It feels like Moco Moco Friends' destiny was to be an obscure PS1 game that some dude on a Neoseeker forum with an Escaflowne avatar insists is a hidden gem because he spent over a hundred dollars on a Japanese import, not a 2015 3DS title that...also happens to be over a hundred dollars.

Luckily, it's very easy to hack your 3DS, and you too can be tricked by the cute monster designs and the catchy soundtrack into thinking that you're playing an overlooked masterpiece until you realize that it's more a charmingly bad RPG designed for infants than anything. There's quite a few design choices that are so uniquely terrible that you will yearn for the simpler things in Pokemon like "being able to pick up items by pressing A" and "evolving automatically when you hit a certain level".

Oh, and I got stuck in level geometry in the hub world, softlocking my game. I lost 20 minutes of progress. This isn't a hidden gem; this is a pebble on the side of the road.

But man, those little hedgehogs that are actual pincushions make everything worth it in the end, and the game is hitting the right notes of Interesting Choices that I want to see how it ends, even if the main character Moco is one of the most irritating main characters I've ever had to endure. Just don't try to go for 100% because the amount of grinding needed to fill out your Plushie Pokedex is lethal.

-----------
UPDATE

Okay so I wrote that review when I was 10 hours into the game and now that I've finally beaten the game, I gotta say...this game Goes Places in regards to its plot. You'll be sitting through ten hours of the most one-dimensional magical girls saying things like "mochi mochi excellent", "mukka chakka fire!", and "I'm hungry 8(" only for Moco to find out that her mom has been split asunder into two beings as the result of dark magic ripping her soul from her body and that there's some sort of matter vs dark matter type of dimensional entropy that's threatening to destroy multiple universes. You spend the final cutscene of the game before the credits roll standing in the void between dimensions.

Doesn't make the game any better, but this is the main reason why I completed this game instead of shelving it.

-----------
Bonus Section - The Interesting Choices Made By Moco Moco Friends

- The crafting system is entirely based on RNG. There's a mat harvesting mechanic in this game but instead of getting a bunch of different recipes and creating the exact items you need, there's only six recipes for six very broad categories (Heal, Equipment, Assist, Bloom, Awake, and Evolve) and you just pray to the RNG gods that your witch summons the item you need. This means you can't just craft a healing potion if you want to - you gather materials to get the chance to craft something that could be a healing potion but could be something that heals paralysis or blind.
...This is so much worse than you think, trust me. See, to evolve your critters, you need evolution items. Sometimes several of them! And there's a bunch of evolution items and a lot of monsters use the same one! I did NOT get the very specific evolution item that I needed at first so I save scummed. For a crafting system.

- The befriend system is also based on RNG. Other games like Yokai Watch and Dragon Quest also had something like this, but also having the crafting system be luck-based means that you don't feel fully in control with your little pink witch friend. Want to catch monsters in this monster training RPG? It's all based on vibes, my friend.

- Capturing monsters in this game reduces their level to 1! So you finally caught that monster that looked cool in that random dungeon! Good job! You finally beat the odds! Now you have to start at the very beginning with that monster and the exp gains in this game are just abysmal!

- Evolving your monster also reduces your monster's level to level 1 and yes, they will be in a weakened state until you can raise their levels again.

- No exp share either, which means your monster farm will be full of level 1 weaklings that just kinda take up space. Yes, this means that, if you want to start using a monster in your team, you're going to have to grind, and you're probably already grinding because you had to evolve one of your monsters.

- Your monster farm can only hold 60 monsters in a game with over 100 monsters. Because you, the player, needed to be punished even further.

- There's something called Awakening that raises the max level of your monster. Problem is, you also need a second monster in that exact same species in order to do this and yes, that includes the monsters you only get via evolution and yes, your monster farm will run out of space extremely quick. There is no need to use this feature at all so about 1/6th of the materials you harvest end up being a literal waste of inventory space.

- There's no bank and you lose half of your money if you wipe out. You have to pay money to evolve or train your critters.

- You can't skip or speed up the cutscenes. Before you go "what if I want to sit through the story", trust me on this one...

- I hate Moco's "my tummy hurts" noise. This is not a mechanic - I just hate it.

