Sylvanian Families: Otogi no Kuni no Pendant is a Role-Playing game, published by Epoch, which was released in Japan in 1999.
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very endearing. none of the minigames are very good and the gardening loop is really barebones but that hardly matters in a world this charming and effortlessly cute.
the leveling up for the time you can spend outside of your home and there being a time restriction in the first place can be read as a nuisance but it also encourages you to actually become familiar with its world and be excited by how new pieces of it unlock and how new shortcuts pop up, also adding a bit of tension to its small mazes and a touch of planning wrt where you'll go. also recreates the feeling of becoming more confident with yourself and your surroundings as a child upon learning more about them and what makes each person tick, even if in silly ways like "this guy really loves skiing". while having the pop quiz first happen on day 3 is a strange choice it also highlights how much you absorb of this world through just playing more of the game, with the quiz becoming really easy later on. i love this feeling of actually getting to know a game's world, small as this one's is it's still very rewarding to do the sidequests and fill the photo book up and chip away at making the world's flowers bloom again.
the translation patch is really good translation wise, pretty professional script, but i had some technical hiccups which i don't know what caused them: the frying pan sidequest would just Not turn in, my first attempt at playing this got killed really late into it because i couldn't access the seed/drop combination screen anymore and that etched into the save somehow? then i replayed the game with speedups, not doing as much side content, to try to get to the ending, and that menu didn't break but one optional minigame did for reasons also unknown. maybe it's mgba (though i played it on different instances each time, first through the standalone vita app then the retroarch core), maybe it's the patch, i don't know. but that i had the motivation to spend a couple hours farming just to get to a short ending cutscene speaks volumes to how immediately attached i got to this small, colorful 8 bit world with really nice music. the evangelion shito ikusei of sylvanian families, except with gardening that's more barebones than the angel raising and a more developed world. lol these comparisons are stupid
the leveling up for the time you can spend outside of your home and there being a time restriction in the first place can be read as a nuisance but it also encourages you to actually become familiar with its world and be excited by how new pieces of it unlock and how new shortcuts pop up, also adding a bit of tension to its small mazes and a touch of planning wrt where you'll go. also recreates the feeling of becoming more confident with yourself and your surroundings as a child upon learning more about them and what makes each person tick, even if in silly ways like "this guy really loves skiing". while having the pop quiz first happen on day 3 is a strange choice it also highlights how much you absorb of this world through just playing more of the game, with the quiz becoming really easy later on. i love this feeling of actually getting to know a game's world, small as this one's is it's still very rewarding to do the sidequests and fill the photo book up and chip away at making the world's flowers bloom again.
the translation patch is really good translation wise, pretty professional script, but i had some technical hiccups which i don't know what caused them: the frying pan sidequest would just Not turn in, my first attempt at playing this got killed really late into it because i couldn't access the seed/drop combination screen anymore and that etched into the save somehow? then i replayed the game with speedups, not doing as much side content, to try to get to the ending, and that menu didn't break but one optional minigame did for reasons also unknown. maybe it's mgba (though i played it on different instances each time, first through the standalone vita app then the retroarch core), maybe it's the patch, i don't know. but that i had the motivation to spend a couple hours farming just to get to a short ending cutscene speaks volumes to how immediately attached i got to this small, colorful 8 bit world with really nice music. the evangelion shito ikusei of sylvanian families, except with gardening that's more barebones than the angel raising and a more developed world. lol these comparisons are stupid