A nice collection
This is a collection of Japanese literature. As the title implies, it contains 100 works, although only around fifty of those are novels and long-form stories, while the other fifty are short stories and poems. In addition, there are thirty unlockable titles, bringing the total to 130.
Obviously, due to copyright considerations, the works are fairly old (mid-19th-early-20th centuries), so anyone looking for Yukio Mishima or Yasunari Kawabata will sadly have to look elsewhere.
Still, the famous works collected are numerous, and I was surprised at the sheer volume. There's everything from Soseki Natsume (Botchan, Kokoro, and eleven others) to Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Rashomon, In a Grove, and fourteen others) to Ichiyo Higuchi (who fairly recently became only the third woman to appear on a Japanese banknote) to Yakumo Koizumi (known in the West as Lafcadio Hearn). You'll find mysteries, dramatic novels, moral tales, horror stories, poems, and plenty of other stuff here. There really seems to be something for anybody who can read Japanese, excluding people who only want to read manga, for whom I might suggest, I dunno, the new Death Note game?
In addition, there is a short biography and a portrait for each author represented.
As for the format, well, it's pretty simple. You hold the DS like a book and pick a bookmark to start (unfortunately, you can't make a custom bookmark design, but you can choose from ten or fifteen preset designs), then you select something to read. Works are indexed by title and author, and there's also a big, messy, pointless list of all works, first in author order, then in title order. A genre list would have been nice, but I'm not complaining.
Among the options, you can change the text size, change your bookmark, choose wallpaper, choose left-handed/right-handed mode, choose music (or turn it off altogether), and turn illustrations on or off. More on some of this stuff down below.
When reading, you can either use the stylus or the buttons. For button control, left goes forward and right goes back, though these feel like pressing up and down due to the sideways format. B and X select music, A turns the illustration on or off, and Y changes the font size. In addition, you can return to the title menu by pressing start and insert a bookmark with R (you may have one bookmark for each of up to 10 titles). With the left-handed setting, everything is upside-down, so the page controls become A and Y, and other buttons change similarly.
Now on to a scoring description.
-=Difficulty=-
Well, this isn't a game, so I wasn't sure what to put here. I went with hard, as the contents are, for the most part, not easy-to-read literature. For some things, some knowledge of Chinese classics and Buddhism is expected, and so on. This is all modern Japanese though (not classical), so "Very Hard" would be going too far.
-=Learning Curve=-
I explained the most important controls in one paragraph up there, so this is pretty much negligable.
-=Gameplay=-
Again, this isn't a game, but the controls are very natural, and it feels like reading a book. Using R to bookmark a page seems particularly clever. Two points are lost for the unlockable content though. With this not being a game, I don't really see the point. Sure, the unlockables aren't exactly the most famous stuff, but everything should be accessible from the beginning, just as in a printed omnibus.
-=Graphics=-
The text is fairly easy to read. It could have been a bit better in this respect, so I'll dock one point for lack of clarity on complex kanji (even on the large font size), but I didn't have much difficulty reading this. Furigana are provided within reason (i.e., not for every kanji as with a children's book, and not repeated for already introduced words, but for the most part, difficult words have furigana provided, just as in print books aimed at the same audience). Also, the illustrations are very nice and go well with the stories. Some appear to be painted in various styles, some appear to be pencil-drawn, and some are computer graphics. As mentioned above, I wish there were a little more customization of bookmarks, but graphics are not really the point of this anyway.
-=Sound=-
The music is all right. It's pretty relaxing, low-key stuff, even if you choose the "scary" music or something like that. It doesn't really interfere with reading, and that's what's important.
-=Value=-
This is 512 Megs, so it's necessarily a bit expensive (I paid about 3400 yen for mine, which is somewhere in the range of US$30), but a sticker on the package says it works out to 29 yen (about 25 US cents) for each title at MSRP. Even though half of them are short works, that's still a pretty good deal. You could probably download most of this stuff off of the Internet for free, but it wouldn't be this nice or this convenient.
-=Tilt=-
To move or cause to move into a sloping position.