Yokai Tantei isn't trying to hide anything; it wears its influence on its sleeve, that influence being Hudson's flagship creation, Bomberman.

You control a little Medama-Oyaji lookalike, tasked with clearing out a maze swarming with enemies (you can choose between Japanese yokai or western Universal monsters, which is a nice touch). Unlike Bomberman, your form of attack is a bit more direct, however, and this is where the the main hook of Yokai Tantei comes in.

Potentially taking influence from another Hudson creation, Binary Land, you shoot a fireball which can dart all around the maze, and is controlled contemporaneously with the main character. The two move at different speeds, and —much like Bomberman— the cross-shaped blast radiuses when you activate the fireball will kill you as well, so there's quite a bit to micromanage here.

When I first booted this one up, I didn't really care for it that much, as I thought the mazes were too cramped, and the spawn rates of the enemies were too unrelenting. That is, until I realized that the fireball can actually kill enemies by simply making normal contact with them. Once I got this, the game clicked; it's the classic temptation of risk vs. reward, whether you want to clear out enemies by firing point-blank, or risk trying to get a massive combo by blowing them all up at once for more points. I haven't figured it out completely, but it seems the enemies need to be hit at a specific angle from the fireball to die, so as not to ruin any combo potential.

As for this particular version, much like Relics (another Bothtec creation) the PC-88 version they chose to use isn't the best, but it's not as dire as Relics' 88 port was. It certainly looks better than the MSX version, but lacks the music of the other ports, though it's by no means a dealbreaker. The speed-up feature is perhaps more welcome here than any previous title, as it allows you to plow through the ridiculously slow loading times.

Seeing the wireframes and polygons they were able to achieve on an 8-bit computer makes this a worthwhile experience, really showing how (between this and Thexder) Game Arts were programming magicians of the PC-88.

As for the gameplay, it's pretty good too, it's a lot more playable than some of the other Eggconsole rereleases, being a straightforward shmup. The genre was evolving rapidly at the time and it doesn't quite measure up to some of the shooters that were coming out for consoles and game centers (Darius, Salamander, Fantasy Zone...), but it has some fun powerups and unique level design, with said powerups being put in purposeful locations relative to the hazards ahead. Being able to change your type of fire before each level is pretty sick too.

The one actual flaw is that the game's tilted perspective (à la Radar Scope) is just as disorienting as it is impressive, and you're better off sticking to the bottom of the screen, taking potshots from afar like an early Invaders clone, which doesn't feel nearly as good. Overall though, this is a technical marvel for its era, and worth checking out if you want to dive into some early Japanese computer titles that actually stand the test of time.

This game is such an interesting abstraction of the Japanese cityscape and countryside: I would say it feels most not like a central-Tokyo but like it was designed by someone who lived in one of the major cities an hour or two from central Tokyo. You get the occasional dense area with a skyscraper or two (Saffron City), dense collections of single family homes (Celadon City), but there's still the countryside running through mountains and forests, farming towns here and there.

That is easily Pokemon Blue's most interesting trait: it's a world based on reality, but not in the direction of an Earthbound that's more focused on constantly parodying America or people. Pokemon Blue is a game more interested in the idea of adding a layer of mystery (world of pokemon) and exaggeration (everyone catches pokemon!) to the mundane normal everyday life. I imagine this (and the affordances of the Game Boy and the 151 pokemon, and the marketing efforts of Nintendo) is what helped to capture the minds of the initial millions of players! I'm not sure how much of that exists today, where the series feels a bit more phoned in and calculated.

It's honestly quite disturbing the extent that Satoshi Tajiri's artistic idea become full-on media-mix/anime-ified - most symbolic of this is how sprites underwent slight revisions between the original JP red/green to US red/blue to yellow to bring things 'more in line with the anime' - a direction which, I think, informs the series direction today: something that's more interested in doing only what's necessary to keep the brand going, rather than an interest in the kind of design fundamentals Tajiri/team had that allowed them to conceive of Pokemon Blue in the first place.

