Shujinkou for Nintendo Switch – Review

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Shujinkou

Genre: First-Person Dungeon Crawler / Turn-Based JRPG / Educational

Players: 1

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Review:

Shujinkou, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, is a First-Person Dungeon Crawler and Turn-Based JRPG and Educational game seeking to immerse English-speaking players in the Japanese language with the goal of better-acquainting them with this foreign tongue while they fight enemies and save the world.

It’s an ambitious goal, and one that might make some players a bit wary, so I’ll start here. In short, you don’t really need to engage with the Japanese-learning stuff all that much, though the game frequently tries to push you to, with the game’s maps littered with little helper sheets talking about how Japanese words and writing work, and in battles you can imbue attacks with elemental properties that work best against certain enemy types, with the weakness correlating to that enemy’s name, as well as the current in-game day of the week it is.

Only… well, the game doesn’t tell you the enemy names outright, you only find that out after you successfully hit them with attacks that are strong against that enemy a few times. And when you do successfully connect with an attack the enemy is weak against, the game remembers this and shows you whenever you fight that enemy again, saving the player from having to remember which character is which. This makes it easier to play the game effectively even if you can’t remember your Japanese, but it also removes the drive to actually learn Japanese.

There are all sorts of issues like this throughout Shujinkou, where the game’s mechanics don’t seem to consistently match up with its educational goals. During conversations in the game’s story, you can look up highlighted words to see the Japanese translation, but can’t do this consistently throughout every facet of the game. Additionally, there are options to cycle between different languages and methods of writing non-English words, but this also does not apply to all uses of these words

On the other side of things, this educational drive causes the game to be muddled up with a lot of instructional pages detailing how its various mechanics work, especially early on. Players are pushed to absorb a lot of information, and it’s easy to find yourself confused as to what these different gameplay elements actually are.

The gameplay itself isn’t too different than other Turn-Based Dungeon Crawler JRPGs, though I would argue that games like the Etrian Odyssey games and Moero Crystal H manage to offer players more depth and variety (well, in Moero Crystal’s case, if you can get past the lowbrow raunchy elements). To be clear, what’s here works fine, but between the pages of text about the Japanese language that had zero impact on the gameplay to a lack of mechanical variety, I definitely felt like the mixed focus here resulted in both the gameplay and educational elements suffering.

When it comes to the presentation, Shujinkou uses a mix of very nicely-drawn 2D anime-style characters with relatively simple 3D areas to explore. This will be pretty familiar territory for those who play games in this genre, and Shujinkou does little to break the mold. This is all backed by a soundtrack that resembles traditional Japanese music, which fits the game’s theme, but isn’t very memorable. However, there is a nice feature in that the instructional Japanese helper pages will let you hear sample words and sentences spoken aloud by both male and female speakers.

As for the story, it involves a retired (though still quite young) samurai whose village is attacked by demonic oni creatures, who sets out with a few friends to seek out the threat so the village can be safe. It’s nothing particularly inspired, but I suppose it works.

Overall, I liked Shujinkou, but I didn’t love it. I admire the drive to take an RPG and mix in elements to make it educational, but the way it’s done here doesn’t feel like it serves the gameplay or the educational parts, and at times this really hurts the pacing. This is still a good Dungeon Crawler, but it’s not the first game I would recommend to Nintendo Switch players looking to get into the genre.

tl;dr – Shujinkou is a First-Person Dungeon Crawler and Turn-Based JRPG that also aspires to be an Educational game teaching the Japanese language. While I think it’s not a bad game, I do think the educational and gameplay elements don’t interact very well, resulting in a game with pacing and consistency issues. Plus, I just think there are other games in the genre that offer richer variety in their gameplay. However, if you’re a fan of JRPGs who is already trying to learn Japanese, this game may provide a decent supplement to that education, with enjoyable gameplay.

Grade: B-

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4 responses to “Shujinkou for Nintendo Switch – Review”

  1. Julian Rice Avatar
    Julian Rice

    Hi, thanks for playing Shujinkou! It’d be nice if you could mention how much time you played and how far you got into the game before making claims such as an “unmemorable soundtrack” or summarizing the first 10% of the game’s story. The game has a 158-track OST with dozens of genres, dozens of important characters, and plenty more to explore, but this reads like someone that’s played through just the first, or maybe even the second labyrinth. Please aim for accuracy or transparency through your reviews. Julian

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    1. eShopperReviews Avatar
      eShopperReviews

      I’ve edited my response to your post multiple times before submitting it because I rambled on far too long, or because I felt like I was sounding too defensive, or because I felt I wandered off-topic. However, I will try to give you the condensed version as best I can manage. Please bear with me here…

      When I see a comment like this, I have an instinctual drive to get defensive, but if I’m honest I have to admit there’s some truth to your criticisms, while at the same time I feel they don’t invalidate my own issues with the game.

