Hey everyone, I’m extremely excited to present a custom deck that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. For those unfamiliar, Hotel Dusk is an adventure game for the Nintendo DS which follows a detective unraveling a mystery while inside of a remote motel. The reason I’m excited to share this deck is because I really feel like this is one of the best games to play for someone interested in trying to apply their Japanese learning skills for both grammar and vocab. Why do I believe this?
-Sentences are short. The way the game is displayed results in very neatly packaged sentences and phrases which are not overly complicated. Additionally, I didn’t find any of the phrasing to be overly complex like I would find in a game like Ace Attorney.
-The setting results in a neatly packaged vocab set. Because you’re in one setting and the game is following one theme throughout the story, you end up seeing new words repeated over and over again. This is great for retention.
-The game is simple to play and engaging. The game is 50/50 gameplay where you are solving puzzles based on dialogue with other characters and then engaging with those same characters to advance the story. This means you can take some brain breaks with actual gameplay between dense story sections.
-The game has built in comprehension checks. At the end of each chapter, the main character will confront a character and unravel their story. This means you will need to understand the conversation happening as it’s happening to approach them with the correct rebuttal or piece of evidence. Additionally, at the end of each chapter the main character will review everything he’s learned during the chapter which requires the user to input the correct answers to prompts. All of these interactions have very low stakes, you will just have to reload and try again.
-The game is very charming. Maybe it’s just me, but the setting of an old motel with a set of extremely memorable and quirky characters is just a delight. I played this game as a kid when it came out so I have some nostalgia glasses on when it comes to the graphics, but I also think the game was extremely impressive for being on the NDS.
-There’s a sequel. That’s right, if you love Hotel Dusk and find it to be a valuable learning tool, there’s a sequel with a whole new mystery and setting!
You can find the deck in the community decks section on BunPro under the video games category. Big thanks to the anonymous person who hosts this site:
Japanese Video Game Text Dumps
I’ve been trying to get a text dump in Japanese for a long time but have only ever managed to get English ones off of roms. Using this dump, I was able to scrape the script for vocab.
Enjoy!