The story in Blue is most interestingly not at all much of an anime story. Nobody is really fleshed out except potentially Giovanni, the game feels like a series of vignettes where the sport-like Pokemon battling at times briefly overlaps with the reality of our world. Lt. Surge fought with pokemon in a war, Mew is from South America, the moon landing happened in 1969, people are addicted to gambling, there's a crime syndicate, pokemon can die and become ghosts. There's a lot of room for your imagination to think about.

I loved the underground walkways that feel like the long, underground train station walkways in Japan, or even arguably underground shoutengai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dtengai). How the Celadon "Mansion" is a mistranslation of the Japanese Manshon (often a 5-10 story apartment or mixed use building), how it has the Game Freak devs. The department store inspired by big Japan department stores.

I think the first 2/3 of this game (through Silph Tower) is really well paced, I love how you go between countryside exploration and weird little dungeons in urban settings or caves. The last 1/3 of the game feels a bit more out of place - the 'science' angle, while interesting, kind of starts and ends with Cinnabar island. Seafoam Island and Victory Road are fine, but they feel less connected to the whole game's sense of place compared to e.g. the rocket base or mt. moon. I don't think this detracts from the strength of the game, but the game did feel like it was dragging by that point - the fact it began doing block puzzles might be symbolic of that. (Ha ha)

An aside: The core of the "trainers are multiple pokemon, random encounters are one pokemon" is a brilliant design choice - they can express trainer personality through this, they can characterize spaces like dungeons or caves based on who is there. I actually wanted to see more of the Viridian Forest-type dungeon - where not everything is a random encounter tile.

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After playing, it does feel like the game is at a bit of a crossroads. I think Tajiri definitely had more he wanted to do with his vision, but they may not have been in-line with the more obvious routes to 'improving' the game.

The more obvious routes, to me, neither of which interest me personally, are:

- Increasing the traditional storytelling: clear villain characters, more cutscenes, more regularly paced villain-related levels. This could help attract an audience put off by the way Pokemon Blue feels like falling into a story at times (which I personally prefer, haha). It would also increase franchise tie-in and business synergies!

- Making the battle system 'better' and not a pushover. Make the game more technical, increase training options, create harder battles or challenges - as this would be the only way to 'balance' the game from becoming too easy. This lays a lot of weird traps though, and I think pokemon's devs fell into most of them: stark divides between the 'true combat postgame', many compulsive traps around perfecting stats/builds (rather than letting you teambuild freely), etc.

Personally I would have liked it if the game went harder on the weird influences and level layouts, maybe experimenting with a smaller level range or different methods of training other than bland 'QoL' features to help even leveling... but hey! I'm not the billionaire company here...

Almost done with my Hard Toal run! First, the things I think are good

- The romance and setting. Oh babey
- At certain brief points the combat feels really good

BUT...

For the past few years I've espoused these three Ys games (with the order being Oath > 6 > Origin) but coming back to Origin I see a number of problems.

First, the gameplay's whole point of existing is speed and aggression. It feels absolutely the best when you're doing these things and being rewarded for it. For this reason, Hugo's Hard playthrough kind of sucks: he's slow, aiming is fiddly and you're doing so much thinking about your exact positioning as a result.

BOSSES

The boss movesets are often contradictory with the whole 'pulpy dark high fantasy power metal' aesthetic and "fast and aggression feel good!" idea : a gigantic number (perhaps all?) of the bosses are designed around only having particular safe windows to attack. These range from the most obnoxious (Gelaldy, the fire construct, who you must wait for his hands to pound the ground): these feel almost like Zelda/Mario bosses: you're expected to behave a very particular, strict way, waiting for the moment to bop the enemy.

Some bosses employ this logic but allow you to speed up opening these windows: Khonsclard (sand plant) or Velagunder (poison bubble arm beast), etc. However, because the act of attacking them when vulnerable is so boring (they just sit there waiting to get hit) there's a terrible, clunky rhythm to the fights. Some bosses do the same thing but 'hide' this fact - Shion lets you be aggressive to stop his shield but you'll still have to dodge his easy attacks before making him vulnerable again.

