Young Walter Mitty for Japan's jilted generation, a show hazily recalled but always produced. For the residents of Setagaya, it's a St. Vitus dance every end of the week, with too many interpretations to reconcile before the day-to-day grind begins anew. For us, there's a calm before the storm followed by the euphoria of living through a kind disaster, as mild as it is transformative. For the developers, all this presents a release from the simple, sorrowful nostalgia of their past games, a more cynical yet still passionate affair. For Level 5, it's another lauded product in their catalog, a shining example of what Nintendo's 3DS offered to players. For around five hours, this was an bewildering piece of fiction I couldn't get enough of, until somehow I did…and then it couldn't stop. For all of that, I'd feel like a fool to rate this any lower, both for its quality and for how much I esteem the life's work of its creator. Yet this appraisal yearns to be higher.
Consider lead developer Kaz Ayabe, who describes spending a chunk of his post-high school days listening to techno and IDM. Going to rave parties in the countryside, finding his inner caveman…all that energy, melancholy, and plenty of inaka nostalgia fed into what became the Boku no Natsuyasumi series. But where the Bokunatsu games revel in remembered childhood, free from all but the most sensible restrictions, Attack of the Friday Monsters deals directly with a modernity you can't escape, the waking dream of life under smoky layers. Our frame hero, Sohta, is stuck coming of age in a shared stupor, watching and acting through the post-war obsoletion of an imperfect arcadia. And we're brought along for the ride, encapsulated in one interminable day of discovery.
This project was developer Millennium Kitchen's chance to subvert their formula, to leave the proverbial family ramen stall and make a divebar izakaya of a game, both more childish and more adult. It wasn't ever going to be as glamorous or idyllic, but the old recipes and principles which sublimated Bokunatsu into such a masterwork all remain. I just wish Level-5's stipulations and some less well-considered design choices hadn't gotten in the way of this experiment.
Let's settle L5's role in the equation. Their Guild brand of 3DS-exclusive smaller titles—produced/developed together with studios like Nextech, Comcept, Vivarium, and Grasshopper Manufacture—was a smart way to jumpstart the system's paltry launch-window lineup. Why settle for Steel Diver, neat as it is, when cheaper, more immediate larks like Liberation Maiden or Aero Porter are available? Nor did this brand skimp on deeper experiences, like the Yasumi Matsuno-penned Crimson Shroud or the publisher's own Starship Damrey? Among this smorgasbord, Friday Monsters claims its spot as the most relatable, uncompromising adventure within the 3DS' early days. It hardly feels as lacking in meaningful hours of play as you'd expect from a 4-to-6-hour story.
As a Guild02 release, the final product had a similarly low budget and developer count, a budget take on what Ayabe's team and their partners @ Aquria were used to. I can't help but marvel at how they accomplished so much within these limits. While I appreciate L5's former willingness to bankroll and promote other creators' works with little intervention, they clearly signaled their partners to consider how few early adopters the platform had, and how their games should account for that. Finding that balance between "content" and artistic integrity must have been worth the challenge for Ayabe's team, and it leads to an excellent, ambitious yet rougher take on their usual slice-of-life toyboxes.
This makes itself very apparent in the interesting but tedious card collecting & battling system you use throughout Friday Monsters. I knew this was going to get awkward once I noticed the conspicuous lack of tutorializing for anything else in the whole game. Running around, talking to neighbors, and solving simple puzzles all explains itself, but the Monster Glim scavenging and combat rules needed explication. So that's one mark against the game loop's sense of immersion, even if, again, this kind of artifice isn't unusual throughout the experience. I've learned to distinguish the "good" kind of artifice—that which dissuades me from considering the story's events and interactions through realistic terms—and the other, more distracting kind which begs me to question its use or inclusion.
