i completed the main story and collected as many ooblets as i could while feeling somewhat addicted and obsessed with this but i think thats worn off now and ive decided im done with it. the dance battle system is cute but it gets a little repetitive after a while and i felt less inclined to grind it out in completing the ooblet almanac, and with the end of the main story there wasnt much to really stick around and continue playing for. i love my little ooby buddies and theyre all so cute but i wish there was more of a sandbox/endless play incentive!

This game looked like Stardew Valley meets Pokémon ….we’ll… I guess it is lol
Which sounds fun on paper but it gets very boring and uninteresting very fast. Ooblets is a life sim where you move to an island, get a shack in the woods, and your very own monster. You farm crops and have dance battles with your monsters instead of your typical “Pokémon” battles. You do side quests, you do missions and develop friendships with the town folks. I love this stuff but this game ended up being so boring . Play Stardew Valley. Play Animal Crossing. Play Pokémon. But this game just isn’t that great unfortunately. I mean I was very excited to play his game for years and sadly it was not worth the wait.

fun & cute twist on a farming game, but sadly has the same qualms as the others. after about 4 hours of playing, i got stuck at a point where i was just waiting. waiting for crops to finish, waiting for the day to be over. ooblets lets you take naps- which is nice but also made me feel like i should be doing something if i’m trying to go to bed. but there’s nothing to do. the inventory/toolbar is a little confusing to use compared to other farming sims, but i do appreciate the decoration mode to be overhead. farming mode is also nice as you can quickly choose spaces far & close from you. sadly i almost felt like the ooblets took a backseat from farming because to be able to dance with them, you have to cook, to cook you have to farm, to be ready for a random ooblet (if you’re not looking up a guide) you have to have lots of ingredients/materials on hand, hence more farming. it’s confusing that you can’t sell every item, so i was holding onto items that i don’t think i needed.. but the storage is okay since you can buy many chests instead of being stuck with an integrated storage. the cutesy & quirky naming of absolutely everything was a bit overwhelming at times.. reading a sentence like “you have to yooble your sploinky at the grumblo before you can unlock bloofles” gets pretty confusing when you can’t understand anything.

all in all, it’s a good game. its just easy to be critical of farming games, because it’s such a saturated market. i wish ooblets were more of the focus than farming.

I wanted to really like this game, but I only kind of do.

First off, it's cute as heck, the dialogue is fun, everything looks great and it has fun gardening, creature collecting and deck building. It's like a Stardew Valley meets Pokemon meets Slay the Spire combined!

Except it's very minor in all those aspects. Growing plants in the garden serves as the goal for fetch quests, cooking, recruiting Ooblets or selling. It does have similar systems as Stardew Valley, but not as robust or deep as the farming simulator. It also seems somewhat simple, as I'm now hoarding seeds, plants, cooked food and Ooblets, which I'm not sure if a fault of my grinding behaviour in games like this or if the game is not demanding enough from me.

The Ooblets are very cool! Running around towns to find the little creatures then coax into dance battles is fun. They make little noises, follow you around and serve as the basis for deck-building. I mix and match them for dance battles typically as counters or because of their synergy, such as ones that require a high amount of resources to spend their cards along with ones that accumulate resources per turn.

However, these dance battles have huge problems. This part of the game is incredibly easy, and I don't believe that's because of my skill level. Your team always goes first, which is a huge advantage. There's usually a clearly visible order of operations and limitations when looking at your cards, which the AI absolutely ignores. For example, it will play cards with "+2 points" then "+1 to all points gained" and then "+1 point for every card played this round" - we humans should know that the opposite order should be played to get the most points, and it's laughable how bad the computer plays this game. Counter strategies aren't even really necessary, because the computer tends to play cards in a random order without taking advantage of Ooblet unique abilities and synergies, how they can interrupt the players' round or whether the cards can even be played! The computer attempts to steal points from me when I don't have any.

While this is frustrating, my biggest problem with dance battles is the camera. Your Ooblets are super cute, fun to look at and have really cool dance moves. However, when it's their turn to dance, they're obfuscated from view as the camera zooms out, pans upwards, and gives the worst angles of your Ooblets during the dance battle. I want to clearly see these little guys do the "One Step Pep" then "Gavotte Trot," but they're either obstructed or too far away to really get a good look at. Then, when you inevitably win the dance battle, there's beautiful shots of each of your Ooblets gaining experience points, but they're not visibly in the spotlight when they're doing their signature "Boogie Blossom". Also, the music is good with some real bangers, but it needs more of it if the dancing is so intricate to the game and done often.

It's so odd that an incredibly cute and fun game does a disservice to itself. The difficulty and views are my major gripes and if they were somehow patched, it would be definitely be a 5-star game. I recommend this despite my disappointment with some aspects of it.