I played this because the Japanese is quite simple so it was decent practice, plus I never finished it as a kid.

This game is undeniably full of charm. The cute and colorful art style and the music make it a fun experience. However, it gets quite repetitive at times. The second is definitely better, but for the second to come, a first has to exist.

I'll get on the second one again sometime this year, been like a decade since I last played it.

LocoRoco is another Sony Japan Studio game I do not like. It is cutesy, but I hated the controls. You use the L1 and R1 buttons (assuming you are playing using a PS4 controller on the Vita TV like I was) to tilt the stage. Hold both the L1 and R1 buttons to jump, and press "O" to split yourself into multiple smaller versions of yourself. You get bigger by eating berries.

I am sorry, but I will never like this control scheme. Let me tilt the stage with the D-pad or analog sticks and let me jump with the face buttons. After finishing the first world, I pulled the plug on my playthrough.

Now, for a rant on Japan Studio. I swear, people are capping for Japan Studio. After they "closed down" (they merged with Team Asobi, the Astro Bot devs), people all over the internet were suddenly fans of Japan Studio's titles. Where were you when they released many of those games? You only realize how important something is, once you have lost it. I am sure there were genuine fans of Japan Studio who were not happy, but it feels like I am seeing more and more fake fans online.

I have many Japan Studio titles on multiple systems and the only one I liked was Shadow of the Colossus, but they co-developed that game with Team Ico. I did not like Ico, Gravity Rush, or Ape Escape and Gravity Rush is a title I have grown to dislike more as time passes. Knack 2 is a meme, but not a good game. I have not played Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Wild Arms, the Patapon trilogy, Gravity Rush 2, or Last Guadian (as of Feb 20, 2024), so I have no opinions on those. Astro's Playroom is a decent platformer, but that is more of a tech demo for the PS5. So far, Japan Studio has not won me over.

Who knows? Maybe when I get to those games I mentioned that I have not played, it might change my mind. As of now, Japan Studio is overhyped.

Doesn't settle for merely bad, playing this feels borderline abusive. At the start of each stage there is a windup sequence where have to wait your guy get dropped through various tunnels and only until it says go you can actually start playing. But very first thing your guy does, literally the very first thing is randomly hop around without your input, before you even get a chance to do anything, even if you were mashing the buttons the whole time waiting to finally play.

In this game you don't move by using the directional pad and jump by pressing X or something normal like that. Instead you have to use L/R buttons to move left/right and jump by pressing both L and R simultaneously. Technically the gameplay would have functioned equally well the other way, so doing it this way accomplishes nothing but make playing the game feel more laborious.

So anyway, anywhere from ninety to ninety-five percent of each stage simply involves holding down the R button while repeatedly mashing the L button. There are very few instances anywhere in the entire game with any challenge and even those instances are quite easy. There are plenty of instances however (nearly in every stage in fact) where a collectible is teased but it's suddenly too late to get it without starting the whole stage over, as if the game is saying "ha, ha, that's what you get for not being psychic!"

The graphics are very basic and gross. The background is white pretty much all the time and everything else resembles paper craft. The entire game feels like it takes place on the wall of a pediatrician's office. Some stages have you inside the stomach of a whale or frog or something and you get literally sharted out at the end.

The only good thing about this game is that it saves me from having to play the sequels. Well, there are some sequences where you watch them sing for a moment in order to get a collectible, and those were kind of funny to me but maybe unironically funny since I always imagine that what's really going on is something akin to a rap battle or dogs barking.