This game series fulfills my dream game wish: an aimless life sim with no bigger purpose than simply chatting and interacting with cute mascot critters. You select a Pokepi, one of these creatures in the game, to be your partners and from there you can teach them words for plenty of things and topics in real life and they will have conversations about them with you. They might also randomly ask you questions about them to better inform themselves about such topics, and you can play a quiz minigame in order to earn points (which i assume measure your friendship with these characters) by guessing from words you've previously teached them. The more words you have taught them, the more their "IQ" stat grows, and the more you will be rewarded for this minigame. Every day, they will also leave notes on an in-game diary about things they've done while they were away, or other thoughts, and at the end, you will be allowed to save these diaries to a memory card.
Although the game is mostly cutesy, as more days pass and you build a stronger relationship with them, sometimes the topics they talk about can take serious turns, like how Jun once brought up things such as "hikikkomori life" and her bad childhood memories. Never in my life i thought i would see a game from the PS1 era with an alcoholic pink cartoon bunny talking about being a NEET. It might sound like BS, but this is actually in the game. It genuinely shocked me when i thought i had already heard everything the character had to say.
As far as i know, there are different endings. A bad ending can happen if you don't interact with your Pokepi for days, prompting them to leave out of loneliness, with a sad note on their diary. The good endings usually happen after a bit more than 10 days have passed, when you interact more actively and, well, are simply nice to them, and they end similarly, only with heartwarming notes instead. Either way, no matter what, it always ends with the characters leaving. The director was often told by many people that they were upset that their Pokepi would leave and asked if there was any way to keep them for longer, or even indefinitely. But i think that's something that kinda encapsulates the beauty of this experience. Toro and all the other Pokepi are not just virtual pets. They're Pocket People, with autonomy, living their own lives, who wish to learn more about the real world through you, with different goals in mind. Such as Toro wanting to become a human.

You have to keep in mind that this game has a huge language barrier: It was a game released to promote the PocketStation, a playstation accessory that only ever released in japan, and the japanese language and kana are so integral to the interactions in this game that i think it's pretty easy to see why these games never got localized outside of a few spinoffs like the PSVita social game "Toro's Friend Network". I tried playing it with the google translate scanning the japanese words, but even at minimum text scrolling speed, all the speech crosses automatically so fast and with no way to scroll back up that the shitty and slow Google UI just can't keep up with 70% of the dialogue at any moment. There's really no way around learning Nihongo in order to have the smoothest experience with this game. It also doesn't help that there's also very little documentation of the PS1 game out there.

I'm really only rating it lower than most other reviews because it seems this one version has pretty much been bested by latter titles and feels somewhat lacking in dialogue options in comparison. I'd suggest starting with the PSP version, the PS3 game Mainichi Issho, or some other latter entry for anyone interested in this series, specially since you won't need to track down a PocketStation in order to play it. That said, for this version at least, if you have a pocketstation already this game is worth checking out for playing the authentic way. A very kokoro-touching game, if you have a strong sense of suspension of disbelief.

Basically a Nintendo 64 era collectathon but on a OG Xbox disc. It translates the gameplay from the first ToeJam & Earl game very faithfully into a 3D world. The presents are a very fun way to break the game and some of them make the levels feel almost sandboxy in the freedom they give you, although you still have to use them intelligently as presents appear randomly and are limited for every level, even when bought from mailboxes or vendors. To break the repetitiveness, there's also many bonus and secret levels sprinkled around the worlds. I thought the idea of music albums being the main collectibles for reaching other worlds in the game, as well as the way to unlock more in-game soundtracks, was very nice and fitting for the "funkyness" of the game.

I find it interesting just how for as much as Sega was allegedly propping the Original Xbox to be the "Dreamcast 2", out of all the franchises Sega could have granted Xbox exclusivity, they went with some of their weirdest, nicher "core SEGA fan" IPs like ToeJam & Earl, Rent-a-Hero, and Panzer Dragoon. I feel that treatment would have been more important for Virtua Fighter 4, Sonic Adventure 1 DX/2 Battle or for a port of Shenmue 1, but hey, that would be playing it safe. And this just feels right at home with the weirdness of original Xbox exclusives like Mad Dash Racing or Munch's Oddysey.
Kudos to Back to the Groove for remembering Latisha!

A nice and comfy building sim but Open Play gets a bit boring once you figure the game out. After creating a massive, rich and powerful city and conquering every other one in the world map there really isn't anything left to do, but to rebuild after disasters, offer tribute to gods every 2 mins, and waiting until you reach Iron/Steel age, which takes a LONG while, and the fact that you can't even leave it in the background since the game auto-pauses when alt-tabbing + having to manually offer tribute to gods makes that even worse. After a while you just have to create your own challenge. Still, i bet this game must have been a blast in multiplayer back in the day.