We want to play this game ourselves! There’s just one problem….
Japanese kanji are made up of smaller components called “radicals,” kind of like how some English words are made up of smaller parts (such as the word “biology” made up of “bio” meaning “life” and “logy” meaning “study”).
This fact has caused some hilarious confusion before, but it actually makes learning kanji easier. As long as you know the radicals, then you can write pretty much any kanji!
And now Japanese Twitter user @aramatypo has taken advantage of this fact and created an amazing video where they show off a game that’s so brilliant, it’s amazing it hasn’t been thought of before.
▼ “I wanted to play a game where you make kanji like Tetris, so I made this video.”
(Note: They actually compare the game to Puyo Puyo, a similar Tetris-like tile-matching game.)
For those who don’t know much about kanji, here’s a walkthrough of what’s happening:
▼ In the bottom left is the kanji 土 (“dirt”), and
the kanji 一 (“one”) is falling down on top of it.
▼ When they connect, they fuse together into…
▼ …the kanji 王 (“king”)! You can pretty easily
see how 一 and 土 came together to form it.
▼ But of course it gets more complicated. Here the three turquoise
kanji 臣 (“retainer”), 又 (“again”) and 貝 (“shell”) fuse together to form…
▼ …the kanji 賢 (“wise”)!
That took some pretty careful planning for sure.
For anyone who has studied kanji, this looks like the ultimate test: can you put the radicals together fast enough to race the clock? I know I definitely want to try!
…there’s only one problem. It’s not an actual game. This was just a video that @aramatypo created for fun.
To be fair, I’m not even sure if such a game could be made. The amount of combinations that would have to be programmed in is just mind-boggling. Plus there’s the fact that some sequences of radicals would lead to impossible games. But still, we can dream, right?
Here’s how Japanese Twitter reacted:
“I’m terrible at kanji, but I’d play the heck out of this.”
“You should definitely program this and sell it. I’d buy it!”
“I lol’ed at the end when the final kanji was 終 (“end/finish”).”
“It seems cool, but there’s so many ambiguous combinations. In the video, the kanji 十 and 口 fused into 古, but it could have also turned into 田, 申, 甲, or others.”
Even though it would be a tough nut to crack, it still might be a fun project for some ambitious kanji-lovers/master programmers out there. They just have to be sure to make it so that if you ever fuse together one of the hardest kanji ever, then you get an automatic win, of course.
Source: Twitter/@aramatypo via My Game News Flash
Images: Twitter/@aramatypo