Card battling usually boils down to getting as many gems as you can find, combining cards of a set to increase their power, and then hoping your utterly random placement puts you on the losing end. Rounds come down to who makes the correct rock-paper-scissors predictions, or just has the larger numbers. This all ties into other themes of mutually understood but lightly lampooned adult rules and hierarchies that tie us down, but the player has to go through all this on Sohta's behalf, rather than just existing in plot and dialogue regardless.
Bokunatsu's game loop almost always manages to avoid this pitfall by having you engage in more obvious, more rewarding activities like bug-catching, environmental puzzles, or just managing the passage of time by moving between camera angles. Friday Monsters uses a less chronologically fixed premise, encouraging completion by removing time skips across screens in favor of a loose episodic structure. But even these are more like bookmarks to tracks and remind you of ongoing plot threads, while Ayabe & co. nudge players towards methodically circling the town during each beat. If the typical Bokunatsu day uses its style of progression to force a basic amount of player priority, then what Friday Monsters has instead emphasizes the periphery events and observations of the village's afternoon and evening.
All this comes back to the Guild series' need for back-of-box justification for spending your precious $8, something that Millennium Kitchen's other works aren't so concerned with. What I'm trying to say is that, more than any other Guild release, this one shouldn't have had to include a post-game, or any hinted insecurities about what's "missing". Extra stuff for its own sake is generally optional here, but incentivized by the narrator + promises of extra story which you neither need nor actually get much of in the end.
Much of the story's strengths and staying power comes from what it insinuates, with characters' routines and tribulations shown in enough depth yet elided when necessary to preserve dignity and mystery. After all, it's not just Sohta's tale, the aimless but excited wanderings of a kid trying to take his golden years at a slippery pace. Friday Monsters is just as much concerned with his parents, especially the downtrodden father who wants a courage to live he's never had. While the children only know TV, a story around every corner no matter how slight or recycled, the parents and post-teens stuck on Tokyo's recovering borderlands still remember the tragedies and romance of the cinema or puppet theater.
Sohta's mom and dad are struggling to keep their love and dedication as they enter middle age, denied the economic and cultural promises emblemized in classic Shochiku dramas. Megami and Akebi's dad now have to reconicle their own free time and hobbies with devoting their energy and resources to creating and supporting the tokusatsu shows that seem all too real for Tokyo's new youth, but no different from genre pictures by Toei or Toho. Emiko and her police officer father share an intimate Ozu-esque dialogue while a kaiju duel rages behind them, Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu's archetypes juxtaposed against superhero depictions of the country's calamities, environmental injustices, and looming specters of globalization. All of them could fit right onto the silver screen, if they weren't too wrapped up in their comfortable itineraries.
At least he kids are all right. School's always over when they wake up to play, and the simpler joys of learning their vernacular and playing absurd master-servant games never gets old. Two of the boys even reduce their identities to family professions, as Ramen and Billboard both exude their working-class roots in place of stodgy, less memorable formal names. It's precisely that contrast of Sohta & S-chan's mundane but precious growing up with all the frustrations of adulthood which drives not just the plot, but the dive into magical realism this game unleashes upon players.
One example is the protagonist's baffling ability to warp from a seemingly inescapable bad ending back into Ramen's family's diner. Context clues from talking with friends and acquaintances tell the player that Sohta had almost passed out, not remembering his feverish journey to the watering hole, but he doesn't recall nor care that much about it. Any grown-up would understand the gravity of the situation, yet our "hero" plays helpless ghost and witness to an imagination shared with his close circle. Dreams and willpower make any outcome possible on a dog day like this, be it becoming the new cosmic hero of your hometown or falling from Godzilla's claws back into reality. And if they don't even know how to overthink it (discounting A-Plus' genre savvy mumblings), why should we? There's always time later for crack theories about how our protagonist and the "6th cutest girl in class" represent Izanagi and Izanami, after all.
