Shin Lucky Star Moe Drill Tabitachi Review

Lately if you've been up to the news, the DS has been used for learning purposes in Japan. Great isn't it? Shin Lucky Star Moe Drill Tabitachi is just that, a learning game. Is it good?

For those not in the know, Lucky Star is a rather popular anime now in Japan. Hit up your favourite Japanese anime torrent index to find out. (No I will not provide links, but I'm sure Uncle Google glady will). The game in my opinion doesn't really live up to the hype generated from the anime. As a matter of fact I don't think this game really relates to the anime judging from the different voiceovers in game compared to the anime. (Perhaps to the drama CD - Lucky Star had two different seiyuus for each character)

The game itself is pretty easy to jump into actually. There are three main sections in the game. The first one is a fairly basic Mathematics battle between you and the CPU where the premise is rather simple: If you get it correct, you deplete the enemy life bar and vice versa. Getting it wrong will hurt yourself. (Although I am fairly sure the CPU NEVER gets it wrong). You are actually given roughly 2-3 seconds to answer before the CPU answers. But here's something I did not like. It's pretty easy to answer questions like 8 x 9 or 32 - 14. But what if you are hit with a question like.... 234 / 9? Yes, for some odd reason, questions like this show up and while it is challenging, I don't quite like the sudden spike in question "difficulty" when you are blazing through most of the easy questions.

The second section is based on kanji. I can only fairly assume it has something to do with basic Japanese knowledge, though due to my lack of Kanji knowledge, I cannot verify on this. Perhaps someone would like to fill me in on this?

The third section is a simple Japanese-English test. The format of battle is the same as the Mathematics, except this time, it's more of a "fill in the blanks" thing. Basically, the screen will show you the Japanese sentence, as well as part of the English translated sentence. The main purpose is for you to translate the red parts of the Japanese sentence to English. Most of the answers are fairly hilarious (Konata would probably be the one be designing these tests IMO LOL)

Story mode is fairly straightforward and revolves around all three of these "tests". I highly doubt there is much of a story involved if at all. As far as multiplayer is concerned, you can choose to go on local wireless or Nintendo WiFi Connection for a head-to-head battle for the three above tests. Not too fun, but...it is nice to be able to challenge someone far away with things like this I suppose.

Is it import friendly? Not that much. This game is clearly designed with the Japanese in mind, and as a result, if you are planning to import, you will need a sufficient amount of Japanese knowledge to get through (this is important if you intend to play the Japanese kanji test...).

You can get Shin Lucky Star Moe Drill Tabitachi from Play-Asia here.