Long-time lurker, first time p...blah blah blah I found something that I felt I just had to share.

I was searching through the iPhone app store looking for "kanji games" and about 10 pages deep I found Ninja Words. This game has blown my mind. First, it is basically the first real Japanese-studying game software I have ever found and on top of that it is polished to hell. Basically you run through a story and then free mode battling enemies; attacking you need to match the English word to the kanji and defending you need to match the kanji to the English word. It has only 500 kanji in this version, but hopefully they will come out with an update to get it up to the full joyo 2000.

It's made by a Japanese company that I don't think has ever heard of Heisig, but the "studying by matching an English word to each Kanji" is eerily similar, so I am sure you will all appreciate it. At first I thought the kanji descriptions in English were the same as those in Heisig, but after checking just a second ago some are the same and some are different... oh well.

Anyway - check it out. I was extremely surprised to see that it hadn't been discussed on this forum yet. I want to promote this because I want more Japanese learning games so I want this to be successful. There's a free version you can download to sample it first, though I just went and bought the full version.

Link to iTunes store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ninja-wor...15309?mt=8

Let me know what you guys think.

Best,
Scott

This looks really nice - and is actually pretty similar to game idea i had (damn!). It actually looks really nice and well made, so I'll probably give it a download.

However, the main issue i can see is that is mainly teaches kanji -> english word and back, similar to the Iphone game KanjiPop. For a regular Japanese learner this might be revolutionary, but for those of us who have done Heisig, we already know these words, so the game isn't that useful.

Is does teach a few compounds, but really we need to learn readings, and it appears it doesn't teach them (unless im missing it?). Hiragana > kanji would be a useful game, for now it appears this is a toy.

But still, thanks for the link!

It also sounds similar to the game I played, Slime Forest Adventure. You have to type english words for kanji in battle. Correct, you hit and the slime dies. Incorrect, you miss and more slimes appear that you have kill before you can kill the original one.

I used it to learn the kana (both sets) and about 1300 kanji before I got bored. I actually found this site after and tried RTK, but SFA worked better for me.

They have a lite version now. Pretty nice game, but still limited to 500 Kanji and they present you English. Still fun.

Hopefully they will implement RTK in there and your character actions consists of handwriting the kanji in their correct stroke order (wishful thinking haha).

And that they port it to other platforms.

P.s. I may be wrong but looks like the game requires internet connection to play. T_T

very nice game.... writing the kanji with your finger would be an added bonus... if you have a decent amount of knowledge of Japanese, you can change your ipod's language to Japanese as the story is pretty easy to read in Japanese also