This game series fulfills my dream game wish: an aimless life sim with no bigger purpose than simply chatting and interacting with cute mascot critters. You select a Pokepi, one of these creatures in the game, to be your partners and from there you can teach them words for plenty of things and topics in real life and they will have conversations about them with you. They might also randomly ask you questions about them to better inform themselves about such topics, and you can play a quiz minigame in order to earn points (which i assume measure your friendship with these characters) by guessing from words you've previously teached them. The more words you have taught them, the more their "IQ" stat grows, and the more you will be rewarded for this minigame. Every day, they will also leave notes on an in-game diary about things they've done while they were away, or other thoughts, and at the end, you will be allowed to save these diaries to a memory card.
Although the game is mostly cutesy, as more days pass and you build a stronger relationship with them, sometimes the topics they talk about can take serious turns, like how Jun once brought up things such as "hikikkomori life" and her bad childhood memories. Never in my life i thought i would see a game from the PS1 era with an alcoholic pink cartoon bunny talking about being a NEET. It might sound like BS, but this is actually in the game. It genuinely shocked me when i thought i had already heard everything the character had to say.
As far as i know, there are different endings. A bad ending can happen if you don't interact with your Pokepi for days, prompting them to leave out of loneliness, with a sad note on their diary. The good endings usually happen after a bit more than 10 days have passed, when you interact more actively and, well, are simply nice to them, and they end similarly, only with heartwarming notes instead. Either way, no matter what, it always ends with the characters leaving. The director was often told by many people that they were upset that their Pokepi would leave and asked if there was any way to keep them for longer, or even indefinitely. But i think that's something that kinda encapsulates the beauty of this experience. Toro and all the other Pokepi are not just virtual pets. They're Pocket People, with autonomy, living their own lives, who wish to learn more about the real world through you, with different goals in mind. Such as Toro wanting to become a human.
You have to keep in mind that this game has a huge language barrier: It was a game released to promote the PocketStation, a playstation accessory that only ever released in japan, and the japanese language and kana are so integral to the interactions in this game that i think it's pretty easy to see why these games never got localized outside of a few spinoffs like the PSVita social game "Toro's Friend Network". I tried playing it with the google translate scanning the japanese words, but even at minimum text scrolling speed, all the speech crosses automatically so fast and with no way to scroll back up that the shitty and slow Google UI just can't keep up with 70% of the dialogue at any moment. There's really no way around learning Nihongo in order to have the smoothest experience with this game. It also doesn't help that there's also very little documentation of the PS1 game out there.
I'm really only rating it lower than most other reviews because it seems this one version has pretty much been bested by latter titles and feels somewhat lacking in dialogue options in comparison. I'd suggest starting with the PSP version, the PS3 game Mainichi Issho, or some other latter entry for anyone interested in this series, specially since you won't need to track down a PocketStation in order to play it. That said, for this version at least, if you have a pocketstation already this game is worth checking out for playing the authentic way. A very kokoro-touching game, if you have a strong sense of suspension of disbelief.
Although the game is mostly cutesy, as more days pass and you build a stronger relationship with them, sometimes the topics they talk about can take serious turns, like how Jun once brought up things such as "hikikkomori life" and her bad childhood memories. Never in my life i thought i would see a game from the PS1 era with an alcoholic pink cartoon bunny talking about being a NEET. It might sound like BS, but this is actually in the game. It genuinely shocked me when i thought i had already heard everything the character had to say.
As far as i know, there are different endings. A bad ending can happen if you don't interact with your Pokepi for days, prompting them to leave out of loneliness, with a sad note on their diary. The good endings usually happen after a bit more than 10 days have passed, when you interact more actively and, well, are simply nice to them, and they end similarly, only with heartwarming notes instead. Either way, no matter what, it always ends with the characters leaving. The director was often told by many people that they were upset that their Pokepi would leave and asked if there was any way to keep them for longer, or even indefinitely. But i think that's something that kinda encapsulates the beauty of this experience. Toro and all the other Pokepi are not just virtual pets. They're Pocket People, with autonomy, living their own lives, who wish to learn more about the real world through you, with different goals in mind. Such as Toro wanting to become a human.
You have to keep in mind that this game has a huge language barrier: It was a game released to promote the PocketStation, a playstation accessory that only ever released in japan, and the japanese language and kana are so integral to the interactions in this game that i think it's pretty easy to see why these games never got localized outside of a few spinoffs like the PSVita social game "Toro's Friend Network". I tried playing it with the google translate scanning the japanese words, but even at minimum text scrolling speed, all the speech crosses automatically so fast and with no way to scroll back up that the shitty and slow Google UI just can't keep up with 70% of the dialogue at any moment. There's really no way around learning Nihongo in order to have the smoothest experience with this game. It also doesn't help that there's also very little documentation of the PS1 game out there.
I'm really only rating it lower than most other reviews because it seems this one version has pretty much been bested by latter titles and feels somewhat lacking in dialogue options in comparison. I'd suggest starting with the PSP version, the PS3 game Mainichi Issho, or some other latter entry for anyone interested in this series, specially since you won't need to track down a PocketStation in order to play it. That said, for this version at least, if you have a pocketstation already this game is worth checking out for playing the authentic way. A very kokoro-touching game, if you have a strong sense of suspension of disbelief.