Gamertell

That’s right, two “Important Importable Mini“s in one week. I know, shocking, but this item’s pretty cool and I couldn’t resist. I’m a sucker for import DS games.

I was looking at JBox after getting Peter Payne’s “Greetings from J-List” newsletter today (June 4, 2008), browsing its game selection and came across the $58 DS game, Beautiful Kanji Training. Its one of those edutainment titles where you learn while having fun. Except unlike most edutainment titles, which leave you feeling bored and unfulfilled, Beautiful Kanji Training looks fun.

Basically in Beautiful Kanji Training you hold the DS like a book and draw kanji characters. You can check your writing in Writing Check, practice with Daily Beautiful Kanji Training, play against friends in Everyone Beautiful Kanji or freely draw and have the program analyze your writing with the Beautiful Kanji Dictionary. The Writing Check, Training and Dictionary modes all help you perfect your kanji creating abilities.

Beautiful Kanji Training is a complicated program, and not for casual, uninformed importers. The JBox description recommends it for people who’ve been studying Japanese for three years. The game contains kanji on the Kyoiku kanji (education kanji) list and allows players to adjust the difficulty level from third grade (440 kanji) to sixth grade (1,006 kanji). This means that it contains characters that Japanese third graders and sixth graders would be expected to know. If you’d like to know more about the Kyoiku kanji list, The Kanji SITE is a great resource.

If I knew more kanji, I’d probably consider this. The only ones I recognize at a glance are “love” (my friend has it tattooed on her shoulder), “person” (Thank you Fruits Basket and “happiness” (it’s on one of my old wallets). That bonus stylus is designed to resemble a calligraphy fude brush.

Read [XORSYST] Site [JBox] Site [The Kanji SITE]

EDITOR’S NOTES: J-List, Play-Asia and G-Collections feature items not suitable for gamers under the age of 18. Game images are from the J-List web site.