Welcome to Yamaguchi! Please let this moe mascot show you around.

Quickly, think of the most visited areas in Japan. Most of you came up with Tokyo or Kyoto, a couple of the real ones dropped Osaka, and there’s a person in the back who has the pockets for Okinawa. Fantastic. I personally always enjoy a jaunt up to the Tohoku region, but I’ve also lived in Japan most of my adult life. There are still many prefectures I haven’t seen or visited, mostly because I have no incentive to do so. In fact, I would guess that most of us haven’t seen the majority of our home country, either because it’s too goddamn big, travel is too expensive or we’re lazy by nature. All are valid reasons, and, yes, being an agoraphobe is also a solid excuse. So we all, collectively, are pardoned for not seeing every square inch of land in the place we call our home.

Yet there’s a distinctive pride in every nook and cranny across the globe, and none moreso than in Japan, where every single city, town and village boasts something that makes them unique. Maybe it’s the obvious, like miniatures of every major landmark in one place or the real grave of Jesus. Maybe it’s a bit more unsettling, like the village of dolls or the abandoned city. But the city of Iwakuni in Yamaguchi knows they’ve got plenty of amazing things for people to see. Castles, museums, a beer brewery, tons of local foods and so much to experience in a prefecture that most (including myself) couldn’t find on a map. In today’s age, you can’t just have some boring, cookie cutter tourism campaign and hope for the best. No, you make a whole ass video game and give it away for free to promote your city. You make Iwakuni Quest.

What, you have no idea how you got here or what to do? Good news, all these cute girls are available for tour info!

Debuting the same day as Tokyo Game Show 2025 kicked off, Iwakuni Quest  is a remarkable little feat where you play as a random person who has wandered into Iwakuni city. Immediately, you are beset by the helpful anthropomorphic beings that inhabit the city, such as Mihashi Towa, who is the personification of Kintai Bridge, or Iwakuni Jo chan, which is Iwakuni castle. Because this is still very much a Japanese game, all of the characters are cute girls, but none are meant to be lewd or titillating, so as to not distract from the mission statement of helping you get to know Iwakuni. With no preamble whatsoever, you get paired up with Marifu chan, a little fairy girl who personally escorts you to all corners of the city to experience their wonders and meet other characters.

Iwakuni Quest does its best to be an edutainment product, giving you elements of enjoyment and gameplay while trying to educate you about all that is Iwakuni City. Over the course of five areas, you’ll get some cursory information about products, sights and experiences within the city, though a lot of the information is up to the player to decide if they want to learn. The different areas ask you to engage in a match three puzzle “battle” of sorts, where you have to get so many combinations of things like wasabi plants, cherry blossoms and various products of Iwakuni to unlock gallery entries. If you don’t know to go back to the main menu and check the gallery after completing a battle, then you won’t know how important wasabi is to the everyday diet of an Iwakuni resident. Spoiler: not a lot but still essential.

The look of joy that only comes from matching up reams of silk and lemons.

The puzzle element is the crux of the entire game, and it’s mostly well crafted. On the one hand, match three games where matching four then creates a special attack item is far from a new concept. But, as a result, everyone and their mother (probably especially their mothers) knows how these games work and can pick it up without blinking, and it is satisfying. The combinations come fast and furious, the animation is smooth and simple, and there’s a surprisingly dynamic soundtrack to underline all the puzzles. It’s rather humorous: in contrast to the benign and ambient music when you go through the exposition scenes, the guitar and electronic beats really gets the blood going in the heat of the puzzling.

Though I must admit, I was pretty impressed with how the puzzle matching works out. Instead of crafting new powerups from matches of four, the game gives you a supercharged version of an existing icon that has different effects. For example, a supercharged tomato has a blast cross that’s very reminescient of Bomber Man. The cherry blossom will make a diagonal slash across the screen, giving you the image of a samurai slicing their katana across the different artifacts. And the wasabi will destroy everything in a one block proximity, sort of like how eating too much wasabi will destroy everything inside of you. The results are incredibly satisfying, and the chain reactions can build up in no time flat. There’s some solid design, and players who finish story mode will have Endless mode if you just want to keep clicking for the sake of wasting time and having fun.

Akari is training! Training for what? Too many questions, let’s puzzle battle!

The different characters you encounter all have their own quirks, though you barely get a glimpse of them due to interactions being incredibly short bursts. That, I think, is the biggest drawback of Iwakuni Quest: the game fails to fully investigate what it creates. You’ve got a bubbly ocean girl, a slightly odd but endearing train fan and someone who hangs out with crows and drinks too much, and you barely have any face time with any of them. Had the tourism board decided to make a lighthearted dating simulation or even slice of life experience within Iwakuni, this could have been a grand title that I actually would have paid for. There’s some fantastic artwork, and I would have liked to learn more about Akari and her role in Iwakuni. Seriously, some of these characters are mysterious and adorable, let’s lean into it!

If you finish everything in Iwakuni Quest, then you’ve successfully invested about a half hour into the game, if that. The entire romp through the exposition, the maps and the final puzzle battle are very fast and barely give you a chance to catch your breath before it’s all over. Again, not a bad thing: if you want to sit down and watch a video essay about Yamaguchi prefecture, there’s plenty of sources and vloggers who’ve done a lot of input. The issue there, though, is the same as the issue of the game itself: entirely in Japanese. While Iwakuni City’s main goal might me just to bolster awareness among the domestic crowd, a nod to trying to get foreign based wallets to visit may have generated more eyes on the project. Still, thanks to the brevity of it all, you can absolutely finish the game with no reading required.

If you point your Google Translate app at the game, it’s like you’re practically there!

Personally, I think this is a bold and delightful move in trying to encourage more people to come to Iwakuni. Iwakuni Quest is a great exhibition in trying newish tactics to get eyes on the city. While far from the first game to be distributed freely for propaganda’s sake, this one is so earnest in putting the game first and the education second that it’s positively endearing. It exhibits not only a lot about the city itself, but about the mannerisms of the Yamaguchi people themselves. You can glean a bit about their different ben (regional dialect) from how the characters talk, and anyone with a bit of hiragana under their belt will see different conjugations that crop up. The game seems to say “come play, and, if you want to, you can learn more about us afterwards.” It’s wild to think of a game as humble, but here we are.

Lastly, I have to say that Iwakuni Quest was made to run on a potato, so don’t even hesitate to wonder if your computer can handle the incredible fidelity and FPS that Japanese team Zerodiv Inc. has put together. It’s not only a good looking game, it plays to its strengths by limiting system demands and using plenty of stills to push the journey along without any strain on your PC.  They have, in essence, removed any inhibitions people might have about running Iwakuni Quest. It’s free, it’s small, and it’s lightweight, and it all comes together to form a charming stroll in a place that now registers much higher on my vacation list. It’s fantastic for Iwakuni City to create this, and placing themselves front and center at Tokyo Game Show was a bold move that I can’t help but admire.

A devestating 21 hit combo to an anthropomorphic castle to unlock a photo of sake. Japan!

Even if you can’t read Japanese, I would recommend giving a try to Iwakuni Quest to see just what heart and gumption creates in the Southern realm of Japan. Who knows? Maybe it’ll spark something inside you to come and witness this beautiful land yourself. If even a handful of people flock to Iwakuni as a result of Iwakuni Quest, I would consider it a massive success.

Iwakuni Quest is available now on PC direcly from the Iwakuni City website.