Japanese iPhone games

Japanese Language Resources
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Sometime on long flights or waiting for a bus or similar (as long as my WK reviews are done), I’ve been playing a stupid English language word-scramble sort of game. It’s really sort of a brainless, guilty pleasure to make the time pass. A couple of weeks ago, I decided it would be nice to try and find some similar games in Japanese. Not studying, but more guilty pleasure and fun with the side bonus of reinforcing stuff with which I am already familiar.

I’ve found three that are somewhat interesting so far:

Japanese Crossword Puzzle, by Yuichi HARA:
This one is decent, but there only seem to be 20 levels. Hopefully more will be added. The clues are pretty good and make you think a bit, but unfortunately, the input method is a bit strange. You need to click on the letter in a chart of hiragana to ‘type’ it into the grid.

Japanese Crossword, by Le Thi Quynh Ny:
In this one, you’re sort of solving a crossword, but you’re really just selecting the hiragana to spell a particular word written in kanji. The interface is nice, and it becomes sort of addictive. There is a lot of content and it gets harder over time. The downside is that words are repeated a lot.

クロスワードFAN, by release base, Inc.:
This is probably the best of the bunch. It seems to be actual, real Japanese crosswords in hiragana. The clues seem good, but it is a bit above my current level. I would say you need to be N2+ or equivalent to make much headway with these puzzles.

Does anyone have any Japanese iPhone games they enjoy?

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Not an iPhone game, but it’s in keeping with the theme of the games you’ve listed: I actually have a thread here in the forums for solving crosswords. It’s stalled a bit, because there’s only two of us still going, but maybe if some new people came and joined in…

Someone else started a thread here with kanji crosswords from out of a newspaper, and the solutions often seemed to be writing one of the hiragana words in the clue in kanji, the opposite of how you’ve described the second game in your list, so I wonder if that’s just a type of crossword in Japan.

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