I do like a Kaz Ayabe game. I’ve played a few recently, including the previous Shin chan tie-in. They’re all set in sleepy Japanese villages where very little happens and this one is the same. However! Shin chan’s dog, Shiro, wanders off and finds a mysterious train that take him (and, when he is led there, Shin chan) to Coal Town – a mining town that nobody in the village seems to have heard of.
Your days are split between the usual Ayabe tasks of catching fish and bugs, running errands for your family and neighbours, doing a bit of gardening, and making friends with the local kids. It is never explained why there are children and pensioners in this village, but nobody inbetween (aside from one childless woman and a visiting chef) so who are the parents? And why doesn’t anyone care they’re all out after dark? Anyway, yes, your time is split doing that stuff, and also visiting Coal Town and helping out there.
It seems the mayor of Coal Town has, now the mine is running low on coal, gone a bit mad and is doing evil nefarious things which I won’t spoil. It’s your job, as a five year old so obviously best qualified, to help out and stop this happening. Which mostly involves cooking things, collecting items for an inventor, and – crucially – mine cart racing. Of course. Without giving too much away, the plot seems heavily borrowed from the Your Name anime, wrapped up in a Ghibi bow. No bad thing, though.
Unlike other games in the series, there’s no deadline for getting everything done. In previous titles, you’d have a summer, or a month, or a repeating week timeloop, but here you don’t seem to be able to run out of days. Which makes the whole thing even more laid back and relaxing than before. In fact, only the arcadey mine cart races are anything but.
So not a huge change to the formula. It’s back to mostly static (as in, not fully 3D) environments of the past after the Natsu-mon game changed it, but then I’m not sure which order the games were originally released in in Japan. It does mean a return of the “hold left to walk off the screen and enter to the left on the next screen and so walk off again immediately” issue, but it’s a minor thing.
Definitely a recommended play if you’re a fan of Ayabe’s work.
