Thanks for taking the time to reply as well !
It's ok and I understand the need of building things from scratch especially for an artist because that is how freedom gives the end product a unique personality.
My Education project is similar to a kanji quest or let's put it this way, you have to walk in a world and find chinese characters or kanji. This really doesn't need a lot of storyline as the main idea is to randomize the objectives. The reason why I wish I could create a game game boy style is because : it's cute, minimalistic, still fun and I guess fast to build when you have the right sprites.
Such a game would be perfect for people learning Japanese or Chinese because they could have the sense of playing a game while having a good environment that helps them to memorize characters more easily. Also there is a collecting-object-oriented excitement to this idea, collecting objects is cool let's be honest.
I am a web developer and over the 5 past years I built a personal database of +3000 Chinese/Japanese characters with few metadatas and translation associated with each of them. That's education first but now that I have valuable data I thought that'd be nice to cast it into a more interactive environment such as games.
I know you most certainly have your mind on other things right now but IF you ever find this idea interesting I'd be glad to provide public this data upon a collaborative agreement. Education + game, that is a good recipe :)
Have a good day