large pikmin game, took 25 hours to complete and truly felt like a $60 game which says a lot being a game released in 2023. if i wasn't a depressed 26 year old that pretends like I don't have time but really just blinks and like hours if not days keep passing me by, then I would easily replay this game in a heartbeat. oatchi is OP in so many areas and couldn't imagine traversing anywhere without him. used to safely deal with each and every single enemy in the game which had very good callbacks to the second game. first game callbacks had its moments to shine here too.

I didn't think the slow, quiet beauty of Bokunatsu and the goofball Shin-chan humour would work this well, but somehow it all works.

Shin-chan is boistrous and over-the-top silly, but the quiet grounding elements of the daily routine gives everything a lived-in depth. You can really get the sense of these people as a family with genuine interpersonal connections with each other.

I've rarely seen a game this beautiful. I spent minutes just soaking in the beauty of those backgrounds.

This is a hard one to review. I LOVED Overwatch 1 and put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. Overwatch 2 is the exact same core gameplay. But there are so many auxillary changes that just make me sad especially when they completely removed Overwatch 1 in order to force everyone onto the Overwatch 2 money making engine. The battlepass sucks and it's impossible to get good skins anymore without paying. 5v5 works well but it's so much harder to get selected for Tank. The new competitive leveling is terrible. The soul just feels gone.

I still love the core gameplay of Overwatch but this game does not spark joy since when I'm playing it, I spend the whole time missing the good old days. This game is a shell of what it used to be and could have been.
*devil's advocate - for a free to play game you can get a lot of value out of this without paying anything at all

A charming country life-sim that jettisons most of the small business economic simulations that usually come along, focusing on being a child running around doing kid shit. I have a vague familiarity with the Boku no Natsuyasumi series but this is the first Kaz Ayabe game I've actually played and it's as delightful as I'd have hoped. Catching bugs, fishing, doing odd errands for town folk all rule in a zero-stakes, to-do list kind of way. Helps that the backdrops are astoundingly pretty and really make a case for prerenders in 2023 (I don't love the stiff animations and some of the character design decisions, but they're far from offensive).

I do wish this was 2-3 hours shorter than it is. Not a long game at 8 hours (give or take), but starts to run out of steam at the end as most of the objectives are completed, there's little left to explore in the town, and you're mostly just waiting for days to pass to trigger the next story beat. The story segments broadly are a bit disappointing, being very linear and existing outside the normal flow of the game (the closest we get is being asked to run from one point to the next to trigger a cutscene). Also, this is Shin-chan, so the humor is...bad. Nothing horrifying, but the pun heavy jokes rarely land in the translation, and hinging the end of the game on getting a date with a college student is definitely a choice. It all washed off me from habitual anime poisoning, but stands out more harshly against the otherwise blissful countryside.

Very excited that this potentially opens the door for future Millennium Kitchen games to get localized (the only other one to make it over being Attack of the Friday Monsters, literally a decade ago). Also, open invitation for indie devs to copy this instead of Stardew Valley.