A charming country life-sim that jettisons most of the small business economic simulations that usually come along, focusing on being a child running around doing kid shit. I have a vague familiarity with the Boku no Natsuyasumi series but this is the first Kaz Ayabe game I've actually played and it's as delightful as I'd have hoped. Catching bugs, fishing, doing odd errands for town folk all rule in a zero-stakes, to-do list kind of way. Helps that the backdrops are astoundingly pretty and really make a case for prerenders in 2023 (I don't love the stiff animations and some of the character design decisions, but they're far from offensive).

I do wish this was 2-3 hours shorter than it is. Not a long game at 8 hours (give or take), but starts to run out of steam at the end as most of the objectives are completed, there's little left to explore in the town, and you're mostly just waiting for days to pass to trigger the next story beat. The story segments broadly are a bit disappointing, being very linear and existing outside the normal flow of the game (the closest we get is being asked to run from one point to the next to trigger a cutscene). Also, this is Shin-chan, so the humor is...bad. Nothing horrifying, but the pun heavy jokes rarely land in the translation, and hinging the end of the game on getting a date with a college student is definitely a choice. It all washed off me from habitual anime poisoning, but stands out more harshly against the otherwise blissful countryside.

Very excited that this potentially opens the door for future Millennium Kitchen games to get localized (the only other one to make it over being Attack of the Friday Monsters, literally a decade ago). Also, open invitation for indie devs to copy this instead of Stardew Valley.

A cute, very earnest meta-adventure game that mostly serves to provide an unneeded second act to the original release. I'm not sure how much of my dislike of this version stems from having played the freeware version first (which I enjoyed quite a bit), but the additions made here to fill in the ambiguous world building almost universally soured me on what initially felt remarkably restrained. There's a charm to the original's RPGmaker hacking that is transformed in the full release into an overwrought but ultimately thin meditation on author/reader relationships (please, stop reading Homestuck and pick up some Barbara Johnson).

I'm still positive on the art and characters, and a few of the later deconstructions are very impressive on a technical level, but this is going to be one of my new go to examples for why everyone needs an editor.