I mentally lump this game together with Hey! Pikmin, which should clue you in on what I think of this game. Truthfully, this game isn't nearly as stinky as that one, but it definitely bums me out way more. Hey! Pikmin is just a failed experiment by a studio that could seemingly orchestrate murder and still sucker a publisher into hiring them. Zip Lash was a final, last-ditch effort to save the franchise, in much the same way Fire Emblem Awakening was a last-ditch effort to make something of Fire Emblem. Only Awakening catapulted Fire Emblem from a D-list franchise to one of Nintendo's A-listers (for better and for worse), while Zip Lash failed so thoroughly that it killed the studio that made it. A slow death at that, wasting away for years with nothing to show for their agony but a slow retreat from society and a forgotten, desiccated husk discovered long after the fact.

Zip Lash is a conga line of bizarre decisions. Turning a quiet, character-driven open world game that defies genre into a 2D platformer is itself strange, but I at least get that one - desperate for something that would stick with Nintendo's audiences, skip Ltd. turned to an extremely safe and marketable genre. I also think the titular Zip Lash, while weird in the context of Chibi-Robo (how do you extend plug), is a decent idea. Actually, it lends itself to some decently cerebral moments in level design, trying to line up your shot and taking ricochet into account. At a certain plug length it doesn't really matter where you're aiming, since you're pretty much guaranteed to hit the foe anyway, but it's something.

What I don't get is the level roulette. So each world (well, continent, since you're globe-trotting Earth) contains six levels. You need to clear each of these levels before you can fight the boss and move on to the next continent. Standard stuff. Only, for some reason, you cannot select a level to go to - you have to play a roulette mini-game at the end of each level. This roulette contains numbers 1-3. Whichever number you roll is how many levels ahead you go. So, like, if you've just finished Level 2, and you spin a "1", you move on to Level 3. But if the spinner lands on a "3", your next level is 5.

Kind of a quirky, fun way of blitzing through the game, right? Well, no, not really. In fact, not at all. Ignoring the fact that this dumb thing legitimately adds a minute or two's worth of fiddling around between levels, this doesn't change the fact that you still have to clear all levels within a continent. So in my previous example, the player skipped Levels 3 and 4, moving straight into Level 5. This presents an issue: those two levels still need to be completed. But the levels do exist within a loop, so Level 1 comes after Level 6 in this roulette progression thing. What this means is that, ideally, the player would clear Level 5, spin a 1 to move on to Level 6, then spin a 3 to skip ahead to Level 3. Because - yes - if you spin a 1 or a 2, you are returned to a level you have already cleared, and you are expected to play that level again!!! It is necessary to finish a level to get that roulette, so you can't just stick your head in and dip out. It's a good thing four out of the six options on that roulette are "1", so you have good odds of playing the video game normally. Because if you try for another option to shake it up, there's a great chance you'll be replaying a buncha dumb levels you've already played as punishment for engaging with the systems at play.

Another weird choice is the battery system. So like previous Chibis-Robo, this game's hero has a finite amount of battery, which needs to be recharged here and again. My thought would be to use this as a themed health system, the way previous games sorta implicitly do - falling from a great height or getting roughed up by Spydorz in the first game quickly drains Cheebo's battery. But, for some reason, this game includes a separate health system. Battery is instead a separate resource for the player to manage. Throughout each level are outlets, acting as mini-checkpoints. The player must always keep an eye on the battery level, and when it's running low, they must drop everything they're doing to find one of these outlets. Sometimes, this means backtracking. I guess I've seen this sort of thing done before (off-hand, I think of Sandopolis Act 2 in Sonic & Knuckles, where you have to keep pulling the switches to reset the lights), but given how much ceremony Chibi-Robo puts behind plugging in and charging up, it's something else that bogs down the action.

Also, may I just say: in a game where you're roaming the Earth, wandering outside for the whole adventure, it sure is handy that there are so many Type A outlet designs lying around. No universal adapters necessary!

There's also the product placement! This game uses real-world snacks as collectables. In each continent, a tertiary goal is to find all the snacks you can to feed a toy. I know that sounds strange, but don't worry, it's a different toy in each continent. I'm not opposed to product placement, not even in a Nintendo game; Pikmin 2's product placement is nothing short of genius. But it worked there because it juxtaposed these clean sterile images of, like, friggin' Vlasic Pickles with a would-be cultural anthropologist trying to reason out what role this thing had within this fallen society. Here you're just getting promotional praise. So if you ever wanted a cymbals monkey to give you a straight ad read of UTZ REGISTERED TRADEMARK SYMBOL CHEESE BALLS, well, I guess this is what you've been waiting for.

Much like a player who accidentally hit a number greater than 1 on the level roulette, I could go on and on all day with this. But the bottom line is that this game shows a shocking lack of the single most fundamental aspect of the first game: humility. Chibi-Robo in this game is a global superhero, who lives in outer space, in his own satellite and flies down to Earth to solve global crises. Everyone in the world knows and loves him! He's the object of ladies' affection! He's a shoe-in for the intergalactic space patrol! Aliens fear him! Not to spoil the ending or anything, but the final boss is a mecha fight, with Chibi-Robo piloting a giant mecha modeled after himself! Yeah, isn't he so cool? Don't you wish you were like Chibi-Robo?

It... this game breaks my heart. I feel so bad for the human beings who were tethered to this game's success, who needed to produce something that could be a tentpole title, to prop up their failing studio and keep them in business. This game needed to be a very specific thing to even have a chance at being that, and that specific thing was as far as you could get from what I loved about the first game. The original Chibi-Robo is quiet, introspective, mature, and offers no easy answers to life: just characters doing their best and making small steps in the right direction. But something quiet and modest like that couldn't sell; hell, it had failed to sell over and over again. Yet, even turning their back on all that, getting full support from Nintendo, skip Ltd. couldn't make something to save them. And in the end, they had to watch their world fade away.

It was worth it to me to buy this game brand new. The original Chibi-Robo was so important to me that I actually voted for the little guy in the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot (I suppose that makes me in part responsible for the Mii costume we got in Smash Ultimate?), so supporting the do-or-die last release was not even a question for me. Plus, it came packaged with that amiibo of Cheebo sitting down, holding his plug overhead - one of the best amiibo, I think, since it really captures the little guy's understated personality. But devoid of that context, if you're looking at the game now as something to play, I don't think I could ever recommend it as anything but a showcase of what not to do, of what desperation will make of something once-great.