I played Attack of the Friday Monsters…. and I hate it. I hate when adults are condescending to kids or don’t respect their intelligence, and it’s a very strong ludonarrative theme in this game.

I went in wanting to love it, but I recognize I was only interested due to the aesthetic and the idea of it. A slice of life game with an ambiguous story and setting sounds amazing on paper. In reality, the game didn’t really do anything to earn my attention. It has good art and ok music and strong prose at times, but the end product goes nowhere. I couldn’t get wrapped into the story. More power to you if you enjoyed it, I just couldn’t relate.

I didn’t care for the story or the characters orbiting the main character’s life. Everything felt very surface level. Even when the game tries to be a little quirky with the character of Frank, it just feels very unnatural. The game tries very hard to capture an innocence or nostalgia, but it didn’t earn it from me. I know I’m not the target demographic but I am very open to empathizing with any character, they just didn’t give me anything to latch on to.

The pacing is a major problem due to the gameplay. Every 2 seconds walking and picking up a card sucks. it just doesn’t feel right, especially since you can’t see the shines half the time so you can’t avoid bumping into it. The card game is bad. Rock paper scissors didn’t work for Alex Kidd (possibly my least favorite game ever), it doesn’t work for Ayabe Kaz either. There’s no actual discovery or problem solving to be had, just go to points marked on the map in the order its presented. Something like scaring the bullies could have allowed for player choice or at the very least, challenged the player to figure out that they need to yell into the other end of the pipe, but instead it just instructs you to go from point A to point B then back to point A. Riveting.

Also the fact every conversation “unlocking” or “advancing” a new chapter feels very unnatural and like when a gatcha game is playing a dishonest psychological trick on you. Why does this exist? To make the game feel like it’s moving along faster? Because it feels more like it’s slowing the game down unnecessarily.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW:

I’ve been highly anticipating it ever since I saw the fantastic art style and thought I’d take a chance on early access, even knowing that it’s pretty unpolished. The presentation is better than screenshots capture. There’s a great twist that the 2d environments “shift” into 3D when 3D-modeled bosses appear. Fantastic vision and well executed.

It definitely pulls a lot of inspiration from the Kiseki games, with its sense of humor/puns and fourth wall breaking by clicking on different objects. You can also have your character do silly things that subvert the forward progression of the game. The battle system has a very solid, if simple, foundation. It’s not challenging, but the beginning of JRPGs hardly ever are. The enemy encounters and animations definitely take inspiration from Chrono Trigger, and there’s a scene at the end of the first chapter that really drives that home.

But unfortunately despite its short length, it does not really value the player’s time. For example, the main protagonist’s journey starts with her teacher lampshading that he’s assigning you menial tasks. And menial they are. At one point, one of the quest givers/protagonists of another story was sleeping, and I asked for a list of supplies they wanted me to buy. But I missed part of it and clicked again to read it and the character went back to sleep and wouldn’t wake up as a joke. So I literally had to just find a walkthrough video and scrub through to rewatch it. Leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It’s made all the weirder that the game as it is right now is made up of 3 5-hour character stories and this is how the time is spent. Hopefully the stories get better, but for now they are by far the most amateurish part of the game. This type of nonsense does not seem like it would be changed, unless they kind of rewrite the whole thing. There’s so much great potential here but I have a feeling it might always come across as a pretty amateur effort as a result of the tone set by the weak story.

I played 14 days in my beloved snes Harvest Moon for the first time since Stardew Valley was in early access and it’s still so good. Days are very short but nights are as long as you want. The issue is, you don’t have much stamina and you have a time limit to drop things in the box. I accidentally made my potato farm too big already. Foraging is a bit of a grind… you can really only grab 2 pieces of fruit and sprint back to your box before the sun sets, or quickly grab flowers for your gf (in my case I’m romancing my first wife ever, Ellen), and then grab 1 fruit. I am looking forward to taking my horse to the old town road instead.

Only having 2 tools on your person and carrying one thing at a time is tough to go back to, but it’s still workable. All things considered the game still feels really really good to play. Even though I did waste some seeds accidentally because I didn’t realize I had it selected instead of my hoe. But at least with switch online, it’s easy to just rewind and act like it never happened.

I never really realized how much the relationship mechanics are front-and-center from the beginning, but I guess the game doesn’t really show off that many competing systems up front. It takes a while to get the story going, upgrade your house and animals, and have weather events that open up new areas, etc. But for the first month there’s not too much going on, so I understand why they want you to start giving flowers to the girls and read their diaries.

I am so glad that Stardew exists and expanded on this game in every way, but there’s still value in coming back to this one. I hope I just pop it back in every once in a while to progress the story because it is pretty great once it gets going.