INASA!!! My friend made this game... I'm American, so I don't have experience with a rainy summer day stuck at my grandparents' place in Japan - but I (and I imagine many others) have similar youth experiences of being left at a relative's house, feeling like there was very little to do... this game conjured a lot up for me. I loved the choice of letting you pick 20/40/60 minute play session, I also liked slowly uncovering the moveset. After about 10 minutes you'll have an understanding of the house, so passing time becomes a matter of how you use your moves... you can crouch, sit, jump around, open doors or move stuff. As a kid, once I had a Game Boy it became easier to feel busy (perhaps to a fault), but I remember doing things like trying to 'draw' images on plush carpets my moving the fibers, sliding down staircases over and over, looking at grandparents' travel knick-knacks...

On the fence with this one, but there's just enough wackiness with this game's expectations that I like it. It's got a bit of adventure, action, arcade kinda crammed together... weird rhythms of risking your candle resources in order to scrounge around a cave for other resources.

Wondering if you should spend your blow-up-all-blocks powerups to uncover other powerups.

The weird scramble to equip your life float, float on water and bomb what you think might be a wall to let you get out of the water safely.

The various level shapes and layouts, even if they start to texturally feel really similar (bomb, wait, get hit by impossible to dodge tiny bullet, bomb, wait, bomb, wait...). There's a kind of ambiguous risk-reward that's both mushy but kind of pleasing to try and brute force through.

The 'lore' suggested by the flow of these levels is strange. It almost feels like the game really wanted to accurately follow a story and so it goes for the less approachable level design. Some levels are entirely dark, you must navigate them by using your limited candles (or a rare lantern.) Many levels are trapped in unsignalled infinite loops, until you find a holy grail under a tile - usually not in any kind of intuitive place. It's arbitrary, it feels like maybe this RoboWarrior isn't meant to save whatever hell world they've visited. What makes the enemies all drop the same bombs you use? Why is the RoboWarrior doomed to not climb over the obstacles? Who created such bombable-block-thick worlds? Why is the world overrun with these creepy robot and slime things? Why are there hidden rooms full of old statues that drop power ups? Why are so many sewers full of power ups? Why are some seemingly-unbreakable walls actually bombable - but only if bombed 5 times? Somehow this game makes me think about the material science of its world.

The game makes little attempt at explaining any of this, but there's some kind of raw narrative power floating about that is hard to not respect. Especially so after reading a GameFAQs FAQ that had one-line descriptions of the games' levels. Were they official lines from the manual? Or made up by the FAQ author? Who knows...

A '90s PSX Life Sim I posted a song of on my music channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msjpAsvJ5XU

JP-only, but great if you like life sims!

You play as a boy staying at his cousin's(?) bakery on a floating island for the summer. Each day you'll deliver bread to townspeople. Occasionally you can trigger events to get to know some of the girls better. It's typical genre fare, but feels less stiff than your harvest moon - characters all run around on their daily cycles and you often have to chase people down. Events trigger seemingly out of nowhere. It's confusing but works.

I like the game's lore. It's a floating island, but if you explore the tunnels below the surface you'll see distant ruins in chasms below you - out of reach... Complete with forboding music, this makes for some surprising atmosphere. I wasn't able to discover the lore behind it - alongside some suspicious/shifty characters - but I assumed that was all intentional. There are violent creatures in the outskirts of town, you can literally Die... some characters are witches with spooky cavern labs. it felt refreshing to be as in the dark as I presumed the villagers were, about the history of their island.

Certainly we can say the same is true of many of the places we live in. My hometown used to store missiles during the cold war, before that it was a training airfield for WW2... and today it's just soccer fields.

There's points to criticize in DDP but overall it's memorable and ultimately that's all I really care about. As you meet new characters and learn terms, you can ask other characters about other people, or the terms. Of course, most characters go "??? I don't know???" but on occasion you get a detailed response and it sheds light on some social relations of the character. Could've used a design pass or two but I appreciate it nonetheless.

(JP-only but I hear there is a good fan translation!)

They (the company making the massively famous (in Japan) Sylvanian Family line of children's toys) made a GBC Moon Remix RPG-like for girls. I found about this by going to a random toy/game store in Shinjuku the other day. I ran into a friend visiting from Northern America, he pointed out the place's stock seemed to have renewed from a week ago.

He pointed out a giant stand that was filled with perfect condition GBA/GBC/Virtual Boy games: someone probably found an unopened shipping box sitting in some warehouse and sold it to this store. In it were various games - Telefang, Sanrio Timenet (all pokemon-likes), hamster-raising games... an interesting reminder of the diversity of that era. Lots of amazing (and mediocre lol) art and games.

But this one, Sylvanian Family caught my eye...

The art and setting make it charming enough: it's set in one of those "far off villages across countless mountains," kind of a idyllic, maybe Christian-y kind of fairy tale world. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some story behind whoever created this line of toys and branding: it has a strange innocence to it (https://www.google.com/search?q=sylvanian+family).

You have free reign each day to explore where you want, you're only limited by the need to be back home by 5 PM ... or else! You die!

Actually... the day is considered a "dream" and you just reload your previous save.

Each morning you're forced to greet your parents before leaving. Between that and the curfew there's something very childhood-y, strict, proper, about it.

But alongside that, as you explore more, find things, complete minigames... you'll level up, which gives you more stamina to explore for longer. (Hence the MOON comparison). I feel like you'll find yourself thinking about wherever it was you grew up, and how big it felt as a kid vs. now.

As you level up, time literally slows down. It's a neat way to make you feel like the character is somehow growing older and more experienced as you get more time to wander each day. Eventually you can make your way out to some mountains and get lost in a surprisingly stark-feeling system of caves that feels out of a pokemon or dragon quest dungeon. Of course, you'll always emerge safely out of the other side.

The level design has a nice variety: you mostly wander small mazes of trees or bushes looking for items to pick up, but they still feel distinct. The winding gardens of the city, the open meadows of the grassland, the confusing forests of the mountain. They're simple mazes but it works for the game.

Fast-travel holes emerge in the ground: I felt this kind of contradicted the power of the 'time slowing' leveling system.

Before the advent of crafting systems and these kinds of games being almost entirely about making small children develop compulsive-level collecting and building habits (see recent animal crossing or like, Fantasy Life), these kids adventure games were pretty tight experiences.

Sylvanian Families even has a furniture buying/placement system, but there are so few items and options that it feels more like a Harvest Moon-esque progression where you just get to occasionally change your home.

Funnily enough, the items you buy are literally real toys that kids could buy at the time. Those sly branding marketers! There's a cuteness to some of the items: a piano in which you can practice at and get better each day. A house upgrade which will surprise your dad who usually only ever tells you to not come back too late.

I'm reminded of 1998's Dokidoki Poyacchio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msjpAsvJ5XU) which I somehow haven't logged here yet), or 2001's Uki-uki Carnival (I still have the only review here! Who do I have to pay to get this translated... https://www.backloggd.com/games/sakura-momoko-no-ukiuki-carnival/ ).

Ultimately Sylvanian Family doesn't reach the experimental highs of either of those games - but it's still a well-designed experience that stands on its own and establishes an enjoyable fantasy setting, and manages to do a lot with its stamina system, relatively sparse dialogue and events. Curious to see what the rest of the series holds.

Also the music bangs https://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks/album/sylvanian-families-otogi-no-kuni-no-pendant-1999-gbc/17%2520BGM%2520%252317.mp3