The fights that feel best are the one-on-ones - Epona, Galleon, Hugo, Kishgal - but on harder difficulties, their damage output is so punishing that your only option is to learn their moves perfectly. Doing so isn't much of a task, but it turns the battles into basically a Zelda fight of sorts, where your moves are the items - dodge, do 3 hits, dodge, do 3 hits... repeat until dead.

The problem then, is that the difficulty in this game mainly stems from weird hitboxes, dense bullet and attack patterns that are difficult to dodge because of the top-down camera, and poor visual communication. One boss's attacks are dust clouds on top of moving sand! Your position on the screen can be a bit hard to see because of how small you are.

This is still mostly manageable, but it does push you to use the iframe-granting moves which feels messy. Bosses like Nygtilger are particularly bad on this front: the boss is extremely simple, except that you have to stand on it while it continues to snake around and shoot bombs that get hidden under its body.

If the game wants to be about speed and aggression, then the bosses ought to be tuned to reward that. But due to fundamental issues described, playing at high speeds becomes tricky because the game rarely feels like it's up to snuff on the precision of your movement. So the key to success on harder difficulties feels more like holding back and playing slowly, because moving too fast will lead to you getting hit by a nearly-invisible dust cloud, or you being unable to jump due to the 0.25 second delay after an attack (yes really!)

There's nothing wrong with a jump-delay after an attack, but again the enemies/bosses have to be tuned to account for that... otherwise you just end up playing conservatively, because many times bullets or attacks will whip out at ridiculous speeds during that delay window.

LEVEL DESIGN

What I find the most disturbing about Ys Origin coming back to it, is how they twisted shmup's combo systems into this compulsive, flashy and ultimately shallow system of powering up as you do more hits quickly, to gain EXP faster. I think they 'perfected' this system with Origin (compared to 6 and Oath), it makes the regular levels feel like slot machines.

Here's the problem with the level design: again, think about speed and aggression. The levels are disastrously designed: pressing buttons leads to 10 second camera pans, gigantic hitboxes on spike pillars make you move slow and ploddingly, there's generally a ton of Zelda Design all over the place: use the obvious item on an obvious wall, press a button, run over here, etc. There's almost nothing resembling a true puzzle, it's all there as filler.

The enemy design doesn't really work: let's be generous and pretend that I'm not going to grind out levels so I can just blindly mash my way through anything (which the game strongly encourages and pushes you towards).

Due to the gigantic hitboxes and speed of enemy attacks, and the way that enemies rarely combine in a synergistic way - you're encouraged to slowly take your time and pick things off. When designing enemy encounters for a game that's meant to be fast-paced with movement, it's better to have enemies with slower (not necessarily slow) attacks, few to no invulnerable states, and that attack at various ranges. By balancing the combinations of enemies, you can create combat encounters that each subtly feel different. The fast pace is maintained, but without making it incoherent if you choose to play aggressively.

The difficulty, then, comes from trying to avoid the slow accumulation of mistakes. Trying to play fast is impossible in Ys Origin - you'll just group all the enemies together and get stunlocked by something, unless you have enough DPS to overpower them. Your attacks' weird forward motion/tracking will just drag you into some bullet flying at 10,000 MPH.

I'm of the opinion that adding more numbers to Action games doesn't fix anything, it just serves to hide inherent problems. If there were no numbers in Ys Origin's combat or healing items, it would clearly feel kind at odds with itself. You'd be playing at a weirdly slow pace so as to not get hit by the weird overlap of enemy behaviors, you'd be circle strafing and bopping stuff slowly. But with numbers, this is hidden because by the time you're about to complain about anything, you've leveled up 3 times and now everything dies in like 3 hits and so much health items are dropping you can ignore the entire design.

IN CONCLUSION

This game feels very symbolic: only released 3 years before Demon's Souls, it sits at the point right before 3D action games basically started to completely lose their connection to physical reality, shifting from a focus on spacing and movement, and, well, Action, towards the realm of reading animations to perform dodge rolls and parries, waiting for meters to cool down to perform your Magical Gacha Slam!

