Kana Quest Review (Nintendo Switch OLED)

by Jim Smale · April 20, 2023

For our Kana Quest Review, we play a puzzle game that teaches you how to read Japanese Hiragana. Each puzzle is a grid of different Hiragana that can be moved around. Adjacent Hiragana will connect to each other if the pronunciations share a common sound. So a Ka and a Na would connect as they both have an “a” sound. The player will rearrange the Hiragana to make one continuous connection between all the Hiragana in a level. When the player does this the puzzle will be complete. Some puzzles require figuring out the correct order of Hiragana. And others require the player to figure out the pronunciation of a Hiragana by looking at what connects with what.

Kana Quest Review Pros:

Nice pixel art graphics.
918MB download size.
Puzzle gameplay.
Learn Japanese as you play.
Full touchscreen support.
Double-tap a tile to have it speak the letter/word.
The goal of the game is to match up tiles or by forming sentences with them by having tiles make friends.
Making friends is a new way of saying joined together.
Earn Bronze, Silver, and Gold medals per level based on performance-like moves taken.
You can replay levels.
Fast loading times.
Opening tutorial then helpful loading screens.
Game settings – unlock all levels, unlock all worlds, Dyslexic friendly font, and reduce motion.
14 game worlds.
As you progress more variations come into play like conveyor belts and unmovable stone tiles.

Kana Quest Review Cons:

The touch screen doesn’t work for everything.
At times especially early on it feels more like you just slide tiles and you win.
If the score doesn’t matter to you then you can easily blag the game.
Takes a while for the language part to kick in.
By default, the music is way too loud and the speech is very low.
No scoring mechanic to encourage repeat play.

Kana Quest:

Official website.

Publisher: The Not Dead Designer

Developer: Whitethorn Games

Store Links –

Nintendo

7/10
Graphics - 7/10
7/10
Sound - 7/10
7/10
Accessibility - 7/10
7/10
Length - 7/10
7/10
Fun Factor - 7/10

7/10

Summary

Japanese is for me at least, one of the hardest languages to grasp but one I have always wanted to learn, and this has only gotten more so with the amount of Japanese media I try and consume! Anyway, here we have another game trying to bridge the gap and make language learning a bit more fun. I get what it is doing and it does do a good job but if you play it as a game then it’s very basic and you can easily manipulate it. It starts as a good introduction to learning Japanese by helping you with the basics of the language. I quite enjoyed my time with it actually.