Remember a while back I played a game called Shin Chan The Endless Subtitle About Seven Days Of Summer Or Something? It’s one of those lazy Japanese summer games by Kaz Ayabe where you go fishing and catch bugs and do lots of minor things with very little consequence. Natsu-Mon is one of them.
This time you’re a boy who’s part of a circus troupe, staying at a guest house in a small town for the summer. You run errands for everyone, solve some mysteries, catch and raise pigs, and collect shells, gems and litter to sell so you can buy things to help out—like an acorn shooter to stun bugs and daze pigeons and seagulls. Dazing birds does nothing, incidentally. It’s just cruel. I did it a lot.
After a few days the circus is ready to go and you become the planner for the acts, which mostly means picking the order of the performances and choosing the clothes the performers wear. The acts are terrible to begin with and the crowd is unimpressed, but you can buy better, fancier equipment and your audience starts to grow. Not that it matters. Nothing you do really matters. You can ignore the circus completely. Or the pigs. Or the entire town.
Regardless of what you do or how well you do it, at the end of August the game ends and you leave the town. There’s no good or bad ending. Just the memories you made along the way.
It plays just like Ayabe’s other games, only this one is full 3D with a free camera, unlike the others which have fixed camera angles like the original Resident Evil. One of the issues I had with the Doraemon game, and I mentioned it at the time, was that the fixed camera made navigation really confusing. You’d leave the screen heading right and enter the next one from the bottom, or something equally disorienting. This new Breath of the Wild-style camera fixes that and makes exploring the town and surrounding area much easier. The actual world is much bigger this time too, and it even borrows ideas from Breath of the Wild—there’s upgradable stamina you use for running and climbing, and a “Tengu’s Cape” which is basically the paraglider from that game.
The problem is, all this new full 3D big-world-ness really makes the Switch struggle. And that’s weird, because Breath of the Wild is absolutely massive and far more complex and detailed than this, which frankly looks like a GameCube game. Yet the framerate in this crawls into single digits far too often. There also seems to be a memory leak or something because performance gets worse the longer you play. Save, quit and reload, and it’s fine again for a bit, but after another couple of hours it starts to nosedive again.
Despite all that, it’s a lovely, relaxing game with no peril, lovely sunsets, and a cast of silly characters. Just like all the others. Oh yeah, and toilets are used as teleporters. Nice.