Ys Origin has at its core something that kind of makes sense, but the entire design of the game misunderstands it. Entire boss battles break if you miss weapon upgrades, stage hazards take out 30% of your health if you overlooked an armor box.

Padding out things with incessant numbers and resistance multipliers, a game designed by math formulas, curves, nerds and spreadsheets, rather than thinking about what it feels like to touch literally anything and how that might be pleasurable if transmitted to a player.

IN CONCLUSION IN CONCLUSION

It's called ACTION for a reason! Designers take note: You don't DODGE ROLL out of the way of a FUCKING CAR, you MOVE OUT OF THE WAY. Jesus Christ!


4/5 because of epona and hugo and setting a game in the final dungeon of ys 1 is sick

can something be obnoxiously juvenile but also a totally unique lightning-in-a-bottle experience at the same time? because that's B3313 to me. the internet iceberg meme/creepypasta origins of this ended up leading to the creation of something that is kind of unlike anything else in existence (even if it is heavily indebted to stuff like Yume Nikki), but it is also somewhat inherently limited by its origins.

it's sort of like if Mario's castle was reimagined as Constantine's Mansion in Thief: The Dark Project, mixed with Yume Nikki and various internet memes. in your endless hours wandering through the confusing labyrinth of the castle, there are isolated moments that are unique and brilliant. and then there others that are just sort of… there. you’ll spend 15 minutes wandering through a bunch of fairly bland, indistinct rooms and corridors and then you’ll come upon something really haunting and memorable. and then, maybe, you'll be right back in the bland mazes. maybe you'll run into some creepy thing and crash the game. maybe creepy thing will be interesting and well executed, or maybe it'll just be obnoxious boilerplate creepypasta stuff.

these contradictions get more and more noticeable the further into it you are. some of the levels are really interesting/bizarre alternate universe takes that recontextualize the original Mario 64 and seem to offer greater commentary about the nature of how nostalgia shifts things into an alternate universe that is actually different from the source of the memory. "i like to remember things my own way. how i remembered them, not necessarily how they happened" says the deeply troubled Fred Madison in David Lynch's Lost Highway. but other times it feels like you wish you were spending more time in the new/more unique areas you occasionally stumble upon, and less in the 6th variation of old Mario 64 levels.

B3313 feels almost like a bigger AAA game to me in both the sheer scope of the project that's filled with a lot of internal contradictions, and in also how much it truly doesn't respect your time. that’s probably the nature of things of this size, and that a lot of people were involved contributing in what seems like a very tumultuous dev cycle after a certain point. but perhaps that explains a lot about the sometimes inconsistent/varied nature of the experience.

i will personally admit to not caring whatsoever about the personalized copy of Mario 64 meme or the numerous ways this hack borrows from different beta builds of Mario 64. i like Mario 64 a lot, but it is absolutely wild to me the way that game has been metabolized into the consciousness of videogame world. and so i do think the whole “this is a beta version of the game” thing and slavishly cobbling together any and every scrap of asset or idea that was cut from an early documented build of Mario 64 to put on this thing is a bit of a dead end artistically. most of the stuff Nintendo used in earlier builds just seemed like temp assets and doesn’t seem THAT interesting to me outside of that context. it's just not very interesting to those of us who are not 17 years old anymore and not still spooked by internet lore. it just feeds back into a lot of fan culture content machine around big franchises that just feels like this self replicating beast that never really goes anywhere and is always invariably beaten back into conformity by the big companies that are in control of these properties.

i am someone who loves strange and unique experiences. but to me, i want stuff that i guess attaches itself more to telling a specific kind of story through what it’s doing, and B3313 is a bit too much online meme-referencing for me to take that aspect of it very seriously at all. B3313 doesn’t have the narrative coherence of a MyHouse which i guess is the other big artsy creepypasta game mod of the moment. and it doesn’t have the artful direction of a Yume Nikki, which it is obviously cribbing the general kind of surreal abstract multidimensional wander maze thing from.

