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.

I could repeat my entire LocoRoco 2 review here if I wanted, LocoRoco is an absolutely amazing concept for a platformer and I am so happy that after playing the sequel for so long during my childhood I could eventually get my hands on the original and play it.

To my disappointment, on my first playthrough I discovered many things that I loved about the sequel originated in the sequel. Although that does make me appreciate the second game even more, any time I play the first I can only wish for some of those features here.

With all that said, it isn't to say I don't still greatly enjoy this title with its unique level design, catchy gibberish songs, and extremely charming art style. It creates an extremely good foundation for the sequel to build off of.