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.

I feel a little bad ranking this one so low, because I think they had some good ideas and I loved the gameboy aesthetic. The problem was, having a JRPG centered around consumable items loses its fun when you consume all of the items and you’re stranded without an ability to craft. In general, I’ve soured on crafting mechanics in games and it’s a fundamental part of this one. The game was also a little long-winded with dialogue so even though it was a short game, I dropped it after about 2 hours.

It’s a quasi-3D tennis game, and absolutely brilliant. The game has a fixed camera perspective unlike any other tennis game, where your player’s sprite is centered, and the rest of the court moves as you move. This forces you to judge the speed and distance of the ball more genuinely than any stationary camera game. Risks are amplified with this camera setup and the long animations force you to have patience, because there really aren’t second chances to catch up if you misjudge the ball.

It’s a hard game, but it still manages to be player-friendly. It might first seem way too difficult to judge where the ball comes and where the hitbox is, once you practice and focus, you’ll discover that the game is very fair and even generous. It’s also impossible to play this game conservatively. You have to go aggressive with volleys, smashes, and vary your shots. The name of the game is Aim for the Ace – so there is a big emphasis on serving aces and return aces. It’s easy to get good at serving but you can’t get overconfident with a good serve alone. You have to have a complete skillset.

It’s also a story-driven visual novel game, which makes it even better. Your coach and team motivate you in between sets and it has little scenes at high-stakes parts of the match, which really give this game personality. All of your opponents play differently. I absolutely love that there’s a 14 hour campaign where you play complete 7-game, 3-set matches against your opponents. A fantastic change of pace from most tennis games where it’s designed around 5-10 minute mini-matches between the most elite players at the grand slam tournaments. Instead you take the role of an anxious high schooler just trying to just be a team player and not let down their team, and every match takes its sweet time. You can even lose matches and the story goes on! We need more games about the glory of amateur sports.

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.