These days, there is no shortage of apps that promise to make study fun by gamifying the process. As someone who has been studying and teaching Japanese for decades, I wholeheartedly support the idea. You can learn so much more effectively when you are absorbed in something you find enjoyable.

But I’ll be very frank. The overriding sense I get when I look at many of the gamified language learning apps out there is: These people have never actually studied a foreign language.

Learning to communicate in another language is so much more than memorizing vocabulary words. But that is often the main or only component of game-centric apps.

So when I heard about Wagotabi, an retro RPG game in the graphic style of 1980’s classics like the original “Legend of Zelda,” I thought it was a cute idea, but I did not have very high expectations.

I’m pleased to say that I was very wrong.

Wagotabi puts the player in a nostalgic 8-bit version of the real Kagawa Prefecture. Starting at the airport, the player must navigate real-life tasks like getting through immigration, picking up luggage, finding the right bus, and so on. The game gradually introduces vocabulary and grammar patterns, which you can utilize right away in the conversations you have with the NPCs that populate the world.

Like many RPGs, there are lots of side quests, like “Help Paul get on the right bus.” Unlike games in your native language, though, these tasks don’t feel like mere busywork. Instead, they are opportunities to put to use the Japanese you recently learned by talking to Paul to figure out where he needs to go, running back to the ticket office to ask about routes, and then getting Paul to the right bus stop.

In other words, Wagotabi introduces words and grammar patterns in a context where they are immediately necessary for you to complete a task.

Playing Wagotabi, I realized that their approach was similar to the one we take in Satori Reader. When we started out, we initially focused on short dialogs and news articles. But we soon discovered that stories had an incredible power to keep readers engaged. Because they cared about what happened next in the story, they were motivated to continue reading. When the characters in the story went through trials and tribulations, the new words the readers learned in the story took on an emotional weight because they affected someone they actually cared about. The words became important — real — they had flesh-and-blood consequences — in a way that they never could if they were just text on a flashcard. And when learning a new grammar pattern was necessary to unlock more of the story, there was an eagerness to understand it.

In other words, a story you genuinely care about can provide both the vehicle and the purpose for your study. In Satori Reader, it is the story you are reading. In Wagotabi, it is the story you are playing.

Wagotabi is clearly a labor of love by a team who truly cares. I reached out to learn more about their backgrounds, and they all have personal experience studying Japanese intensively. This is clear in the design of the game. This is not an app that is designed to be stamped out to target 50 different languages with a one-size-fits-all approach. This is meant to be a fun and immersive guide through Japanese specifically.

Wagotabi keeps its grammar explanations very short. If there is anything about the game I could quibble about, there were places where I worried that perhaps there was not enough explanation for a totally uninitiated person to grasp the new concept. But then again, I can be something of an over-explainer. One of the main criticisms I have received for Human Japanese, which presents Japanese from square one in a narrative way, is that there is too much explanation, and not enough doing. With its focus on doing, Wagotabi could work synergistically with a more textbook-like app such as Human Japanese.

Available now on the app stores (Apple | Google) and coming soon to Steam, Wagotabi is well worth the price of admission. If you’ve been looking for something to help you get started with Japanese in a fun and motivating way, by all means, give it a try.

If you find you enjoy the approach but would like to augment it with longer explanations of the grammar, you might combine it with something like Human Japanese. And as you gain more experience with your Japanese and you’re ready to start reading and listening to engaging stories, perhaps one day we’ll see you on Satori Reader.

No matter your path, we wish you the best on your journey!