all of this is to say: why did i give it 4 stars and 30+ hours of my time, then? maybe it comes down to: there is an indelible, haunting Tower of Druaga-esque charm to all of it. the commitment to being cryptic and giving the player nothing and doing all these machinations behind the scenes in the game is kind of remystifying what has been lost in a lot of consumer-facing art in general. in games, with all the talk of FromSoft games or like the last couple Zeldas bringing back "old school" difficulties and design values, those are meticulously tested commercial products… not community made romhacks. they simply can’t go anywhere near as far out there as something like this. and we in general are in a moment when so much art seems paralyzed and unwilling to take chances out of risk aversion from industries that have been strip-mined by the rich and powerful. something like B3313 stands in contrast to that - completely unwilling to compromise itself.

with B3313, oftentimes there really is nothing on the other side. but that emptiness starts to feel really intentional after a certain point. as a player, what's interesting in the feeling that you want the design to follow some kind of logic that you can eventually glean so that you can understand what the designers were getting at is that it feels almost like an intentional choice to have it consistently not do that. occasionally it does hint at a deeper language/design sensibility, but mostly it doesn’t. there are times when the “story” or the progression of stages seems to be developing into something more coherent, but then the rug is pulled out from under you. and that happens over and over. because it’s all rug pulls at the end of the day. the message of the design is: whatever happens, whatever journey you go through… it’s all inevitably a way to throw you back into the maze. you’ll always be endlessly wandering the maze.

to me, that says something about Nintendo games in general - how you have these long journeys that (in the case of the newer Zelda especially) aggressively don’t respect your time and send you to all these interesting locations. and then it always just sorta ends, because there’s nothing really deeper at the core a lot of the time. it's escapist entertainment, often with some kind of crypto-conservative values and imagery in it. B3313 feels totally unafraid to unearth and make you fully experience that ugly side.

maybe a lot of our larger culture right now, especially obsessive lore-based fan culture, are just variations of that too. increasingly everything seems like it's hostile, broken down, and filled with different kind of rug pulls. the ground feels totally unstable and there is no “there” there a lot of the time, but we keep shoveling through hoping for new discoveries and hoping for it all to make sense. it’s like being in an abusive, codependent relationship. there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. it’s a disempowerment fantasy. and B3313 captures that feeling absolutely perfectly, in such a uniquely fleshed out way.

there are moments to B3313 that are genuinely unique and fun too, like some of the more creative creepypasta scenarios that i won’t spoil here. or like, occasional stages like the one when you have to climb some structures that are supposed to be some sort of bob-omb factory. you activate the “self-destruct” sequence when you enter which causes you to have to outrun rising lava until the top. and then you get to the top and there’s a little yellow bob-omb guy sitting in a little office and just complaining about how you destroyed the whole factory. it does make me wonder if there’s like some kind of commentary on the tropes of Mario games being attempted in small moments like that. like the fact that Mario is basically a cipher who everything resolves around, and none of these other characters have any agency.

of course, none of that is delved upon for very long. because invariably, you're going to get fed back into the maze. and so that's both the great strength and the great flaw of something like B3313. it doesn't try to offer a way out, it just tries to express what is there. and in doing so it captures a feeling perfectly, in a way that is inspiring. even as a memey internet romhack, it is absolutely something i would call an "art game". there are a lot of memorable areas and moments that really explores the latent strangeness and darkness of Nintendo games, and the latent surrealism of a lot ofearly 3D games in general. it’s also real testament to how far romhacking/modding community projects can really go artistically, along with MyHouse.wad. it could have an enormous impact on a lot of games stuff that comes further down the line. so it’s definitely something that demands more attention and respect outside the whole memey lore ecosystem a lot of this stuff usually occupies. it of course, comes from that however and will probably will do itself no favors in distinguishing itself from that.

i only hope in the future that people take the ambition and interesting ideas from this and run with it in a way that feels unafraid to make a larger statement about the world, and doesn't just do the cowardly thing of retreating with its tail between its legs back into insular internet memes and the online lore ecosystem fed by various content creators. whether or not you think B3313 subverts or further perpetuates that that i guess is up to you. but i still think we have a pretty far way to go.