      I make no secret of the fact that I do not complete games before reviewing them. From my FAQ:

      Do you play these games to completion before reviewing them?

      Usually not. I play them for as long as it takes for me to get a good feel for the game, so I feel like I have a good idea what the game as a whole is like.

      You ask, reasonably, how long I played Shujinkou. While I can’t say from memory, my rough estimate is that I played the game for 2-3 hours, getting well into the first dungeon. At that point, I estimated that I had a good sense of the battle system, the overall gameplay loop, and the general direction that the story was headed.

      Now, you point out, rightly, that this is under 10% of the game. In fact, Howlongtobeat estimates Shujinkou to be 93 hours long, or 511 hours for a completionist run. So you could even go a step farther and argue that I’ve only seen 0.58% of the game.

      The thing is, I don’t do this for a living. I don’t always have the luxury of playing 100% or 50% or indeed even sometimes 10% of each game I play for review, especially for games that are 60+ hours long. Even just going by the lowest estimated time in this case, doing so would take me about a week to do due to my other obligations, and in that week I’m not reviewing other games.

      So, since that isn’t feasible, I endeavor to play through each game until I believe I’ve gotten a good feel for how the game plays, what its presentation is, how its story is told, and so on. The alternative is that I just… don’t review the game at all.

      Also, sometimes when writing a review, I speak in broad terms rather than dive into every detail. So, for example, I didn’t mention how this game’s soundtrack also includes some rock-influenced battle themes or some occasional orchestral themes, because I felt that isn’t uncommon for RPGs these days, although in retrospect perhaps I should have. That said… while it is an oversimplification to simply say “a soundtrack that resembles traditional Japanese music”, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that overall the traditional-inspired Japanese themes are the defining and most distinct and prominent part of this game’s soundtrack.

      When I started eShopperReviews, it was never my goal to be like IGN or Gamespot or any of the other major online game publications. I can’t do what they do, and even if I could… what would be the point? They’re already doing that, people already have places they can go to get that. Instead, I devoted this website to speaking in one voice about all games I review, and casting as wide a net as possible, reviewing even smaller games that the major review sites miss or overlook.

      Some will surely argue that this means that I’ve sacrificed depth for breadth, but I don’t see it that way. I feel like most games don’t need to be played to completion to give me a good indication how likely I think it is that players will like that game. Rather, I believe there’s a point where you can stop and say “I think I see what this game is doing”. I also feel like players shouldn’t have to wait hours and hours for a game to “get better”, and if a game can’t give players a good sense of what it has to offer within the first few hours of playing it, I feel like in most cases that is a failing of the game.

      Is this method perfect? Heck no! And sometimes it has absolutely led me to misjudge a game. I have a page specifically devoted to re-reviews for games I felt I needed to take a second look at for one reason or another, and while many of these are due to changes made to the game after I reviewed it, there are indeed some games where I had to go back because I felt my own initial assessment was faulty – namely, Minecraft, Northgard, Taiko No Tatsujin: Drum ‘N’ Fun, and Wandersong.

      However, overall I’m largely satisfied with my reviews, and the majority of those times I’ve returned to a game out of concern I gave it an unfair shake, my views haven’t changed upon a longer look at the game.

      I hope this conveys to you that it is indeed extremely important to me that I very much strive for accuracy and transparency through my reviews, even if this is perhaps not in the manner some would find ideal.

      And yeah, this is the condensed version. Because when I ramble… hoo boy do I ramble.

      -Jake

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      1. Julian Rice Avatar
        Julian Rice

        Thanks for replying Jake :).

        I am not saying you cannot write reviews for games that you play, nor that your opinions or critiques (and praise) are bad or invalid. However, if you are going to only play a very small percentage of a game that is clearly not enough to gain an informed idea of the full scope of the game, then mentioning the time played or how far you’ve gone is an important step to providing readers with full context as they read the post. If you’ve only played a small portion of a large game, it materially limits how accurate, and especially how comprehensive, your assessment can be. If you know you do not have the time to dedicate to this, I’d urge you to mention your playtime and progress to give readers essential context. Because you are labeling this piece as a “review,” there’s an implied promise of fair, reasonably comprehensive coverage; so yes, the limited scope should be made explicit.

