The real vaccine is the friends we made along the way.

This game is pretty crazy, color picross + minesweeper. There's a story mode where you engage with a given character, and the images the picrosses create follows the narrative of each character. The characters are all pretty cute and their stories are nice, too.

Mechanically, this game is pretty sinful. It occasionally breaks the one rule of picross: on very few puzzles you have to guess where to put a certain tile. Although, you can make an educated guess based on multiple factors, including the patterns that you've built thus far. The kicker is, you fail out of the whole stage if you make 5 wrong calls. There were a few 20x20+ puzzles where I ended up making my 5th mistake over 30 mins into the stage, it's quite punishing. Additionally, on the story levels, you have to solve the puzzle within a certain amount of time. I think I only timed out on like two or three stages though. Either way, all these aspects can make for tense and somewhat infuriating times. Maybe the amount of errors allowed should have been increased with puzzle size. Be it on a 5v5 puzzle or a 30x20 puzzle, you are only allowed 4 mistakes before it fails you and you have to restart the whole thing.

Also they should have let you customize the music and character when you do the non-story puzzles. This game has some good music but for some reason you're stuck with the same one for the ~50 nonstory puzzles. I wouldn't recommend this as someone's first picross game. I think it's a good exception to the standard one, though. Also you don't need to know japanese to play it, but I'd say like half the fun or so comes from the characters and their arcs.

this fixed some of the timing problems parappa had. It's still pretty finnicky, but not as frustrating on average than parappa. At first I thought this game was much worse than it is, idk if my disc is scratched or something but it had no cutscenes between each song. I was pretty disappointed because I just thought they didn't exist, but I looked it up later and realized I just missed out I guess? Or maybe they don't appear if you save between each song? idk :(
Anyways I didn't like how little you could hear the music if you were ever doing bad or awful, it really disincentivized you to actually play at that point because you couldn't even hear what you were supposed to recreate. Regardless, I was able to pass a couple songs because I did well at the end and could barely hear them when I actually played. After relistening to the songs, I only really liked the baby and idol one. maybe it's because my playthrough was messed up, but I feel like they could have done a lot more with this. I don't mean that in terms of number of songs, but I just feel like a lot more happened in parappa.