How about the big 'ol kaiju, then? They all look impressive, even if most are reduced to card illustrations. Only Frankasaurus and Cleaner Man get the big 3D showdown, but their wrestling and interactions with Setagaya and the surrounding wards are so damn effective I don't need to see the other giants in action. Nowhere better does Friday Monsters nail its sense of scale and romanticism, that contrast between you and the wider world around you waiting to be explored, than with its climactic fight. Again, it's likely these science fantasy events happening in front of us could be the result of a community's exposure to harmful pollution and chemical from nearby factories, causing hallucinations. But what we're shown could just as well be the real deal, a marvelous if frightening set of circumstances always repeating but rarely understood. This isn't your typical Friday Monsters, uh, Friday twilight—now the unready man of the house becomes an avatar of justice and moral fulfillment, playing Ultraman to Ayabe's hazily remembered Tokyo suburbia. We're not stuck in Sohta's story, nor in his dad's or anyone else's. There's an undercurrent of Japan's indigenous and regional mythology metamorphizing in response to foreign influences, with communal storytelling traditions used here to comment on the transition into the modern.
A great example of Friday Monsters' writing chops is this funny guy named Frank, a well-dressed European gentleman who looks waaaaaaay too much like the original Doctor Who. He's the broadest caricature in this story, an ambassador of weird Western invasion who's nonetheless become part of the community. What part he plays in it, though, remains up to interpretation. Ayaba presents possibilities as wide-ranging as Frank being Sohta's imaginary friend, born from playing with sausages in his bento box. Or he's an elaborate tarento personality working for the local TV station, an example of outside talent brought in from abroad or the local subculture. Maybe this William Hartnell look-a-like really is an alien, the spitting image of an English sophisticate intervening with local affairs for increasingly imperialistic reasons.
No matter what, this one character can go from a cute little sideshow to a narrative-warping anti-hero, stuck between the suspected real and the seductively imagined. That's a lot of adjectives to say this game's full of similarly compelling individuals, each of whom interact with others and the setting in unique ways. Nanafumi, angsty loner and bully in the making, runs the gamut from puzzle obstacle you must solve to a minor hero later in the story, as much a moral example as a person to acknowledge on his own merits. I can remember almost everyone's name here, and not because there's anyone I ever wanted to avoid talking to.
Maybe the story's biggest theme is the theatrical nature of modern life, from Meiji-era home businesses upon farmland to the unavoidable broadcasts and pageantries these families engage in. Friday Monsters indulges you in rituals, from small details like Sohta not wearing his shoes at home to the "ninjutsu" he and the other kids use on each other to show dominance. Pre-rendered 3D environs come to us through carefully chosen camera angles, often disobeying Hollywood's rules of visual progression for the sake of dramatic and thematic effect. Sightlines clue you in on the separation between rural and suburban Tokyo, as well as the pervasive eternal railway walling you off from the picket line and other harsh politics of this era. If anything, I wish there was just a bit more area to explore, or more to interact with on the scenic routes (something Bokunatsu balances well with its lack of urgency). But the game's visual splendor and lush audio design makes it so easy to stay in this world for longer than you'd expect.
Much longer indeed, as I found out when trying the post-game before eventually bouncing off to write this review. There's a simple reason why, as I'd hinted earlier: the "bonus story" of Friday Monsters is antithetical to the game's design and messages. Sure, it'd be nice to learn even more about these people and the weird stories defining them, but we've spent enough time in Sohta's community to know it's worth moving on from. Why crawl around to dig up the scraps when I could just play the core game again? It's like Ayabe & co. are nudging players towards the realization that completionism is a trap both in media and in our own lives, but L5 told them to develop this post-game anyway.
What we're left with is a slower, even more decompressed village to hang out in where Sohta semi-randomly switches conversation topics and more focus goes to card battling or snooping around for the final Monster Glims. This can be fun if played in short bursts, but definitely not as much as the few hours of well-paced, slow and steady social adventuring beforehand. And actually reaching 100% makes this game the kind of slog some of Bokunatsu's skeptics wrongly deem it. Diminishing returns is the last situation I expected here, and it almost sours an otherwise awe-inspiring experience. We even already had a clean opening and ending like you'd see in an anime or children's show from the time, cute theme song and all. Dragging this out threatens to cheapen all the player's just enjoyed.
