Marvel’s Spiderman

It seems like recently Spiderman is on everybody’s lips. With huge popularity being garnered by both the live action and animated Spiderman movies, Peter Parker, and any other iteration of him, has never been so popular. Marvel’s Spiderman parallels No way home in terms of it’s impact on their relevant platforms. You often expect that games adapted from films and comics are a bit rough around the edges but even some of the early Spiderman games broke this mould. As such I expected this entry into the series to be good but it blew my expectation out the water. Never before have I felt so immersed in being the character I’m playing, which is even more incredible when you consider I was playing it in another language!

Platforms and Languages – 4/10

Spiderman can be bought for the PC, Playstation and Xbox for anywhere up to £60 depending on the version and console. For PC players the game can be set into Japanese through the Steam properties menu however for Xbox and Playstation players you cannot set the game into Japanese in the standard version. The Xbox and Playstation consoles are not region locked so a Japanese hard copy of the game can be played freely on your standard consoles, see here for more details and tips!

Glossary

Usability 10/10

Marvel’s Spiderman is fantastic for experiencing and learning language. The game is a perfect menage-et-trois of story, action and comedy and features so much digestible content that, regardless of your interests, you’ll find something that makes you tick. First and foremost, you can tell that the game devs genuinely knew and loved the source material for Spiderman as the game is packed full of references and each character feels like they came straight out of the comics. The story utilizes patterns and events relating to certain villains and yet somehow manages to remain fresh and keep you on the edge of your seat. This, coupled with top quality voice acting, makes for a game you truly want to get invested and immersed in, and with the density of the world design in this game you can truly get lost in it for hours. I spent what felt like weeks swinging around New York, actually feeling like I was Spiderman, all the while surrounded by constant and entertaining Japanese language.

The first feature that has to be discussed is the narrative. As previously mentioned the story is oozing with Spiderman’s typical wit and charm, character models are brilliantly designed and each interaction feels meaningful and relevant to your adventure. Each chapter in the story reveals new characters but also provides variation in topics, including crime, community, politics, love and romance, and even the occasional sharp insult. Even during travel time between these set points the world around you is living and breathing. Bystanders will call out to each other, police radios will go off alerting you to crimes in process and news tapes from your favourite angry broadcaster, J Jonah Jameson, will ring through your ears. There are few moments where no language is present and the audio quality and natural feel of it allows you to sit back and take in new vocab passively.

The next most fascinating part of Spiderman for me was the menus. User interfaces are a necessity in all video games but there are plenty of instances where your pause menu can just be a few options and sound settings and nothing more. This menu is phenomenal. Every aspect of your kit, abilities and research while playing as Spidey is laid out in tremendous detail. Your selections for your gadgets, special abilities and suits goes on and on and each one has a it’s stats, a description of its abilities and peripheral detail on how to unlock it. Needless to say you can spend hours scrolling through this menu and the content is incredibly nostalgic and engaging. Unlocking a new suit in particular gives a whole new buzz to how you approach each scenario (and makes for some nice new photos in the photo mode!).

The topics throughout Spiderman are pretty varied but for the most part are based in usable day-to-day vocabulary. While there’s a ton of physics based lingo for all the combat and swinging my favourite part was actually the chemistry. If you didn’t know, Peter Parker daylights as a scientist when he’s not fighting crime, which is close to my own heart.

The story sprinkles a good helping of research sections throughout, including sections where you work at a lab run by Dr Octavius (Yes, that Dr Octavius). Without spoiling too much, you and Otto work to develop new composites and circuitry that can be used for his ongoing project of cerebro-kinetic arms (Bet that won’t bite you in the arse). You’ll also be tasked with finding research hubs around the city for your friend Harry Osborne (Yes, that Harry Osborne) and conducting really diverse experiments. This proved to be one of my favourite types of missions because it features all of the best formats of language: A brief description of the experiment and how to resolve it, a voice over from Harry providing further background and Peter’s quips as he completes each checkpoint.

For those of you who enjoy dipping into the wordier aspects of games, you can read through Peter’s database. This contains lengthier descriptions of each of the characters, trinkets that Peter has found during his fights and school life, and audio tapes. These are much denser and more descriptive that any other pieces of text in the game but they have the benefit of being able to be read at will. At any point when you’ve discovered or interacted with something or someone new you can stop and read about it to your hearts content. The tapes and trinkets in particular have an incredible rare feature in that they have repeatable voiced dialogue, meaning you can hear good quality audio with having to rely on cutscenes that have varied language. This was by far the most impressive tool for me. I found every collectible as soon as I could because of it. For each item you can play a unique audio clip on loop in order to practice your listening. If you have the subtitles on it is even more indispensable as you can associate the kanji with the audio of the words you’re hearing.

The above items make up most of the language content but even so there are many smaller features that just add to the games already brilliant usability. I personally love the loading screens in this game as you get a picturesque dynamic shot of Spidey in whichever costume you are currently sporting and a selection of tips for combat to read while you wait. This strengthens any of the physics based vocab you may have picked up from the abilities or gadgets menu. While looking through the map you can also find Marvel’s equivalent of “Twitter” in which many of the suburbanites will post about Spidey’s accomplishments. This is a fun and comparative view into other, real Japanese forums of this type and can build more conversational skills.

All in all, Marvel’s Spiderman covers all bases and does so with fantastic quality. The play area of New York is vast and has so many different types of mission that it’s genuinely a slog to complete them all, and yet there is rarely a dull moment. You can spend days in an easily immersible world and choose a variety of methods in order to round off multiple assets of your language ability. This game has earned its place as one of the highest recommendations for me and I cannot wait to play Spiderman Miles Morales!

Challenges and Methods – 10/10

Spiderman the lecturer

No surprise this is here. Once you’ve collected a new item or tape listen to the descriptions and note how much you can understand. Use the subtitles and pick out new vocab to study and break down the sentence until you can understand it. Now with your eyes closed, try listening to each description again and see if you can follow the narrative. For added points see if you can write them out just from the audio.

The Rogue’s gallery (and friends)

In this tab you can read through descriptions of both Spidey’s enemies and friends. This descriptive language often follows a colloquial style as if Peter were talking to you himself. Try reading through the block of text aloud or writing it out until you come across a word or grammar point you don’t understand. Then learn it, start again and see if you can complete each whole block.

Mission notes

Sometimes during both the story missions and side quests you’ll get a block of text that will not progress until you press a button. Take the time to read these and write them out where possible. They will add valuable understanding to the theme and events of the mission you’re on and will likely not be able to be seen again once the mission is complete.

Posting on the web

As you progress through the story the post feed on Spidey’s “Twitter” will change and reflect relevant comments on either your latest mission or big story events that are up and coming. By regularly checking this feed and noting down words you don’t know you can build a vast conversational vocabulary. Just be sure to note down any useful sentences you like before they dissapear!