A rhythm game spinoff of the Sylvanian family game boy games, this came out a few months after the first game. It looks like a collaboration with Natsume and Epoch - perhaps evidenced in a different and more fleshed out art style. The animals dancing during the songs are surprisingly elaborate, and each stage has a cute visual theme sort of like beatmania or something.

Weirdly though the songs seem to just be original to the game (or maybe some other mixed media related to the series), none of the songs from the first game seem to appear in this.

The game itself is simple, there's three directions to press (Down, A, B) and the songs are short. I think it took me like 15 minutes to play through the game. There's also a mode where you can record yourself 'playing drums' to other songs and save them as 'videos'. Kind of like a rudimentary wii music or something.

Overall it's cute and solid for what it is, but feels like a brand tie-in more than anything.

Review

I gave it a real shot, for 8 hours!

You can read my notes and thoughts here : https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1735187901296836666

Or read an essay in which I discuss TotK https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/why-ocarina-of-time-cant-be-recreated

The short version is: the game has its nice charming moments, I actually like the idea of janky physics dungeons and riding around on stuff. NPC designs are nice and some of the side quests looked interesting. But I hattteee the crafting stuff, it kind of ends up padding almost everything in the game out. There's also so much distraction, it feels like YouTube recommendations or TikTok...

Shitpost review

Zelda but if Miyamoto wasn't inspired by wandering the countryside as a kid but opening up Genshin enough times to get the 30 day login bonus

An interesting looking setting visually, but feels too much like a sci-fi manga/anime setting jammed in to the form of a game. The game section is very much functional, but the high reliance on HD art means that the levels, well, feel like HD art more than anything, with a few puzzles and enemies dropped in. The ways the levels all connect to each other underground is neat, but it's never that interesting to traverse (and confusing).

Still, as far as game worlds go, the density does feel neat. It's just a fairly lifeless feeling game world since your interactions feel limited despite the fancy art. It feels very "modern-day AAA" in that sense - expensive art but nothing much in the way of interesting interactions..

I did like the boss fights though, even if they were a bit finicky with the movement... the weird boss movesets require you to move around in some fun ways and using your egg's spin ability was pretty fun.

Great BUMP Action RPG, and a great length at about 1-2 hours! https://sylvie.itch.io/sylvie-rpg

I like how compact the world is and how that allows you to switch between modes of playing quickly - trying to open up each room's secret entrances, grinding for money, trying to survive and form a mental map of an area... the game has a lot of playfulness in its secrets designs that show lineage from older action RPGs like Golvellius, Ys. That era of games are a lot of fun, but they sometimes have moments where moon logic or difficult mapping efforts are needed to complete them. I enjoy that to an extent, but I like the way that Sylvie RPG takes some of the mystique those games achieve but presents it in a way that allows the game to stand more on its own as a whole (without requiring the need to look up a guide.) It's a hard balance to keep a game feeling mysterious and challenging without sending people off to the guides, and I think this game balances everything well. There's secrets I couldn't figure out, but I'm proud to have cleared the game on my own!

Additionally, if you pay for the game you can get bonus files, including a design analysis of the game. It was interesting to read this for a number of reasons. For one, the game cites Angeline Era as a minor influence to one aspect of the combat (opting for Angeline Era style bump-combat (you can attack an enemy from any direction), vs. Ys's "hit the enemy at an angle").

This is an interesting thing to see because Sylvie RPG was made and released while Angeline Era is still in development. There's very few bump action games out there, so being able to play Sylvie RPG and read about it was useful as a point of comparison.