Encompassing all the intricacies behind this game and its wider context is a battle between idealism and cynicism, with childhood nostalgia as the battleground. I'm unsure if this spinoff's any darker or lighter than the most rigorous Bokunatsu titles, but that almost decade-long gap between this and Millennium Kitchen's recent Shin-chan game stands out to me. After making four summer vacation games with more content, iteration, and repetition than the last, here comes a more constrained, more wanting variation on the genre. (Let's not forget Bokura no Kazoku, a promising inversion of this formula idealizing urban Japan.) Friday Monsters achieves so much immersion and introspection via its clash of ideas against labors, feeling like more than a set of tropes or binaries thrown into its confined space. Perhaps this was Ayabe's own journey to stretch outside the Bokunatsu comfort zone, even knowing he'd have to compromise with his publisher as he'd did with Sony and Contrail years prior. Embracing fantasy to this degree was more than a novelty that would appease Akihiro Hino and other higer-ups; it was the natural next step.
For me, it's just frustrating how close this gets to becoming the masterpiece it hints at. A telltale sign early on was seeing the fairly barebones, clunky UI which makes Bokunatsu's skeuomorphic menus look like fine art. I pressed on and enjoyed myself oh so much anyway, but I can only nod in agreement with Ayabe about the perils of funding these more niche adventures without leaning too far into conventions or market trends. What flaws and missed opportunities crop up here manage to highlight all that Friday Monsters succeeds with, though. Other reviewers have rightly pointed out the sheer charm, verisimilitude, and admirable qualities found all throughout, making it the most complete Guild series entry by some distance. You can't stay in this world forever, no matter how much you want to, but the fond memories of this suburban fantasy can last a lifetime. Here's a story that understands the impossibility of utopia yet lets us yearn for an exciting and sustainable social contract between kids, taller kids, and the processes and solidarity making it all possible.
Nintendo should get raked over the coals for letting media marvels like this fall into unavailability because they can't be bothered to spend chump change on server and network maintenance. Little stories like this are what inspire me to keep playing video games, no matter how much I think I've seen or what I might miss out on. That's most valuable of all.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023
Consider lead developer Kaz Ayabe, who describes spending a chunk of his post-high school days listening to techno and IDM. Going to rave parties in the countryside, finding his inner caveman…all that energy, melancholy, and plenty of inaka nostalgia fed into what became the Boku no Natsuyasumi series. But where the Bokunatsu games revel in remembered childhood, free from all but the most sensible restrictions, Attack of the Friday Monsters deals directly with a modernity you can't escape, the waking dream of life under smoky layers. Our frame hero, Sohta, is stuck coming of age in a shared stupor, watching and acting through the post-war obsoletion of an imperfect arcadia. And we're brought along for the ride, encapsulated in one interminable day of discovery.
This project was developer Millennium Kitchen's chance to subvert their formula, to leave the proverbial family ramen stall and make a divebar izakaya of a game, both more childish and more adult. It wasn't ever going to be as glamorous or idyllic, but the old recipes and principles which sublimated Bokunatsu into such a masterwork all remain. I just wish Level-5's stipulations and some less well-considered design choices hadn't gotten in the way of this experiment.
Let's settle L5's role in the equation. Their Guild brand of 3DS-exclusive smaller titles—produced/developed together with studios like Nextech, Comcept, Vivarium, and Grasshopper Manufacture—was a smart way to jumpstart the system's paltry launch-window lineup. Why settle for Steel Diver, neat as it is, when cheaper, more immediate larks like Liberation Maiden or Aero Porter are available? Nor did this brand skimp on deeper experiences, like the Yasumi Matsuno-penned Crimson Shroud or the publisher's own Starship Damrey? Among this smorgasbord, Friday Monsters claims its spot as the most relatable, uncompromising adventure within the 3DS' early days. It hardly feels as lacking in meaningful hours of play as you'd expect from a 4-to-6-hour story.