        There is nothing wrong with a “play less, cover more” approach. It suits writers with limited time and real-world obligations. The issue here is scope. Two or three hours, perhaps one labyrinth, is not enough to support a review presented as representative of the whole game. It is similar to playing only the opening of Persona 5 or Fire Emblem: Three Houses and then not considering or mentioning systems that arrive after 10, 30, or even 50 hours.

        For context specific to Shujinkou, the review does not touch many major pillars of the game: a full skill system, negotiation, seven minigames, the bonding system, more than a hundred quests, learning modes for katakana and kanji, writing systems, over a hundred illustrations, and a whole lot more. The second arc is set in a desert… and traditional Japanese music makes up roughly a third or less of its gigantic seven-hour soundtrack. A quick look at the soundtrack online, or more time with the game, would make this clear. To someone that played 3 hours of the game, your words make perfect sense, but people are not reading this post with the expectation that you played 3 out of say 80 hours, leading to an objective discrepancy and “lack of accuracy.”

        I agree that a game should earn a player’s attention within the first few hours. Long-form JRPGs often build slowly. I would not write a review that claims to cover Shin Megami Tensei IV or Persona 4 Golden after only their early 2-3 hours, even though those openings are not their strongest parts. If I were Atlus or Nintendo and they saw someone publishing a “review” for their JRPG that only covers 2-3 hours of play, I believe they would not be happy with said outlet too. And just to clarify, if the game is a 10 to 15 hour title, I would be 100% aligned with your expectation too!

        I am the director of Shujinkou and head its publishing studio. I am not looking for an argument! I am asking for transparency about playtime and progress so readers can weigh your piece fairly. More than 20 developers spent seven years and tens of thousands of hours building an ambitious JRPG that really expands over the course of the journey, just like the many legendary JRPGs that inspired it. When a review covers only a very minimal fraction of that very arduous, laborious journey, it helps your readers and our team to make the limits of that coverage clear.

        Thanks for playing 🙂
        Julian

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        1. eShopperReviews Avatar
          eShopperReviews

          I don’t think I viewed your prior post as combative or anything like that. Ironically, I think we’re both in the unusual position of defending our baby, so to speak. 😛

          While I believe I understand what you’re saying here, I guess I’m a bit conflicted. I think the point that I’m not sure about is here:

          > I agree that a game should earn a player’s attention within the first few hours. Long-form JRPGs often build slowly.

          I guess my response to this second sentence would be… why? Why must they build slowly?

          If we’re talking about gameplay mechanics, I can understand why mechanics would need to gradually build up over time so as not to overwhelm the player, but I don’t see as much reason to establish mechanics and then just leave the player with those mechanics for a while without further progress. Once a player demonstrates that they understand those mechanics and are acquainted with them, I would think it should be time to move on to additional mechanics the game’s creator intends to introduce, if those are so integral to the game.

          My mind keeps going to Xenoblade Chronicles X, which has mechs you can pilot pretty far into the game. And that’s cool and all… but I don’t see how it matters to an assessment of the game if it takes 15-20 hours to get to that point. If a player didn’t like the gameplay prior to gaining access to the mechs, surely it’s not going to be worth it to them to slog through 15-20 hours of a game they hate just to get to them?

          If we’re talking about story, I feel like it becomes even less sensible. To compare to a TV series, I think if the average person has to sit through three boring episodes of a TV show before it starts to get good, it’s pretty understandable if they’re not going to bother getting to that fourth episode. You can say that’s intentional, but I would argue that someone who deliberately creates a story that doesn’t get good for 2-3 hours, that’s not a well-told story. Entire films take place in that time, and while longform storytelling works differently, surely a storyteller can pepper in some of what makes their story special within that amount of time.

          It’s different if the story starts interesting, but that’s just a setup for it to transform into something entirely different that’s interesting in a different sort of way. But in that case, if there’s some big twist that recontextualizes things to take an interesting story and turn it on its head into something else that’s great, I don’t want to be spoiled for it.

          Here I think of Bravely Default, which has a major plot twist at 10-12 hours that completely recontextualizes the entire story… but I already liked the story by that point and wouldn’t want to spoil readers regarding it… and if I didn’t like the story prior to that, then why would I recommend someone to put up with a bad story for 10 hours until it “gets good”?

          This is why I have trouble getting past what I was saying earlier – if a game is good, shouldn’t it be good from early on? Even in a game with a long campaign, one with evolving mechanics, I feel like that’s a fair expectation to set.

          -Jake

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