review of the first: https://www.backloggd.com/u/MelosHanTani/review/1572193/

What do game sequels do? That's always a fun question to explore. There's a lot of directions they can take, so... what did this series of kids' games based on a popular animal dollhouse toy series do?

---

Sylvanian Families 2 (SF2) takes a standard approach - more of everything. Bigger world, seasons, slower level progression.

They added school events - in the Spring it's stargazing, and in the Summer, it's camping - complete with a 'folk dance' minigame where you must pick a boy to dance with (for you are a girl). (Of course, the boys set up the tents, the girls make the curry) .

Some characters are still weirdly insistent you always return home by 6 PM - probably because it's a fairly strict rule where you lose progress for hitting 6 PM without returning home.

The game is tutorialized better - shop NPCs now cite a fictional 'guidebook' that suggests one ought to 'do minigames at the school to level up before trying to walk further'. Instead of the furniture store being... in your dreams... it's at a furniture store.

---

I think I prefer SF1 over SF2 because it's shorter - rather than a big experience with More Everything! SF1 feels more like, well, a toy, that kinda sits off in your closet somewhere, to be enjoyed for a few minutes every now and then.

Not that SF2 is that much worse than SF1, but mainly I want to move on to the 3rd and 2-3 hours each with these games feels like enough to get the gist.

--

On another note, this game makes me think: there's something a little misguided in the idea of marketing a game at kids - and then making it about things the kids are already doing (going to school, doing events) - isn't it? A kid already has to be home at 6 PM. What's the point of making a game where the kid has to do the same thing?

Did these games sell well, or was it just an attempt at branching out by the parent company Epoch? Was the main playerbase kids, or actually adults who collect the toys? (Maybe.) Was the gameplay simple 'for kids' or for adults who may not play games often? Life has no answers to such questions...

But if we take this to be a 'kids' game', it's worth thinking about how complex 'kids games' have gotten in the past 15 years with Minecraft/Roblox - or arguably, how complex they've always been - Neopets and HTML scripting, etc.

I don't know what the 'meta' is for making games for kids nowadays (if that's even viable at all,) but whenever I look at something aimed 'at kids' that's also seemingly a little too straightforward it makes me wonder if it's infantilizing to simplify something past a certain point, when kids can make up their own rules playing stuff like Minecraft. If I think back to being a kid, being 4 - maybe 3 - years old was old enough to Judge And Remember Adults. I feel like anyone trying to engage with kids should remember this. Kids' Media can probably do more... or, at the least, scare the kids with glitches. https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1786933397849591857/photo/1

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...