General Game Info

Animal Crossing has been a Nintendo franchise for the past 20 years now and this newest release, New Horizons, has seen record sales achieving widespread popularity. So what exactly is the point of the game? Well, nothing, and anything. Basically you arrive on a deserted island and are tasked with increasing the population and building your own town (if you want to of course). The other inhabitants on the island are, well you guessed it, animals. Who you can talk to as much or as little as you’d like. You can grow fruit bearing trees, plant flowers, catch bugs and fish and dig up fossils. They are all pretty simple activities and that’s one of the reasons I think this game is a good tool to learn Japanese.

Availability

ACNH is available now on Nintendo switch worldwide, and downloadable from the Nintendo Switch eShop. Even the EU/US copies of the game come with Japanese language support, so there’s no need to import from Japan. The game itself asks you for your preferred language settings when starting a new game. Simply choose 日本語.

Price [4]

The game is standard retail price of around £50, $60 or 6000円. So fairly expensive, but there’s a lot of content and longevity, with timed seasonal events there should be new content for at least a year - so in my opinion it’s definitely worth that price.

Japanese Level [7]

Though the game doesn’t have voice acting (well, it kinda does but it’s almost completely incomprehensible) it does include a variety of hiragana ひらがな, katakana カタカナ and kanji 漢字 - which comes with furigana over all kanji. Making it pretty suitable for new Japanese learners with regards to reading and recognising the words. As long as you have access to a dictionary you should be able to understand most words in the game. And the words themselves are rather varied. For example financial words when dealing with bank balances or purchases. The names of fish, fruit, flowers, clothing, tools and insects (mostly written in katakana) - this level of detail may be too much, since I don’t know the names of most fish and insects in English! But it is useful, especially the fish - since in Sushi restaurants there are many times where I’ll know the name of a fish but not know what the fish itself looks like, so animal crossing can help link those together in my mind. Also there are basic greetings and a bit of everyday conversation when talking to villagers. This is usually just talking about upcoming events or visitors to the town. Though every animal villager has a catchphrase of sorts, making the occasional sentence a bit confusing - since they are generally made up words or their word choice can be unusual due to their personalities. But I still think overall the amount of useful words is quite high.

Story Progression [9]

In terms of story progression, there is a short set of tasks to complete, most of which can be done within an hour or so of play time every day, but spread out over the course of maybe 2 weeks. But there is no combat in the game, no bosses and no real objectives. So you don’t have to worry about getting stuck if you can’t understand a lot of the Japanese - which is great! Though there are some tasks such as furnishing a house with specific hand crafted furniture which could be difficult if you struggle to understand the instructions - but nothing a quick google in English won’t fix.

Gaming to learning Ratio [7]

Despite Japanese being everywhere in the game, every villager, item and NPC interaction has at least a sentence of Japanese text to go along with it. However, after you’ve read it once or twice it really melts into the background and there’s a tendency to skip through it. Also long periods of time can be spent just fishing or designing the town, giving very little Japanese exposure. But if you want to read every description and talk to every character, then there really is a lot of good practice here. Personally I think there’s a good balance of learning when you want to, and actually having fun playing the game that you have control over at all times. If you want to learn some new stuff, take a new species to the museum and listen to the explanation! If you’ve been studying all day, just say “not right now” and keep on fishing!

Fun Factor [8]

Animal crossing is a divisive franchise even among the English speaking gaming community. If you’re looking for a relaxing, chilled out time to just lose yourself in creativity. Then it’s super fun! Perfect even. But if you’re looking for a game to test your gaming skills, and your Japanese skills then maybe this isn’t the game for you. But personally I love it.

Verdict

Animal Crossing New Horizons is an easily accessible game, with a standard full retail price tag. It requires the basic ability to read hiragana and katakana to start playing. And a little knowledge of Japanese vocab, kanji and grammar to get the most out of it. But even without you can have fun, make some progress and maybe pick up a hundred or so useful nouns or phrases. Even if you’ve never played a previous game in the series I think you can jump straight in and pick things up, if you want a stress free game, while practicing your Japanese along the way give it a shot! So my verdict on can you learn Japanese with ACNH? …Yes. It’s great reading practice, a little comprehension and it’s fun!

Check out the video version of this article here!