Shujinkou Review
A Massive and Didactic Cover Letter
Solo-developed dungeon-crawler Shujinkou bills itself as a story-driven RPG that additionally offers a fun way to learn Japanese. This didactic approach is a plus, as it still promises an immersive adventure for those not interested in learning the language. The game delivers what it promises with the enthralling main adventure being around 80 hours long while including a lot of optional content, showing a lot of love, passion, and dedication in its development. Shujinkou is not ashamed of paying homage to the games that influenced it, having similar lore and mechanics. Unfortunately, it tries to incorporate so many things that some features feel forced into the game while the UI is sometimes unfriendly.
The game starts with an Akuma invasion in a small village, and players take on the role of a young man called Shu to stop this threat. He embarks on a journey with some allies to put an end to these demons, leading them to more villages and dungeons in a dangerous and fun journey. As the story progresses, more allies including the two other main characters Jin and Kou join the quest, each bringing something interesting to the story with their backstories and motivations. While the premise is somehow common, the different events that take place during their enterprise make the story gripping throughout the whole adventure, adding other objectives besides getting rid of the Akuma. The story is ambitious and is divided into two arcs, with each arc featuring different foes and locales that certainly help build this magical world.
Players control a varied set of playable characters, with most of them also bringing comedy with their quirky personalities. Besides featuring droll dialogue, the adventure has some emotional punches that balance the comedic approach with emotive passages. There is a big cast of secondary characters who help with world-building. It is worth noting that even many environmental NPCs have moments to shine, and the effort put into fleshing out every character by adding a birthday for each one shows the love for this world. It is also impressive how many references to several iconic elements of Japanese culture are included in its items, locales, and beasts.
The three main characters are likable.
The heroes engage in turn-based battles against a vast array of enemies. Players select the actions of the three-member party at the start of the turn, with playable characters and enemies’ actions ordered depending on their agility. At first, Shu and company can only use normal attacks, but after progressing the story, they can also use skills and items, defend, negotiate with enemies, or escape. Battles at first feel a little repetitive, but unlocking the other actions makes them more interesting and varied. In addition, several status ailments, as well as elemental and ontological weaknesses add more depth to this battle system. However, having a lot of mechanics also comes with drawbacks as players can get by without even making use of some of them. Negotiating with enemies, for instance, feels very much optional and skippable. The ontological system is also poorly explained and difficult to grasp. A tutorial that clearly showed players how to exploit these weaknesses would have been welcome. As a consequence, most players will focus solely on exploiting elemental weaknesses, making the other options irrelevant.
In addition to leveling up and increasing their stats, the playable characters unlock new skills by spending skill points. The skill trees for each character are slightly different even when they share several abilities. Skills can either boost exploration or combat, including several passive abilities. The growth system is good, with players being able to have different ranks for most skills to tailor how they want their heroes to fight. The settings menu offers a lot of options to have a highly customized experience, ranging from selecting the level of Japanese and the interest in learning it to choosing whether to use pressed or mashed buttons for the minigames. Featuring five difficulty settings, Shujinkou aims to please newcomers and veterans of the genre alike.
Shujinkou features over 100 different enemies.
The gameplay is divided between visiting villages that are explored using a point-and-click system and traversing dungeons. The grid-based dungeons are called labyrinths since they all include puzzles to advance, ranging from really fun ones using traps or colored doors to others that feel unnecessarily big or tedious since they force players to answer some questions. Though labyrinths are overall great and are where Shujinkou shines the brightest, how players interact with dungeons is not inviting, and it takes a little for players to get used to the grid-based exploration. Some features are tailor-made for grid-based exploration, such as strong foes that move every time the player moves, making dodging them fun puzzles. Labyrinths also feature chests and resources to dig, mine, or collect, as well as shortcuts that unlock after progressing enough in the dungeon. Each labyrinth includes different obstacles, puzzles, and resources, making them feel different from one another. Unfortunately, there are some progression blockers that end with heroes being trapped and forcing players to reload the game, which is frustrating. Luckily, some hotfixes are being released to fix these issues.
Shujinkou offers a lot of optional content, with almost 300 hundred sidequests. Sidequests are a good way of learning more about this magical world, as well as earning money and experience. Most sidequests are fetching errands or hunts that force players to go back to previously visited dungeons to collect certain items or slaughter a certain number of demons. However, there are certain features such as the limited inventory that get in the way of these sidequests being motivating or fun. Players will need to gather several items to complete these errands, but given the limited inventory, often items have to be discarded, forcing players to have to gather these resources over again. The hunts face a similar problem where players will explore the labyrinths until they defeat a certain number of enemies, but that will only count once the quest is active. In addition, players are only allowed to have five active sidequests at a time, preventing them from completing several at the same time and requiring them to revisit towns and dungeons more times than they would want to.
Labyrinths feature several points of interest and shortcuts.
There are other mechanics such as forging equipment or cooking that give purpose to collecting the varied set of items. However, the limited inventory prevents players from fully enjoying this feature because they need to discard or sell a lot of ingredients only to return to labyrinths later on to gather more pieces of that same resource. Shu, Jin, and Kou can bond with six characters, needing to talk to them in certain places or completing errands for them. This is a nice touch but not so motivating to do so. There are also language-related minigames to deepen these bonds. However, these minigames and other optional activities such as fishing are not engaging or fun enough to motivate players to invest their time in them. There are also optional labyrinths with no random encounters that are unlocked as the story progresses and are used for some sidequests. Even though not all of it is appealing, the amount of optional content is impressive and can give players almost 200 hours of gameplay.
The user interface looks somehow old-fashioned and is not inviting most of the time. This is notable in features such as the backdrop of labyrinths or some menus. Aside from that, the visual art of the game is pretty solid. The character and enemy designs are great, including several outfits for those characters that players can forge bonds with. Music is one of the strengths of the game, featuring a varied set of tracks for each town and labyrinth. The ones with Eastern instruments and powerful electric guitar riffs and solos are the ones that stand out and make battles more engaging. The score has some really good tracks when things are calm as well. What is missed is voice acting as it would make the amusing dialogue even more impactful.
Shujinkou is a great cover letter in the history of Rice Games, putting the developer on the radar of RPGamers. The game pays a fair homage to several of its influences such as some Atlus entries and also brings some good new ideas to the table. Learning Japanese is optional, but even for casual players vaguely interested in learning, some words will linger on their minds, and the didactic approach is a great idea. Shujinkou has some flaws that can dismay some players, but the overall experience is great and makes one look forward to the next release of Rice Games.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Great music score
Original didactic approach
Several interesting gameplay features…
…that fail to connect among them
An unfriendly user interface
Tedious sidequests
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