Tokoton 2 Review

Tokoton 2 is a follow up to IE Institute's first kanji game, Tokoton. The sequel is largely unchanged from its predecessor but adds a couple new features here and there.

The game features two main options. The first is a 漢字チェック where you can take a 20-question quiz to test your ability at the different levels of the Kanken exam. Depending on how many questions you get correct and how quickly you solve the problems will determine what sort of orb you receive as a prize. Rainbow orb seems to be the best. You are tested on 4 different subjects from the test (writing, reading, four-kanji idioms, etc) with 5 questions in each subject. My first reaction here is that 20 questions is far too few to give yourself a good idea on how you would do on a real Kanken test, which has over 100 questions. I think you (and the makers) are a little optimistic to think that your performance on only 20 questions would be a good mark for how you would perform on the exam. The 20 questions don't even begin to cover all the different subjects that the test entails, a common feature found in Rocket Company's Kanken DS series.

The rest of the software is pretty straightforward. You can test yourself on the various reading and writing components of the Kanken exam at your leisure. These include 書き取り (writing), 誤字訂正 (correcting incorrect kanji), 送りがな (okurigana), 筆順 (stroke order), and 部首 (radicals). There are quite a few more areas, and you can test your skills from level 10 (the lowest) to level 1 (the highest level). The problem with these tests, though, is that once you've chosen the area you want to study and the level you want to work on, you only get to work on a 5-question set of problems. Once you finish these up and receive your score, you go back to the main menu--after waiting for a good 5 seconds of loading time that is unforgivable this late in the Nintendo DS's lifetime for a text-based game.

The small number of questions and irritating load time make the game a bit hard to handle in long sittings. If you just want to pop out a quiz or two while you wait for the bus or train it can be nice, but using it long-term for heavy study is not recommended.

The game contains a joyo kanji dictionary and four-kanji idiom dictionary, but these are mostly rendered useless by poor implementation.

The joyo kanji dictionary can only be searched by reading, number of strokes, and the level it appears in the Kanken. You can view the radical and number of strokes for a character, but the stroke order is strangely not included.

The stroke number and level searching is fine, but the reading search function is heavily flawed. You are only able to search for a kanji via the first character in its reading. So for example, if you wanted to look up 漢 (カン) and find out its radical, you would have to input カ and then scroll through ALL the kanji whose readings that start with カ until you reach カン, which appears near the bottom of the list. Since Kanken DS 2 included a search function where you could input the exact reading or even the character itself, it's surprising Tokoton 2 failed to do so.

The four-kanji idiom dictionary suffers the same sad fate as its little brother. The idioms can only be searched by reading or level, and the readings are based on the first part of the first character's reading. So let's say you wanted to look up the meaning of 弱肉強食 (じゃくにくきょうしょく), survival of the fittest. You'd have to input し and then search all the way down to the idioms starting with しゃ and じゃ. While this may be borderline usable by somebody familiar with many idioms and looking to just tweak their understanding, it makes it impossible for beginner and intermediate users to get much use of this.

Frankly, the proverbial ball was dropped on both dictionary functions. The kanji dictionary is painfully inferior to Kanken DS 2's dictionary.

There's also one boring minigame that you can unlock. I played it once or twice. It's not very fun.

So Tokoton 2 offers flimsy tests of your Kanken level, short quizzes bogged down by long loading times, and useless dictionaries. It's hard to think of who I would recommend this game to. Since the level tests aren't very accurate with only 20 questions covering just a bit of the test, I can't recommend this to people prepping for the test. Five question quizzes with five-second load times are aggravating for any gamer and make it difficult to study for more than a few minutes at a time. The dictionaries are not useful in any way whatsoever.

Tokoton 2 proves to be a rather lackluster game far into the life cycle of the Nintendo DS and outclassed by most if not all of its brother and sisters. Give this one a pass. I only played it long enough to write this review.