Kaz Ayabe is known for making, well, the same summer holiday game over and over again. He has a series of titles called Boku no Natsu-yasumi (which means “my summer holiday”) which are quiet little games set in rural Japanese villages where you collect bugs and catch fish and run errands and, well, that’s it. You discover secrets and there are events and stuff but they’re like Animal Crossing on whatever the opposite of steroids are.
On the 3DS, Ayabe released a similar game called Attack of the Friday Monsters which is more of the same thing only with giant monsters and a not-Ultraman woven into the plot.
Anyway. This Shin-chan game, also by Ayabe, is the same game again. Only with characters from the Crayon Shin-chan series of manga and anime. I’ve no real knowledge of the series so that bit didn’t appeal to me, but an English translation of this game series is pretty unusual so has been on my wishlist waiting for a fat sale for a while.
As before, you catch bugs and pick plants, and talk to people – all of whom have weirdly deformed and badly drawn faces because that’s what they look like in Shin-chan – while you’re staying with some family friends in a rural Japanese village. Only this time, there’s a mad professor who wants to take over the world and he does this by summoning dinosaurs to wander the streets and forcing Shin-chan to relive the same week over and over – hence the “Endless Seven Day” from the title.
Despite this evil man and his dinosaurs, there’s literally no peril here. It’s still a relaxing tale where you explore the village, listen to cicadas, and chat to people. You can do collection quests for pocket money, submit all your adventures (like “I caught a new fish!”) to the local newspaper for more pocket money, and take part in a 1-on-1 miniature robot dinosaur fighting game like those beetle fighting games the Japanese love.
It’s a lovely little game, with two issues. One is that each area has a mostly fixed camera angles which causes problems for a few reasons. Firstly, sometimes you’re waaaaaay off in the distance which makes catching things tricky as they’re a pixel big. Secondly, the fixed camera isn’t the same orientation for every scene, so building the map of the village in your head is hard especially when it does that thing where you come off the right hand side of a scene and appear somewhere other than the left hand side of the next one. Very disorienting.
The other issue is that Shin-chan himself has a very disturbing voice. The noises he makes whenever he catches a bug or picks a plant or completes a task bring to mind the noises kids used to make to make fun of Joey Deacon, for those who know what that sounds like. Anyway, that’s what Shin-chan sounds like. It’s probably cute or endearing in Japan but it just sounds so wrong here. Especially since it’s every five seconds or so.
Those aside, it’s a nice little laid back game with a bonkers plot and ridiculous looking characters. Oh, and they do a silly dance every morning. What’s not to like?
