My Japanese Coach cheat

Well, it looks like Ubisoft is giving out the cheat to people who call customer support and request it. A reader of this blog posted it as a comment to the entry titled "More My Japanese Coach News." I figure since Ubisoft is giving it out, I might as well make a full blog post detailing the cheat. If your copy of My Japanese Coach is sitting on your shelf collecting dust, then this should help breathe some new life into it.

Go to the dictionary and look up the word "cheat". Touch the "V" next to the verb to open the conjugation chart. Hold the L and R triggers for a few seconds. If done correctly, you will hear the word "cheat" in Japanese. The cheat has now been activated.

Now to use the cheat, you must return to the main menu, go to Options, then Sound. Pressing R will advance you 1 lesson, and pressing L will advance you to the beginning of the next lesson group (usually every 50 lessons).

Now beware, once this cheat has been activated, it is saved to your profile, and can't be turned off until you delete your profile. And there's no way to go back to previous lessons that you skipped over. Sure, you can visit the skipped lesson from the lesson map, but there's no lesson map once you get past lesson 100.

One last caveat...the cheat has always functioned properly in all testing that I have done, but, as Game Informer magazine says in every issue, "Cheat codes are buggier than Virginia in August." Although I don't anticipate any problems (other than the aforementioned permanent unlock), use the cheat at your own risk.

More My Japanese Coach news

At the time of this writing, My Japanese Coach is currently ranked #6 in DS games on Amazon.com. It is currently behind Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros., but ahead of Brain Age and Spore Creatures.

There is also a video review, as well as lots of game footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JLRjHRsDbs

After reading through the message boards at GameFaqs/GameSpot, I found a few more issues I'd like to talk about.

1. A lot of people want to know if there's a cheat code so they can skip ahead to some new material they don't already know. Others just want to skip to lesson 30 to get away from romaji. I can tell you that there is a cheat (I programmed it), but it's up to the publisher, Ubisoft, to decide when/if that ever gets released. I'd suggest contacting them. Perhaps I can post it here when they give the OK.
2. The vocabulary lessons (after lesson 100) are not grouped in any meaningful way. I agree that it would be better if they had been grouped with similar words, but unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to do this. The words were randomly assigned a lesson, in groupings of 10.
   
3. Just as a clarification (many are confused in the posts I've read), the game defaults to romaji until lesson 30, at which point it defaults to kana (for features that don't require romaji.) The toggle in the options stays gray until lesson 30, at which point you may re-enable romaji.
4. Some of the characters require more strokes than the actual number of strokes. As I mentioned before, with a dictionary of 11000 words, some incorrect characters may have been overlooked. If you finish writing a character, but the game doesn't accept it yet, you can press the A button to check it. This is the easiest way to get past these.
5. On a related note, you can clear the current character by pressing the B button. This is an easy way to start over on the current character if you mess up.
6. The highest lesson you can unlock with the placement test is 11. For non-beginners, the cheat might be your best option (again, you'll need to contact Ubisoft).
7. Unfortunately, there is no verb conjugation game. We had one in My Spanish Coach, but it didn't translate as well to Japanese. However, you can go into the dictionary and click on the "V" next to verbs to view a conjugation chart.
   

A lot of these are valid complaints, and, if there's ever a sequel to this game (Ubisoft decides), then these things will definitely be taken into account. Unfortunately, play testing only gets us so far before the game is released. It's great to see all the things many of you would like to see changed to make this a better product. Perhaps Ubisoft will do an Intermediate version, but the ones that I see on GameSpot for the Spanish version are foreign to me. I don't know anything about them. Perhaps Ubisoft has another developer making those.