Game: Kanji Cats
Genre: Educational
System: Steam (Windows, macOS)
Developer | Publisher: The Farting Cat
Controller Support: None
Price: US $11.70 | UK £10.49 | EU € 11,96
Release Date: May 26, 2026
Review code provided with many thanks to The Farting Cat.
Kanji Cats is a very cute, themed educational game is all about teaching you kanji. It is designed for people who already have a good foundation in Japanese, but they haven’t learned kanji just yet, unlike Kana Quest, which I reviewed in 2023. So let’s dive in and see what it is like.
What is Kanji?
Japanese is a complex language with three different “alphabets.” The first is used to spell out things phonetically, and it is called hiragana; it has 46 “letters.” The second is for foreign words, and it also has 46 characters in it, basically one-to-one with hiragana. The third, the most complicated, is called kanji, and it is made up of Chinese characters.
While there are 50,000 kanji, there are 2,136 required to learn to understand the language. Just about every one of these characters has multiple pronunciations and use cases. This makes kanji extremely important to learn but also very, very challenging. I took four years of Japanese, and I know only a couple of kanji by heart.
One example that was in Kanji Cats’ first levels is 七, which is the kanji for “seven.” It has several pronunciations depending on how it is used: July, for example, is 七月 (七 is pronounced: shichi) while seventh is 第七 (七 is pronounced: nana). It also has two other ways you can pronounce it in different use cases. This makes learning kanji confusing, and Kanji Cats is trying to simplify the process.
How Kanji Cats Plays
Kanji Cats plays like a point-and-click most of the time. You get a selection of possible pieces for the kanji to make it, then it teaches you how to pronounce it in that particular situation. You then take that knowledge and use it to play conveyor belt games where you try to give the right kanji sushi to the cat asking for it. It spells out most of the words in hiragana (which is why you need to have a good basis in Japanese to play the game).
There is even a typing section where you need to type the Romanized version of the hiragana you are seeing on the screen. It also teaches you the correct order of how to write the characters, which is also important for making sure you can recreate them yourself later on.
My Overall Thoughts of Kanji Cats
As someone who was once mildly fluent in Japanese and retains quite a bit of the language, I found Kanji Cats to be extremely helpful and a wonderful learning tool. I found it fun to play, adorable, and I am very motivated to play. When you earn enough coins from playing, you get to play gachapon, which is like those gumball machines with little plastic balls in them that hold toys. In Kanji Cats, each gachapon capsule has a picture of a kitten inside. And I love them.
Conclusion
Overall, I feel like Kanji Cats is a great learning tool for anyone looking to expand how well they speak, write, and read Japanese. Everything is spoken out loud to help you learn better; the words are useful and helpful, and the game makes retaining the information easy. I’ve been playing a few minutes a day for the last week or so, and I do remember a lot of what I have learned.
It’s a great little game, inexpensive for what it is, and it runs almost flawlessly. I’m so glad Kanji Cats found its way into my Steam library, and I look forward to learning even more kanji over the next few months.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up:
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