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Densetsu no Stafi (Switch): COMPLETED!

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When I bought the original Game Boy Advance, imported from Japan, I ended importing a lot of Japanese games too. At the time it was usually cheaper, and there were some really weird looking games that I wanted to play. For a few years, I often saw the three GBA Stafi games for sale on the likes of Lik Sang (RIP) and Play Asia, but never cheap enough to buy. Eventually the DS came out and the 4th game in the series was released for that, was cheap, and I bought and played it. Eventually I bought Stafi 2 and 3 for the GBA but by then the first game was All The Monies. Until now!

Nintendo have nicely plonked the three Game Boy Advance Densetsu no Stafi games on the Nintendo Online Game Boy Advance Subscription Thing, so of course I’m going to play them all. They’d best be good.

And they’re good! Phew.

At its core, Stafi is a platformer, although most of the game takes place underwater where you can freely swim. Starfish aren’t known for their jumping acumen, after all. As you progress through the levels you gain some skills in a very-linear-Metroidvania way, like double-jumping, gliding, and being able to break certain walls. At the end of the game you can return to previous levels and make use of these skills which you wouldn’t have had access to at the time.

Most levels have some sort of puzzle or task to solve. Sometimes they involve finding a certain object or character, or matching colours or shapes, and some of these tasks are pretty difficult because they’re all in Japanese. Thankfully, most are obvious even if you can’t read the dialogue, and those that aren’t are resolvable with trial and error.

Each world has the platform game standard set of themed levels, so there’s a snow world and a tropical world and so on, and each is filled with weird fish (and some not-fish) characters to interact with. The main character, and friend, you encounter is a clam thing called Kyorosuke, who somehow always manages to get further into levels than you’re able to, in less time, and gets angry a lot. I gather he explains a lot of what is going on, some of which I can understand but most goes over my head. Each world has a (very easy) boss at the end too.

There’s almost certainly a plot, involving what seems to be a punk snail or something doing Bad Things, but again, Japanese innit so it mostly passed me by. None of these translation “issues” should be seen as a reason not to play it though, as Stafi is a really good little (well, quite long for the era, really) platformer with some clever and funny bits.

Oh, and I should probably explain why I call the game “Densetsu no Stafi” not how some people say “Starfy” or “Stafy”. Because the name is スタフィー, or su-ta-fuii, and it was always transcribed as “stafi” online back when it was new, and it’s the eventual Western DS release that renamed it as “Starfy”. Also because I Am Right.

Lucy Dreaming (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I do like a nice silly point and click adventure game. Especially with regional British accents. And, hopefully, toilets. WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT, Lucy Dreaming has all those things. Phew, eh?

Lucy suffers from nightmares and sets out to get to the root of why, with it seemingly having something to do with a murder in her town many years ago. Lucy can explore her house, and the town, in the usual pointy-clicky way you would with other games in the genre, but there’s a slightly mind-bending addition – you can also explore her dreams.

Depending on which items are arranged next to her bed when she goes to sleep, she enters one of a number of dreams. She can’t take items into or out of her dreams, but can influence how they play out with external stimuli, and can take items from one dream to another. Things Lucy discovers in her dreams affect her recollection of events in the waking world, and vice-versa, so it has similarities to other adventure games with parallel universes or time travel, only in a way I’ve not seen before.

Puzzles, albeit with the added dream complications, are mostly work-out-able with common sense and a bit of warped thinking, rather than be of the use-everything-on-everything-else format that I really don’t like. There are lots of silly characters to meet, and great accents (if a few perhaps less than stellar voice actors), as well as some very British references and stereotypes and lots of funny made up brand names.

Lucy Dreaming is definitely worth getting if you like these sorts of games, northern accents, and/or toilets. In fact, there are even puzzles involving the toilets. Look, if you are making a game and you want me to both play it and recommend it to others, just put some functional toilets in it and you’re a shoe-in.

Picross S4 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes. It is another of Jupiter’s almost identical picross games. And yes, it is even longer than the previous ones I played. And yes, I will be buying Picross S5 when I see it on sale. What are you implying?

There’s nothing new in this one, apart from all the puzzles being new of course. What I mean is there’s no new modes or mechanics or anything. It does have some huuuuuuge bonus puzzles if you have save data from earlier games in the series, and a couple of those took me over an hour each!

Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation – The Endless Seven-Day Journey (Switch): COMPLETED!

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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?

Another Code: Recollection (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Another Code: Recollection, is a remake of two games that were originally on the DS and Wii (Another Code: Two Memories and Another Code: R). These games are essentially point-and-click adventures with puzzle elements and some great visual novel-style storytelling that digs into family secrets, memory, and loss. You play as Ashley, a young girl trying to uncover memories of her past while helping others do the same. See, the name is clever because it’s a “re-collection” and also a “recollection”.

The first game, Two Memories, starts with 14-year-old Ashley heading to a deserted mansion on Blood Edward Island, where she’s supposed to meet her dad for the first time since her mum passed away when she was only three. Her parents had been working on a memory-manipulating system called Another, which apparently her dad kept working on in secret on this remote island. But just as Ashley and her aunt arrive, they get separated, leaving Ashley on her own to explore the eerie mansion. Along the way, she encounters a ghost named D, a young boy who’s been stuck on the island for decades with no memory of who he is or how he died. As Ashley solves puzzles and navigates the mansion, she gradually pieces together not only her family’s secrets but also D’s lost memories.

The second game, Another Code: R picks up two years later. Now 16, Ashley is off to visit her dad again, this time at a lake near the research lab where he works. She’s hoping for a relaxing camping trip with him, but things get complicated when she meets new characters—some teens in a band, lab employees, camp staff, and yet another young boy with missing memories, though fortunately, he’s not a ghost this time. While the game ultimately ties back to the events of the first game and her mother’s research, it spends a lot of time exploring this boy’s story and his quest to remember.

Now, if you loved the original games like I did, you might find a few changes in this remake a bit of a letdown, especially in the puzzle department. The developers of the originals, Cing, really took advantage of the DS and Wii’s unique features to create some inventive, memorable puzzles. One of the best from the DS required you to close the DS slightly so one screen could reflect on the other—a real out-of-the-box experience. Sadly, those creative moments didn’t make it into the Switch version, aside from a few gyro-tilting puzzles.

And honestly, even the puzzles they did include are a bit hand-holdy. Often, Ashley or D will point out the solution before you have a chance to think it through yourself. You’ll come across a mechanism, and instead of having to work it out, you’re nudged in the right direction before you’ve even really started. It makes things a bit too easy and, well, takes away some of the charm of figuring things out on your own.

But, it’s all very charming and makes me miss Cing.