by a great story and interesting dungeon-crawling experience. It was a blend that melded together perfectly to deliver what I still consider one of the best JRPG experiences of my lifetime.
Shujinkou goes along those same lines.
Enemies and grinding
When you begin gameplay, you’re thrown in the role of Shu, who must take up the mantle of protector after his village is devastated by a terrible evil presence. Not wanting to go alone, and in classic JRPG style, Shu picks up additional warriors, each bringing their style of fighting and balance to the team, and the hunt begins to eliminate the terrible creatures that are ravaging the world.
The game does a great job of throwing the player into the scrum immediately. Once you get out of Shu’s village, you are thrown into your first dungeon-crawling maze. You must get through a multi-level area maze, which can get confusing if you’re not paying attention to its twists and turns, grind your players up to higher levels, and then take on the ultimate evil awaiting you towards the end.
What I found with my first go around with the game is that the common enemies ease you into the gameplay by being incredibly simple to kill without much fuss. You might take down evil rabbits, ferocious birds, and/or even very angry bears, all of which aren’t much of an uphill climb. Visually, they’re amazing, but they don’t initially offer much of a challenge. That doesn’t mean later down the road you won’t hit more impressive enemies, but it does mean you get to slowly wade yourself into the gameplay and understand what the game is asking of you. And the first thing it asks is if you enjoy a JRPG grind. You will answer yes.
The game knows that you must grind and that element of slow grind established in 80s JRPGs of this type, even going as far as making you wander around the maze to build up your characters through random and endless fights, is ever-present in Shujinkou. It takes a fair amount of time to properly level characters through killing these easy baddies, but all of it is worth it, as each fighting success helps level your characters and their D&D-type attributes. The early, easy enemies and slow grind make the payoff that much sweeter, especially when you run into what feels like impossible mid-level enemy roadblocks. You’ll find those enemies in the second area of the first maze. They follow you and terrorize you. It’s kind of unsettling and creepy, but they’re good motivation to keep grinding so that you can take them down because you aren’t doing it the first time around.
Staying with grinding, one of the best parts of early JRPGs was the constant and random enemy encounters that helped push and show progression. That progression helped to create motivation to keep playing the game and gave confidence that the player was making some sort of headway in the game. JRPGS need to establish that sense of success early, as that acts as a hook for players to keep grinding and coming back for more.
Shujinkou isn’t absent from that feeling of progression, but that progression does need a bit of pushing to get things going. I learned late in the review period that changing the difficulty from what is referred to as ‘painless’ (super-duper easy), a difficulty that made enemy encounters less frequent, to normal difficulty lessened the grind time noticeably. The harder difficulty, the more enemies you encounter, and the quicker your characters will level, thus making the progression ever-present throughout the experience. Anytime you can make your players feel like they’re progressing, even in the face of defeat and frustration, it is more than likely a good time. I can only assume that is why players like the Dark Souls series, as dying repeatedly needs to be balanced with some sense of success and progression. I personally never got there with DS, but I can see the progression’s importance to keep the series fresh.
Anyway, I digress.
Crazy Mazes
While the typical JRPG aspects are solid, one thing I did not expect from Shujinkou is how interesting and explorable the mazes were in the game. The first maze set reasonable expectations about how the rest of the game was going to go.
The initial maze is built with a first-person perspective, kind of like the original Phantasy Star in the late 80s, and depends on flat 2D scenery built around the player to create a sense of confusion. While some gamers will certainly shake this off as bad graphics, it’s rather genius to make these flat 2D pieces in a 3D landscape gel together to create no sense of good direction. You might be saying to yourself, “What? No. Why is that genius?” Stay with me.
While this type of design should have driven me bonkers, the first thought in my brain was to whip out graph paper and start sketching out maps. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time, at least not since the 16-bit era of gaming. Of course, games that are comparable to this in our more modern era would be Sega/Atlus’ HD remakes in the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection (2023). You know what Sega/Atlus PR sent with those games? They sent graph paper. And becoming physically interactive with a video game is such a rush, which makes the design of Shujinkou‘s mazes genius. The confusion will only push you to break out paper and chart your path as you go through it. So old-school, so choice.
The mazes featured in Shujinkou are big, multi-area places that have a bevy of goodies you can bump into (and baddies). Again, classic JRPG elements exist in the maze designs, as you will run into treasure chests, consumables, minerals, and even dead ends. Much like progression with grinding waves of enemies, the mazes provide their sense of progression, as each discovery presents some sort of encouragement that you’re going the right way, which also leads to more exploration.
Figuring out these mazes and going on a hunt for items, which can be incredibly useful during fights, makes for a meaningful journey. You can see the thought that the folks at Rice Games put into the maze designs, as they’re solid pieces of an entertaining puzzle.
Gamification for the win
While there is a nice JRPG shell that surrounds Shujinkou and its gameplay, there is also a deeper experience underneath. The game is a vessel for learning the Japanese language. It uses said language, letters to words, in its gameplay structure, and does a great job with integrating language into the experience without making it feel overwhelming or wedged in.
The first layer of learning comes with signs that you bump into during your journey through mazes. These signs could be identifying the name of an animal in Japanese or just learning how to introduce yourself. The signs could also be written examples, which are equally useful. Each sign comes with a male/female pronunciation of whatever the sign is displaying to you, so you can learn proper form when speaking whatever the sign represents.
I cannot imagine the amount of time it took to integrate these signs into the game and try to find a pattern or path to take the player down, so it doesn’t feel like jumbled material mixed with a good JRPG construct. For every sign I ran into, I was impressed enough with its delivery and design to sit back and learn what was trying to be taught. While this may not replace four semesters of Japanese in college, it will, at the very least, get you interested in the language and innocently push you to learn more about it.
Now, signs aside, there are also power-ups via orbs in the game that contain Japanese sounds or something language-related. These orbs are added gameplay elements that can be mixed and matched to create powerful characters in the game. In addition, the orbs come in different flavors of natural elements that can act as specific deterrents for specific enemies. They are comparable to how arrows were used in Horizon Forbidden West, where specific arrows laced with specific elements that could damage robots depending on their creation and location. It’s a complicated backend element aspect of gameplay that makes the game so much more engaging and interesting than it should be.
This added element of Japanese language learning gameplay pushes this game into uncharted fun that most JRPGs wish they achieved. Getting a solid JRPG mixed with a gamification experience means that you’re learning as you’re being entertained. That’s a great combo.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Shujinkou from developer Rice Games is a surprisingly entertaining JRPG that features a design that harkens back to early elements of the genre, while mixing in a learning experience to further its beautiful complication.
