The Mario version is absurdly unforgiving in its difficulty, while the P&DZ part actually holds your hand and has a pretty reasonable difficulty curve. You'd expect the opposite, so that people new to the franchise who were lured in by the Mario tie-in would find it more accessible. Still a fun game and overall solid way to play a series that is otherwise primarily F2P.

Cool little experiment

I bought it on sale out of curiosity because I listened to people who insisted it was a game with great gameplay and I shouldn't be put off by all the schoolgirls with giant tits and how you strip them as part of the gameplay loop because softcore anime teen nudity wasn't the only reason to play it.

It does not have good gameplay.

One of those games where it feels like they forgot how to build on mechanics/create any depth after about 1/3rd through the game, alongside writing/plot that a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons would find offensively overdone/boring. Gameplay is one of those classic 3D jank games where it gets to be hard to tell if you're supposed to be accomplishing things by doing them the way you are or not.

One of those games that I played because people simped for it a bunch randomly online then.... it was just very generic? Nothing particularly wrong with it, just absolutely nothing special about it either to warrant spending your time on it.

Great until... a certain point.

Best iteration in the series, via having a good compromise of features from the old days and newer QoL without flanderizing things and losing their soul to pander.

So much more charm than some of the later ones--this iteration understood "coziness" in the right ways and made your villagers feel so much less generic than the newer ones.

You cannot turn off the camera noise that the console makes when you save, even if you have headphones on or the audio turned to zero. If you for some reason own this and have it installed, do not play this game in public places like on a bus.

The rare game from this era, and especially on the N64, that's aged amazingly. Just as playable and solid today as it was in 2000.

My parents bought this for me for some ungodly reason. I got soft-locked many areas deep. At no point was it fun.

Audio is bad on Switch; particularly voices which are tinny af. Feels like they were up against the limit for storage size on the card and just cheaped out on compression and made all the voices just midi files or some garbage, and didn't want to include a free download/patch to make it sound good.