As a Guild02 release, the final product had a similarly low budget and developer count, a budget take on what Ayabe's team and their partners @ Aquria were used to. I can't help but marvel at how they accomplished so much within these limits. While I appreciate L5's former willingness to bankroll and promote other creators' works with little intervention, they clearly signaled their partners to consider how few early adopters the platform had, and how their games should account for that. Finding that balance between "content" and artistic integrity must have been worth the challenge for Ayabe's team, and it leads to an excellent, ambitious yet rougher take on their usual slice-of-life toyboxes.
This makes itself very apparent in the interesting but tedious card collecting & battling system you use throughout Friday Monsters. I knew this was going to get awkward once I noticed the conspicuous lack of tutorializing for anything else in the whole game. Running around, talking to neighbors, and solving simple puzzles all explains itself, but the Monster Glim scavenging and combat rules needed explication. So that's one mark against the game loop's sense of immersion, even if, again, this kind of artifice isn't unusual throughout the experience. I've learned to distinguish the "good" kind of artifice—that which dissuades me from considering the story's events and interactions through realistic terms—and the other, more distracting kind which begs me to question its use or inclusion.
Card battling usually boils down to getting as many gems as you can find, combining cards of a set to increase their power, and then hoping your utterly random placement puts you on the losing end. Rounds come down to who makes the correct rock-paper-scissors predictions, or just has the larger numbers. This all ties into other themes of mutually understood but lightly lampooned adult rules and hierarchies that tie us down, but the player has to go through all this on Sohta's behalf, rather than just existing in plot and dialogue regardless.
Bokunatsu's game loop almost always manages to avoid this pitfall by having you engage in more obvious, more rewarding activities like bug-catching, environmental puzzles, or just managing the passage of time by moving between camera angles. Friday Monsters uses a less chronologically fixed premise, encouraging completion by removing time skips across screens in favor of a loose episodic structure. But even these are more like bookmarks to tracks and remind you of ongoing plot threads, while Ayabe & co. nudge players towards methodically circling the town during each beat. If the typical Bokunatsu day uses its style of progression to force a basic amount of player priority, then what Friday Monsters has instead emphasizes the periphery events and observations of the village's afternoon and evening.
All this comes back to the Guild series' need for back-of-box justification for spending your precious $8, something that Millennium Kitchen's other works aren't so concerned with. What I'm trying to say is that, more than any other Guild release, this one shouldn't have had to include a post-game, or any hinted insecurities about what's "missing". Extra stuff for its own sake is generally optional here, but incentivized by the narrator + promises of extra story which you neither need nor actually get much of in the end.
Much of the story's strengths and staying power comes from what it insinuates, with characters' routines and tribulations shown in enough depth yet elided when necessary to preserve dignity and mystery. After all, it's not just Sohta's tale, the aimless but excited wanderings of a kid trying to take his golden years at a slippery pace. Friday Monsters is just as much concerned with his parents, especially the downtrodden father who wants a courage to live he's never had. While the children only know TV, a story around every corner no matter how slight or recycled, the parents and post-teens stuck on Tokyo's recovering borderlands still remember the tragedies and romance of the cinema or puppet theater.
Sohta's mom and dad are struggling to keep their love and dedication as they enter middle age, denied the economic and cultural promises emblemized in classic Shochiku dramas. Megami and Akebi's dad now have to reconicle their own free time and hobbies with devoting their energy and resources to creating and supporting the tokusatsu shows that seem all too real for Tokyo's new youth, but no different from genre pictures by Toei or Toho. Emiko and her police officer father share an intimate Ozu-esque dialogue while a kaiju duel rages behind them, Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu's archetypes juxtaposed against superhero depictions of the country's calamities, environmental injustices, and looming specters of globalization. All of them could fit right onto the silver screen, if they weren't too wrapped up in their comfortable itineraries.