This game is frustrating to me because it felt like an okay first step in bringing Spyro into the PS2/Gamecube era (you know, after they fucked up the first attempt with Enter the Dragonfly) and that this game could've led to some other, better games that ironed out the writing and gameplay problems that are present in this one, but instead of doing that, they went "fuck it, we're starting over" and rebooted the franchise. We needed something better than this, that's for sure, but this could've been a fine start to something and instead it's just this lonely, tonally weird game that led to...Shadow Legacy, maybe?

Also - fun fact, Drew Struzan painted the box art for this game. He's the artist that also painted the movie posters for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. Odd as hell choice, but I like it. I wish more video games did this.

I feel like if you're going to make a colorful 3D platformer aimed at children and put it on multiple consoles including the Nintendo one, you would make sure that the Nintendo version of your Dreamcast-era inspired so retro game was at running well on the main console of your target audience. Instead, the Switch version of Balan Wonderworld wasn't so much "made" as it was "shit out" by the developers.

The contrast between the beautifully rendered cutscenes and the disgustingly grimy N64-era textures and the ass level design made for some decent whiplash at least. You know, before the framerate and slowdown kicked in, the game froze in Handheld Mode, and I got actual motion sickness from the level warping effects. Fuck this game.

Playing several hours of this game to get a "reach level 10 in the original Pac-Man" trophy in the Pac-Man World remake actually gave me a brand new appreciation for this game, especially with the enemy AI. While there are some very reliable paths to take that allow you to cheese most of the dot collection, I eventually found myself learning enemy patterns and was able to react to the ghosts a lot better. And they had pretty different patterns! Neat little piece of programming history, and getting to level 10 made me feel like a Capital G Gamer.

However, I do not appreciate the later cinematics that reveal that the "ghosts" are actually wearing clothes and underneath their fabric sheets are sentient blobs of human flesh. Gotta dock a star for those scenes where Blinky's sheet gets caught in a nail and his iconic ghostly form falls apart until he's pathetically crawling along the ground like a depressurized deep sea fish.

I played this in the Cowabunga Collection, so I actually had some conflicting feelings calling this "completed". I didn't so much "beat" the Genesis version of Tournament Fighters as I did "endured" it, I thought. They gave me the tools necessary in which to see the end credits (a rewind feature) and by god, I used it until the CPU thought I was some sort of inhuman anime protagonist capable of reading all the minute movements of my opponent.

Then I realized "You know what? I shouldn't feel bad. If the CPU can cheat and one-shot me with four cheap combos, why not do the same and also cheat?". I didn't want to use the well-documented Casey Jones cheese strat - I wanted to get to the credits as Sisyphus the mutant dung beetle, damnit. Casey can become invulnerable indefinitely but Sisyphus shouts "BUG!" when he wins and his name is a reference to the fact that his species rolls around giant boulders of shit. Casey Jones may have infinite I-frames but Sisyphus has charisma.

The phrase "Wow, I don't think anyone play-tested this!" gets tossed around a lot when talking about badly balanced video games as a little cutesy insult, but I firmly believe that either there was no QnA process beyond "well the game doesn't hard-lock or give anyone seizures when I do this" or the guy they got to playtest this was some sort of futuristic cyborg who assumed that humanity had reached the same level of dexterity and cat-like reflexes in 1993. This game hates you in such a comical supervillain fashion that I picture the I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream monologue whenever I'm projectilelocked into oblivion.

"Okay okay but what about the rest of the game?" you might be asking. Well, even if you get past the fact that the CPU wants your fleshy appendages to bleed and decide to play with someone with a pulse, you're still playing a downgraded version of TMNT: Tournament Fighters. The SNES version just looks and sounds better. Sure, you and your friends probably didn't know any better in the 90's when you were playing this game on the Sonic Console, but now it feels like you're eating stale crumbs from Nintendo's pizza box when you sample the multiplayer.

But there is one redeeming factor. Man Ray (sorry, Ray Fillet as this game coins him) and my boy Sisyphus are only playable in this game. In fact, this is the only appearance of Sisyphus in the entire franchise. Godspeed, Sisyphus. You're punching angels in heaven now.