The sylvanian families series continues with a jump to the game boy advance! Still meeting Epoch's breakneck "every december" release date, SF4 unfortunately is the most uneven and rushed-feeling game so far. Many of the side areas/forests from previous installments are just random-feeling mazes of raspberry bushes: we have raspberry islands, forests, hills... all identical.

The game introduces a hint-system, but like the hints in SF3 it mainly serves as a band-aid to the difficulty of progressing on your own.

The new GBA art style makes the maps larger to navigate (and thus harder to find characters). The higher fidelity also creates an even weirder sensation when the characters repeat the same lines for days on end.

Gathering Points (the currency) no longer levels you up, so everything you do in the game just feels like gathering money for buying the few pieces of furniture or wallpaper.

There's no MOON-esque stamina system: instead the day ends at 6 PM and you're whisked home, rather than losing progress. The game now shows a clock in the top-right, and the world map actually makes physical sense. At the same time , these things were part of what gave the GBC games their charm - having a brutal survival system in a kids game felt somewhat refreshing. I appreciate the clearer map, but there's also not much to the navigating or exploring that makes the map feel all that necessary now.

Basically the ironed out the 'wrinkles' to an already simple game design, which leaves SF4 feeling even more featureless than its predecessors.

The game is centered around finishing mini-storylines with characters and collecting "Dream Seeds", but the game takes a step back from the GBC trilogy, which would often hide the MacGuffins at the ends of suspicious spots or paths. Instead in SF4 the Dream Seeds are seemingly randomly spawned in the middle of fields. This serves to make the backgrounds and level design feel even more like pointless set dressing: overall the game has a feel of a middling children's story with huge moments of radio silence in between.

Honestly I feel like the team was probably feeling burnout at this point, that with learning the new GBA technology and likely the lack of any strong design directors, and perhaps who-knows-how-many weird brand guidelines to follow - resulted in a overall middling game.

A rhythm game spinoff of the Sylvanian family game boy games, this came out a few months after the first game. It looks like a collaboration with Natsume and Epoch - perhaps evidenced in a different and more fleshed out art style. The animals dancing during the songs are surprisingly elaborate, and each stage has a cute visual theme sort of like beatmania or something.

Weirdly though the songs seem to just be original to the game (or maybe some other mixed media related to the series), none of the songs from the first game seem to appear in this.

The game itself is simple, there's three directions to press (Down, A, B) and the songs are short. I think it took me like 15 minutes to play through the game. There's also a mode where you can record yourself 'playing drums' to other songs and save them as 'videos'. Kind of like a rudimentary wii music or something.

Overall it's cute and solid for what it is, but feels like a brand tie-in more than anything.

First of all, another ad: Some other indie devs and I organized a free Substack journal about game design for a general-audience: the first volume comes out 5/20 so check it out: https://afterjourneysend.substack.com/p/announcing-volume-1

(Also the Angeline Era (my 3D Bumpslash Action-Adventure) demo is out on Steam! Check it out)

Okay, now the review. Here's thoughts on Sylvanian Families 1 and 2.

SF2: https://www.backloggd.com/u/MelosHanTani/review/1599452/
SF1: https://www.backloggd.com/u/MelosHanTani/review/1572193/

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Again this is a series of childrens' adventure games set in a Sylvanian Family-inspired world, a famous toy series in Japan (and some of the rest of the world). The mainline series had a game release at a breakneck pace every holiday season from 1999 to 2004.

There's a calming idyllic quality to the setting - a hidden forest village free from conflict, kids happily going to school and adults working in craftsmen-esque positions. If you hold up a little social critique to it, it leaves a lot to be desired as childrens' media, but if you're not set on being a party pooper it's a pretty pleasant fantasy world. There's even a Theme Park.

However, the games (so far) are frighteningly - hilariously so - obtuse to progress and clear (at least from the 3rd one) - Japanese YouTube comments of Let's Plays often include thanks to the let's player for clearing a game that was impossible for them as elementary school students.

The 3rd game is no exception and is probably the most obtuse so far.

The main changes from the first two are that 3's tutorial is elaborate: you first play 4 mini-chapters as different animals -getting to know their parents' jobs (the Tailor, Baker, etc) or learning about the minigame and gardening systems.

The basic story premise is that the town has opened a time capsule, but it caused the starry sky to vanish. The 'stars' (fairies) went to the past. And now you have to fix it!