At least he kids are all right. School's always over when they wake up to play, and the simpler joys of learning their vernacular and playing absurd master-servant games never gets old. Two of the boys even reduce their identities to family professions, as Ramen and Billboard both exude their working-class roots in place of stodgy, less memorable formal names. It's precisely that contrast of Sohta & S-chan's mundane but precious growing up with all the frustrations of adulthood which drives not just the plot, but the dive into magical realism this game unleashes upon players.
One example is the protagonist's baffling ability to warp from a seemingly inescapable bad ending back into Ramen's family's diner. Context clues from talking with friends and acquaintances tell the player that Sohta had almost passed out, not remembering his feverish journey to the watering hole, but he doesn't recall nor care that much about it. Any grown-up would understand the gravity of the situation, yet our "hero" plays helpless ghost and witness to an imagination shared with his close circle. Dreams and willpower make any outcome possible on a dog day like this, be it becoming the new cosmic hero of your hometown or falling from Godzilla's claws back into reality. And if they don't even know how to overthink it (discounting A-Plus' genre savvy mumblings), why should we? There's always time later for crack theories about how our protagonist and the "6th cutest girl in class" represent Izanagi and Izanami, after all.
How about the big 'ol kaiju, then? They all look impressive, even if most are reduced to card illustrations. Only Frankasaurus and Cleaner Man get the big 3D showdown, but their wrestling and interactions with Setagaya and the surrounding wards are so damn effective I don't need to see the other giants in action. Nowhere better does Friday Monsters nail its sense of scale and romanticism, that contrast between you and the wider world around you waiting to be explored, than with its climactic fight. Again, it's likely these science fantasy events happening in front of us could be the result of a community's exposure to harmful pollution and chemical from nearby factories, causing hallucinations. But what we're shown could just as well be the real deal, a marvelous if frightening set of circumstances always repeating but rarely understood. This isn't your typical Friday Monsters, uh, Friday twilight—now the unready man of the house becomes an avatar of justice and moral fulfillment, playing Ultraman to Ayabe's hazily remembered Tokyo suburbia. We're not stuck in Sohta's story, nor in his dad's or anyone else's. There's an undercurrent of Japan's indigenous and regional mythology metamorphizing in response to foreign influences, with communal storytelling traditions used here to comment on the transition into the modern.
A great example of Friday Monsters' writing chops is this funny guy named Frank, a well-dressed European gentleman who looks waaaaaaay too much like the original Doctor Who. He's the broadest caricature in this story, an ambassador of weird Western invasion who's nonetheless become part of the community. What part he plays in it, though, remains up to interpretation. Ayaba presents possibilities as wide-ranging as Frank being Sohta's imaginary friend, born from playing with sausages in his bento box. Or he's an elaborate tarento personality working for the local TV station, an example of outside talent brought in from abroad or the local subculture. Maybe this William Hartnell look-a-like really is an alien, the spitting image of an English sophisticate intervening with local affairs for increasingly imperialistic reasons.
No matter what, this one character can go from a cute little sideshow to a narrative-warping anti-hero, stuck between the suspected real and the seductively imagined. That's a lot of adjectives to say this game's full of similarly compelling individuals, each of whom interact with others and the setting in unique ways. Nanafumi, angsty loner and bully in the making, runs the gamut from puzzle obstacle you must solve to a minor hero later in the story, as much a moral example as a person to acknowledge on his own merits. I can remember almost everyone's name here, and not because there's anyone I ever wanted to avoid talking to.