In the design notes, Sylvie describes the "Three Modes of Play" idea that was a guiding principle - in this case, "Exploration", "Resource Gathering" and "Stage Clearing". It's three modes of play that many Action Adventures/RPGs tend to have in various ratios. I think the choices the game makes (de-emphasizing Stage Clearing for the other two) work well. Sylvie RPG does feature 'stages' (defeating bosses) but much of the time is spent poking around the screens and trying to uncover secret caves on each screen. These range from grottos you can buy swords in, to shortcuts, to little helper cats who will come fight with you.

There's neat decisions related to this - like how bosses respawn you near the fight entrance, but you start with the stats you initially reached the boss at.

I also found it interesting that Sylvie RPG's conclusions about defense are similar to the ones we have in Angeline Era, in that for games with more of a focus on action and smaller numbers (where enemies often take a few hits to kill), defense items are hard to balance. Because flatly making everything in the game less threatening is not always an ideal choice. I liked Sylvie RPG's solution which lets you get shields, which negate most damage, but you drop the shield if hurt (and have to pick it up, which can be dangerous.)

Anyways, above all else it's an interesting game world to explore. Go play it! Support bump combat

INASA!!! My friend made this game... I'm American, so I don't have experience with a rainy summer day stuck at my grandparents' place in Japan - but I (and I imagine many others) have similar youth experiences of being left at a relative's house, feeling like there was very little to do... this game conjured a lot up for me. I loved the choice of letting you pick 20/40/60 minute play session, I also liked slowly uncovering the moveset. After about 10 minutes you'll have an understanding of the house, so passing time becomes a matter of how you use your moves... you can crouch, sit, jump around, open doors or move stuff. As a kid, once I had a Game Boy it became easier to feel busy (perhaps to a fault), but I remember doing things like trying to 'draw' images on plush carpets my moving the fibers, sliding down staircases over and over, looking at grandparents' travel knick-knacks...

EDIT: (See bottom. Finished the post-game)
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Finished the first playthrough. There's a lot of extra story stuff in the 2nd playthrough, so I want to do that at some point.

Overall this is a pretty brilliant and personable feeling children's adventure game. You live in a place called Color town - which is a 3x3 grid of different villages, with separate themes: "Old Japan", "Modern Japan", "Future", Desert, Downtown, Jungle, etc. In order to have the carnival, the town needs a lot of power, so it needs 8 stars - which you have to get from the dieties at each of the 8 towns' shrines. To get the stars you need to give them their desired offerings (a red hat, a laptop, etc), and finding those items is the meat of the gameplay.

Finding the items involves meeting shopkeepers, doing simple minigames or tasks, and exploring the townsfolk's home pages, sometimes looking for clues on who to give what item, or how to do something (e.g. there's a minigame where you need to cook a dessert, so you need to do some reasoning to find a recipe for it in the game's internet).

Exploring characters' home pages is pretty fun - they link to each other's, so you can see who's friends with who. People even have little blogs, so you get a sense of their humor, quirks, personality in a rich but succinctly stated way.

Every NPC in the game (about 70 in the first playthrough, and about 50 more in the 2nd) can be invited to the carnival - sometimes through just speaking to them, or by doing other things first (often bringing an item, or clearing some other condition). Since every NPC is named and has a unique design, it's actually manageable to faintly remember each person's job or role.

I loved the little stores and shops - you can't buy stuff, but you get a sense of the types of places in a 70s-90s-inspired japan. Dagashi stores, shoe stores, libraries, tailors, fireworks, bakeries, etc.

Anyways I love the scope of the game - the first playthrough took me about 8-10 hours, which is a reasonable length. Some repetition does set in by the end (e.g. in each of the 8 towns you need to answer a 5-question quiz about the town in order to get the golden star - which can be kind of cute at first but eventually feels repetitive), and there start to be a lack of any interesting item puzzles, but for the most part it's a strong game, and it's fun to just poke around and read the webpages. Or to receive e-mails or BBS requests from people.

The 2nd playthrough involves a lot more puzzles relating to the webpages (e.g. finding hidden links, solving quizzes), so I'm curious about that.