After that you're thrown into a fetch quest as the striped cat girl, which requires you to find those 4 animal friends to receive some magic Sand Dust. Doing this is made tricky by a MOON-esque stamina system that will reset your day if the in-game timer hits 6 PM. To slow the passage of time, you must level up by grinding a variety of minigames, most of which are either luck-based, seemingly-impossible, or overly straightforward. While no issue on modern emulation, you only get one shot per day and you can imagine a kid having their day reset over and over as they fail one minigame after the next, hitting the curfew (which comes remarkably fast at Level 1), obliterating any progress they might have made.

Hilariously, the in-game map, though more visually complex than the previous two, is nearly impossible to use: your position on the map is nonsensical, the map's roads barely correspond to what yousee in-game, and sometimes the name of the area the map says you're in differs from where it seems you are. In one example, a sign says "North for Acorn Hill!" but following the passage takes you to what is unmistakably a Potato Field. Opening the map says you're in "Whispering Woods". And so on. However this is kind of inspiring and interesting, something worth exploring intentionally maybe...

Much is made harder by the fact that hints are only given Once per story beat, by a fairy who speaks to you as you sleep.

But if you make it through that section (and I nearly gave up), you earn a magic hourglass item that will take you back in time! Given that the sound and music are reminiscent of some of Oracle of Seasons/Ages (Feb 2001), I wonder if this game took a note from those. There's even an Ocarina you use for hints...

I'm glad I stuck to the time-travel section because it's the meat of the game and actually has some neat aspects to it. You see your parents, but young, you see a young version of the mayor. Different species live in the town, and where there are houses in the present, are only small molehills in the past. Perhaps there is deep lore to Sylvanian Family's universe. What happened to all the ducks? The moles? Why did the bus to the city vanish in the present? Such questions remain unanswered.

After the initial interest of the past/present, the game makes it clear that it's about finding "Fairy Bottles" in the present (through searching and minigames), and finding Fairies in the past (through some item puzzles and searching). The item puzzles aren't well telegraphed - instead you rely on using an Ocarina to summon the Owl Mayor who will tell you if any fairies are remaining.

I got about 14 or so of the 60-something fairies before quitting. This part of the game is like SF1/2 where you're tasked with finding 60-or-so flowers around the map, but in SF3 it's made a bit more complex because you need to find Fairy Bottles and Fairies, and sometimes the puzzles require you to grow a flower in the present. Overall it's a little drawn-out - there's a seasons system which triggers new dialogue and events, but the writing itself is pretty straightforward, so for a big chunk of it it's replaying minigames and searching the same ways in the past.

There's occasionally some funny lines in there (a bear kid who thinks windmills create wind) but a lot of it is like "I can't wait for customers to try the new bread!" or "It's winter, don't catch a cold!" or even just houses with a single Duck who only says "Hello."

Overall it's certainly building on the previous two games and a little more ambitious, so I wonder what the GBA era will bring for the game series.

Music here: https://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks/album/sylvanian-families-3-hoshifuru-yoru-no-sunatokei-2001-gbc

I got DDP Resurrection because I watched a review for a switch release of DDP DOJ, and then bought the wrong game. This game feels so WILD, you're pushed to be super aggressive, something the generous auto-bomb system seems to hint at... in the few stages I tried to learn (just 1-1 and 1-2) it felt like you had to be really preventative, like quickly managing all the escalating risks that would fly onto the screen - on top of the actual bullet avoidance. Being able to hyper your way out of a situation or to play it safe felt really cool.

I appreciate all the thought that goes into the design, the subtle ways in which bullet patterns escalate and build on each other, the fun of learning stages and then pulling the whole thing off in the end.

Of all things, shmups remind me the most of being a kid and trying to memorize songs on the piano, working through harder sections one at a time to try and pull the whole thing off ("Playing for Survival") and then going back and actually working in personal flair/expression ("Playing for Score"). Sort of like with shmups, I never really got too much into that hobby as a 'soloist' beyond playing in orchestra/band. And I don't think shmups and playing music are really that alike, but there does seem to be something similar in how you have to train/learn at both, and the way in which stuff that feels impossible slowly becomes possible.

Actually, it's hard not to try and compare shmups to many things in life! They (like other arcade games) really distill the whole difficulty/learning thing down to some pure essence. But in particular, these bullet hell shmups feel like they're compressing that essence even further - it's an interesting design space to learn from and experience.