🤛🏻🎀❌🍛👊🏻🏐🎸🌊🤜🏻

maaan, i was looking forward to this one! time to unpack a bit after deciding to stop pursuing the post game.

there’s a lot to love in the presentation here. rem is this expressive illustrator who’s designed some real good knuckleheads. reading through her comic, devil’s candy, is a blast every time, and i love getting to see another angle of her work through this synthwave rude girl lens. go check out devil’s candy!

the setting of two delinquent girls headbutting their way through a city of violence is also too good to pass up. you’ve got shops full of jaded kiosk workers & inspiringly buff women giving you brief periods of calm between tidal waves of punches on vibrantly beat up streets. each variant of an enemy has a unique name & can be recruited as a single move unit, including secret boss versions that hit harder & reveal the undercurrent of a subplot through their descriptions. going around the city & finding these characters becomes it’s own type of minigame.

these are all cool ideas! there’s a lot of cool ideas in this game. but it feels like a collection of cool ideas & sweet art put next to each other on a shelf, rather than something that works together as a cohesive whole. none of it quite rings through to me as well as i can imagine how cool it sounded in the planning stages of development. there’s this spiritual successor fusion of scott pilgrim & river city ransom going on, but it gets in the way of delivering a good time.

i wish they either kept things rougher around the edges or actually playtested the game a bit. things end up in this kinda in-between space where you can feel them phoning it in after a while. for me it was around the 20th time an enemy said ‘does anyone actually read this?’ as their defeat line.

🕵🏽‍♀️🤖🌻👨🏼‍✈️🌐👠🎥❎

i started playing this b/c i’ve been interested in picross games, and the phoenix wright flavoring felt like a friendly enough entry point to get the ball rolling. it turns out i’m really into picross! something about the system feels like i’m casting a complex spell, or in the case of this game, mulling over the details of a murder investigation. it’s equal parts arcane & meditative.

while making my way though this game, i picked up super picross & pokemon picross, and they kind of made me realize how the structure of MbN doesn’t feel like a great container for the puzzles. bouncing back and forth between grids, point & click mechanics, and dialogue feels like it should be a great time, but it just ended up a bit of a slog. somehow too much story in between each puzzle to get right back into it, but also not enough to make me care that much. there’s cool stuff in the plot, like a tv detective falling into the real deal & discussions of gender between a robot and a drag queen, but i wanted more. it felt like the worst parts of an interruptive hacking minigame sometimes, and that wasn’t even during the actual hacking minigame!

the writing was earnest, but never threw me a real chewy whodunnit curveball. the puzzles were fun, but the color blotchy pixel art style meant i could never really make a visual guess towards what i was looking at. the character designs were? all over the place?? the game felt hard to put down at times, but hard to pick back up at others. i think i took a year long break before coming back to the second half!

all in all, i’m happy this game gave me the in for picross i needed. there’s a lot of fun genre blending going on here, i just wish it was strong enough in one area that i could be more on board for it.

At its core, the game really is just a fancy looking pedometer, but it's the stuff you get to do BECAUSE you decided to take that walk through the park or the neighborhood that really makes this worth checking out. My only complaint is that the game is really confusing when it comes to getting the special Seedlings because you'll swear on your life that Seedling came from a restaurant, but the game says it's a Roadside Seedling. Not really a big deal, but I'd prefer my Pikmin collection not be filled with Pikmin with a simple sticker on their head. Overall, though, definitely check this out and maybe it'll slither its way into your daily routine like it has for me.

I like Pikmin Bloom. It's fun to go on walks and see your small army of purple Pikmin (the best ones) marching behind you as flowers pop up in your path. And it makes for a nice end of day routine to see everywhere that you went that day and journal it.

However, the thought creeps in from time to time: "What is the point of this really?" I already walk and hike plenty, less so now that the sun is down when I get off work, and I even have apps that track that stuff better than this one. Is it just the aesthetic pleasure? Well, mostly yes, unfortunately.

Maybe I don't live in a big enough city, or at least one big enough to have been noticed by Niantic, but my local area has very few flower buds in the app so I don't really get to engage with that side of the app much. Maybe my afternoon and evening walks just aren't long enough, but I feel like I am constantly topping out on nectar and flower petals to spread around as my Pikmin earnestly bring me more and more. (I can spend $1.99 to upgrade my storage capacity though!) I've nearly stopped sending them on expeditions altogether. The vast majority of points of interest in my area seem to be roadsides, at least according to Niantic, as that's the type of Pikmin I seem to find regularly.

I've had a good time with Pikmin Bloom, and I plan to continue playing it daily for the time being. I just wonder how soon the magic will wear off.

I wasn't ever much of a Pokémon guy, I had a backpack in Kindergarten that had Pikachu on it but even a decade later I could never say that I had ever caught a Pikachu. I had some'a the Pokémon spinoffs, Pokémon Ranger Shadows of Almia for example, and while those were a fun time I never really got too deep into them. Pokémon was something elusive to me that I've always wanted to try and never quite had the time. This is still true for me today.

It has been over 5 years since one of my cousins convinced me to play the recently released
Pokémon GO. I played Pokemon GO in 2016 for less time than I had played the Pokémon Rumble demo. It just didn't click with me, the only mobile games I played were those tapping Piano games, Flappy Bird, Temple Run... the standard Phone Stuff.

I tried it again earlier with my Girlfriend encouraging me to play it, she is a much bigger Pokémon person than I am. I gave the game days of time instead of minutes this time, but the concept still struggled to have me go back to it, in fact 90% of the reason that I kept going back to it was because my Girlfriend was leaving me gifts in the game frequently.

Now comes Pikmin Bloom, developed by the same folks. I downloaded it the day I went to an Olive Garden. Olive Garden gave me food poisoning in 2016, so I wasn't excited. We were going to get our food in about 20 minutes, so I figured I may as well step out of The Hell House and I decided to walk to the local Goodwill with Pikmin Bloom in hand.

Goodwill is so lame now, back then I'd see game consoles there and games like Trauma Center for cheap. The only thing of note that I saw this time was a copy of Halo 3. But I guess that is still awesome! Eventually it was time to reenter Hell's Garden, and I had walked thousands of steps without realizing it. Olive Garden didn't give me food poisoning this time.

By the time for my first Daily Lookback, it had dawned on me that the reason this had clicked for me Pokémon GO didn't is because of how much more passive this game is. I don't have to go to a PikminStop or whatever, I just walk and bring my Pikmin with me. It encouraged me to walk so much that I had decided to walk to my friend's house which was a ways away, something that I had actually never done before as my parents usually drive me. It was fun!

All the Pikmin blend so closely together though, I kinda don't try too hard naming them if I can't pick em out through a crowd. Hopefully my eventual children don't end up being twins.

Nevertheless there is still a ways to go to draw me in, Pokémon GO had my attention for 15 minutes and this game had my attention for a couple of weeks. The Olive Garden Food Poisoning Incident had my attention for a few days while this most recent encounter only had my attention for an hour. Something this time was missing, and that something was the food poisoning. Something is missing here too, I feel like the game doesn't do enough to give itself true longevity for most players, something that Pokémon GO certainly succeeds at. After the Harry Potter Niantic game got shut down after only a couple'a years of service, I can only hope this game gets the chance to find what it's missing. I'll follow up with the game if that happens

Some of the music tracks remind me of system-music of the Wii U and 3DS. I didn't realize that I missed that