Maybe the story's biggest theme is the theatrical nature of modern life, from Meiji-era home businesses upon farmland to the unavoidable broadcasts and pageantries these families engage in. Friday Monsters indulges you in rituals, from small details like Sohta not wearing his shoes at home to the "ninjutsu" he and the other kids use on each other to show dominance. Pre-rendered 3D environs come to us through carefully chosen camera angles, often disobeying Hollywood's rules of visual progression for the sake of dramatic and thematic effect. Sightlines clue you in on the separation between rural and suburban Tokyo, as well as the pervasive eternal railway walling you off from the picket line and other harsh politics of this era. If anything, I wish there was just a bit more area to explore, or more to interact with on the scenic routes (something Bokunatsu balances well with its lack of urgency). But the game's visual splendor and lush audio design makes it so easy to stay in this world for longer than you'd expect.
Much longer indeed, as I found out when trying the post-game before eventually bouncing off to write this review. There's a simple reason why, as I'd hinted earlier: the "bonus story" of Friday Monsters is antithetical to the game's design and messages. Sure, it'd be nice to learn even more about these people and the weird stories defining them, but we've spent enough time in Sohta's community to know it's worth moving on from. Why crawl around to dig up the scraps when I could just play the core game again? It's like Ayabe & co. are nudging players towards the realization that completionism is a trap both in media and in our own lives, but L5 told them to develop this post-game anyway.
What we're left with is a slower, even more decompressed village to hang out in where Sohta semi-randomly switches conversation topics and more focus goes to card battling or snooping around for the final Monster Glims. This can be fun if played in short bursts, but definitely not as much as the few hours of well-paced, slow and steady social adventuring beforehand. And actually reaching 100% makes this game the kind of slog some of Bokunatsu's skeptics wrongly deem it. Diminishing returns is the last situation I expected here, and it almost sours an otherwise awe-inspiring experience. We even already had a clean opening and ending like you'd see in an anime or children's show from the time, cute theme song and all. Dragging this out threatens to cheapen all the player's just enjoyed.
Encompassing all the intricacies behind this game and its wider context is a battle between idealism and cynicism, with childhood nostalgia as the battleground. I'm unsure if this spinoff's any darker or lighter than the most rigorous Bokunatsu titles, but that almost decade-long gap between this and Millennium Kitchen's recent Shin-chan game stands out to me. After making four summer vacation games with more content, iteration, and repetition than the last, here comes a more constrained, more wanting variation on the genre. (Let's not forget Bokura no Kazoku, a promising inversion of this formula idealizing urban Japan.) Friday Monsters achieves so much immersion and introspection via its clash of ideas against labors, feeling like more than a set of tropes or binaries thrown into its confined space. Perhaps this was Ayabe's own journey to stretch outside the Bokunatsu comfort zone, even knowing he'd have to compromise with his publisher as he'd did with Sony and Contrail years prior. Embracing fantasy to this degree was more than a novelty that would appease Akihiro Hino and other higer-ups; it was the natural next step.
For me, it's just frustrating how close this gets to becoming the masterpiece it hints at. A telltale sign early on was seeing the fairly barebones, clunky UI which makes Bokunatsu's skeuomorphic menus look like fine art. I pressed on and enjoyed myself oh so much anyway, but I can only nod in agreement with Ayabe about the perils of funding these more niche adventures without leaning too far into conventions or market trends. What flaws and missed opportunities crop up here manage to highlight all that Friday Monsters succeeds with, though. Other reviewers have rightly pointed out the sheer charm, verisimilitude, and admirable qualities found all throughout, making it the most complete Guild series entry by some distance. You can't stay in this world forever, no matter how much you want to, but the fond memories of this suburban fantasy can last a lifetime. Here's a story that understands the impossibility of utopia yet lets us yearn for an exciting and sustainable social contract between kids, taller kids, and the processes and solidarity making it all possible.
Nintendo should get raked over the coals for letting media marvels like this fall into unavailability because they can't be bothered to spend chump change on server and network maintenance. Little stories like this are what inspire me to keep playing video games, no matter how much I think I've seen or what I might miss out on. That's most valuable of all.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023