An instant improvement over its prequel 'Hiragana Battle'.

Hiragana Battle was extremely basic; it did what it needed to do, and it worked well, but its UI elements felt clumsy and its character progression was lacking. Katakana War fixes that with a clean user interface; neat and tidy answer windows; better RPG progression; and a degree of focus and polish the original sorely needed.

As soon as the game starts, being prompted to enter your own name, class, and select a preferred gender tells you just how much more effort they're putting in right out of the gate, but my experience was something like that of a rollercoaster.

There's voice acting for the characters! Yay! But they're all Americans claiming to be Australian, or from European or Slavic countries, with absolutely zero accent. Boo!

There's more than four stock characters! Yay! But they (including the protagonist) total 8. Progressing the game even at a slow pace means that if you're looking to max out everyone's affection, since YOU cannot leave the party, there will always be one character left out, who you'll just have to grind with for an hour whilst the finale patiently waits for you. Boo!

There's more than one music track for battles, including fun little special versions of those tracks when fighting certain bosses. Yay! But music tracks don't loop well. Boo!

There's a variety of special effects and magic spells to be had. Yay! But there was no consideration put into audio stacking (getting much louder) when affecting more than one enemy, resulting in having to turn the volume down. Boo!

Anyway...

It's nice that these characters - accent-starved as they are - get a lot more banter between eachother, but my opinion vacillated on whether I liked them or not. I know 'annoying human with no concept of actually *being* a human' is a common anime character trait, but the game seemed to be making your party members juggle endearing qualities and loathesome ones from scene to scene, and I went back and forth between laughing and cringing.

Speaking of laughter, it is a funny game with a lot of charm, and altogether has a salubrious effect, but what's important is that it works.

It helps familiarise Katakana just as effortlessly as Hiragana Battle did with Hiragana, but since Katakana focuses on loan words (foreign words taken from other languages), the game often seems to run out of material, and takes the time to teach you Hiragana. I really, truly don't see why. So many of my notes (you WILL need a notepad, trust me) contain me having to confusedly specify that the game swapped from Katakana words to Hiragana words for no real reason. I think a more strict focus on Katakana would have been appreciated. A scant few words are in both Hiragana and Katakana, but the game doesn't explain why both are used in the same word.

But yeah, I walked away happy and confident that I could revise both alphabets well. I know Kanji, vocab and grammar are Japanese's real threats, but just like Hiragana Battle, Katakana War is effective at effortlessly making its subject matter easy to digest. I really recommended Katakana War, with the caveat you finish Hiragana Battle beforehand.

It's a wonderful program.