kinda a logical progression from number 2's tone and overall wonky they're-gonna-die mood, with many minigames where if the game were minimally realistic they'd result in 3 or more people dying by your hand and then you killing yourself. alas this is jackass fantasy land, minus any spark of actual humanity that's not in the music (i like most of the music but i wish it didn't just loop one song for when you retry a stage), with the dialogue being kinda painfully scripted both in the sense it's clearly so and that it's really bad, with not even pontius having a single good line. knoxville villain arc. literally every cutscene is bad it's impressive.
anyway gameplay wise most minigames are at least fine! wow! but that they repeat the shticks somewhat often, with two bumper car stages, many races etc or sometimes go to really shovelware places like party boy or the whack a mole one makes it not a very impressive package in this aspect either. i appreciate the really dumb non-win goals that are like KILL YOURSELF IN THIS SPECIFIC SPOT! though

don't gel with this as much as warioware for multiple reasons, it needs so much tutorializing, feels imprecise at points because of the flicking motion, has total nonsense ranking standards and is generally less funny (besides the moais) or charming. plus the soccer stages are easier with my eyes shut?? besides a couple songs they're all good but not great. well it's cool and shit sure but besides having more challenge this isn't significantly better than touched and it's way worse than the first two, which can also be played on the first two models of the ds! i'm probably sounding like a hater but i'm keeping it 100

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

a real monument to mankind's willpower that this game that starts as a bait and switch remake of the original donkey kong has such a robust moveset, feels so correct and uncompromised, has 101 stages but feels like it could go on for way longer without stretching itself thin (i really disagree with the assessment it loses significant steam, world 9 is such a fun boss rush too). sincerely pretty mindblowing. the moveset alone makes this feel better than any other 2d mario if you ask me. sm64's older portable brother