Recently, we often hear the term "edutainment" in discussions of new forms of education. This is a new word made by combining the words "education" and "entertainment." This way of thinking has been around for a long time and has inspired a large number of materials like educational games featuring popular characters.
However, we cannot exactly say these materials produced by the educational industry have entertainment value. This is because many people in the education industry unfortunately do not really understand entertainment. In my case, because I am a part of the entertainment industry and have experience seriously devoting myself to game development, I simply never found the study materials created by educational companies interesting.
I was not the only one who felt this way. Other creators around me felt the same. In particular, a surprisingly large number of those who were parents themselves said they wanted to do something for kids.
I thought it would be amazing to create a game that children could genuinely enjoy playing and become fluent in English in the process. I wanted to give them the experience of naturally acquiring knowledge through playing rather than being taught.
We adults thought long and hard about this. After a year and a half of scenario and setting creation and around five years of planning and development with our partner MINTFLAG, we created the English educational game "Maguna to Fushigi no Shojo" (Magna and the Mysterious Girl).