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Other than that... the game features a lot of "Monpi", these monster/object humanoids. E.g. a talking eggplant. They're quite quirky and represent maybe a relation to the lives of inanimate objects? There's some 'lore' to the world of Uki-Uki regarding these natural ecosystems outside the borders of the town you never visit. Like a lush jungle, or a mountain range with no humans, or a desert that was once an ocean. They're not the focus of the game, but they give this simple depth of fantasy to the game's atmosphere that's appreciated. In some ways, the 2nd playthrough of the game can be seen as trying to 'mix' this inaccessible world of the Monpi with that of the humans.

Finally, this game was directed by Noriko Miura, older sister of famous manga artist Sakura Momoko. I wonder what she's up to now! Seems like she didn't do any games after this, unfortunately, although the studio, indieszero, did go on to make some cool games (electroplankton, sennen kazoku).

Makes me pine a bit for this era of Nintendo games, where around 40 people would make a short and unique game. Oh well!

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POST-GAME ADDENDUM

The post-game is a fairly different-feeling experience. What happens story-wise is that you are chosen, once again, as the carnival organizer. This time though the goal is to have a night carnival! Luckily everyone you invited last time is still up for it. What happens this time around are the following:

- Under-construction webpages of monpi are now open, and thus there are a couple dozen more monpi you can invite
- There are more monpi to chat with (chat works by choosing between two conversation options until you manage to invite the monpi - it's fairly trial and error to pick the right choices)
- Various new events are triggered once you've invited the correct monpi.
- These new events include interesting things like: visiting the "hidden sides" of the towns' webpages to find clues that will open up a storeroom under a statue (Which gives you confetti for the fireworks lol)
- Finding a hidden maze underneath a "stone circle" in the town square. Here you meet a queen who allows the carnival to happen at night. There's a (simple) mystery hunt to open up this area involving angel NPCs and new links on monpi's webpages
- You start to get deliveries from Monpi, which can be used in small quests. Likewise, a big sidequest involves collecting candy box stickers to mail in for prizes.
- You're free to explore all 8 towns from the start.


Despite some of the events and the newness of some monpi webpages, it's more repetitive than the first playthrough. Because you don't have the discovery of new shops and towns to balance out the simple quests, you're pretty much doing simple fetch quests in between meticulously sweeping the web for monpi pages.

The monpi have an assortment of webpage-based minigames to play - they're often luck based, stuff like, "Simple Blackjack" or solving a timed maze, or a sliding tile puzzle. There are some that even require coming back on multiple days, like planting and watering a seed. The worst require massive amounts of luck (winning blackjack 5 times in a row) while allowing you only one try per in-game-day, meaning they're missable.

Overall it's something I think I'd have liked as a kid, but I really was just grinding by the end for the sake of it.

In the end though, you're greeted with an even livelier carnival than the first round! That was kind of neat.

FIRST OF ALL my "BUMPSLASH ACTION" game angeline era is getting a demo (not full release) on may 9th...go wishlist it!! I know you like weird action games!! you're on backloggd reading a Dragon View review!! we made a good one!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2393920/Angeline_Era/

anyways,

proto-quest 64 map navigation (the game gives you these hand-drawn-esque maps that you use to navigate a pseudo 3d overworld), baroque music bangers, snappy sidescrollng dungeoning/gameplay, some lovely sprite and artwork... Certified Good Time. i did use fast forward for the overworlds though too big lol. also there's funny old dudes hiding all over the various maps. strange stuff like a guy trading armor upgrades for 50 apples (what is he doing)

Pretty easy to progress without a guide too, i got hard stuck only once

the game doesn't give maps, but i really loved the dungeons and how they use multi-floor grid-based layouts, but it plays out as a sidescroller. the action and how it has you weave forward and back to dodge stuff is fun. maybe i should play beatemups..but i just love the sword to much.

i like how freaky and hostile it felt walking into a way too hard part of the overworld.... platforming through the mountain areas. side-on platforming with some Z-depth movement is pretty fun.

the damage /exp curves in ths feel pretty Ys-y. It's not really my personal favorite choice but it more or less works