Please Teach Me Onedari Shogi

Genre: Board Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Please Teach Me Onedari Shogi is a Board Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2019 and ported to PC in 2023, with the goal of teaching players how to play the classic Japanese board game of Shogi.

One would naturally think the target audience for such a game is pretty slim, especially since this game features no multiplayer mode – this is very specifically for teaching players a game that most English-speaking players would see as semi-obscure. However, I felt like I may well have been the ideal target audience for such a game, as I’ve never been able to wrap my head around Shogi, but have always been curious to learn. Surely then, I would be the best test case subject to see how well such a game does at teaching players this classic Board Game, yes?

Well, no. If you look down on Nintendo’s listing for the game, down past the “Read more” prompt you need to click on to see the full description, past the long descriptions of the women featured within the game (more on this in a moment), buried deep in the game’s page at the bottom, is the following disclaimer:

Attention
The language used in this game is Japanese.

In other words, this game doesn’t have English language settings at all, making this game virtually unplayable for me, and for anyone else who cannot read Japanese.

I’m reminded of the game Vazial Saga XX, which pulled the same trick, and I do think it’s a trick – if this game’s creators really wanted to warn players who can’t speak English (the most widely-spoken language in this region), they wouldn’t have buried this warning so far down on the game’s page, and they wouldn’t have misled customers by having the entire game’s description in English. What’s more, the fact that they had a warning at all makes it clear that they knew what they were doing, and still did it anyway.

Because of this, I can only get a vague sense of the game, and from what I can tell, this game is bordering on “ecchi” game by “rewarding” players who do well by showing increasingly revealing photos of one of three Japanese women (at least one of whom is an adult film actress). However, there doesn’t appear to be actual nudity in the game, just “cheesecake” photos, though I don’t know if that makes things better or worse.

It hardly matters though. Unless you can read Japanese, you won’t be doing anything in this game. Just be grateful if you mistakenly bought this that it only costs $8, because you have just thrown that money away. And if you haven’t made the mistake of buying Please Teach Me Onedari Shogi… don’t.

tl;dr – Please Teach Me Onedari Shogi is a game that purports to teach players how to play the classic Japanese Board Game of Shogi by enticing players to succeed with photos of attractive Japanese women in increasingly revealing photos. However, unless you actually read Japanese, this game is nothing more than a wasted purchase, as it does not have an English language setting. So if you only speak English, do not bother with this.

Grade: N/A (F)

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