NIS America have announced their all-new puzzler for iOS in which players get to interact with cuddly characters while learning Japanese. Players will meet challenges by the "Nommons" who are hungry for katakana, hiragana and kanji. The more difficulty you have recalling certain characters, the more often they'll appear over time while characters a player has mastered move out of the way.

When the game is released (summer this year), the katakana character set will be totally free. Everything else, including heroes and villains from the Disgaea games series and hundreds of kanji, are downloadable content users could grab later on. The good thing about this is, you can sample how the game works and learn one entire character set before committing to the rest of the app.

In case anyone is wondering, I was actually concerned about the kanji section and whether the command line would be displaying just English words (you're tasked with identifying kanji for their meanings) or if the game also covered spelling. I asked about it, and since there are so many different ways to use and spell kanji (which is true, many are situational), it'll be entirely based on matching English words to the characters for their meanings. This is especially true in the case of multiple kanji being spelled the same way, which the developers have decided would be a frustrating playing experience.

Check out the gallery for images provided by NIS America and Yummy Yummy Tummy (co-developers). It looks pretty damn cute and the idea seems fun, so I'm looking forward to more updates.