videogameblog

After the gruelling experience of Ninja Gaiden Sigma, playing Chibi Robo was a really nice palette cleanser. It's the second game I played for video game book club with my friends, the theme of the wheel we spun was 'wholesome games'. I went into this knowing literally nothing about it, I thought it was a platformer with similar mechanics to Unravel. Turns out its a weird life sim style puzzle exploration game? It's extremely unique and very hard to categorise. If anything it's kind of similar to games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, but instead of farming you clean up stains on the floor with a little toothbrush. The main gameplay focus is on helping the family (and toys) of the house solve their woes. Chibi Robo's ultimate goal is to bring happiness to all around him.

When you start of the gameplay loop seems pretty simplistic - walk around the house, clean up dirt on the floor and throw away trash. After a while you'll come across someone that needs your help, whether it be a talking dog toy or the dad of the family. After a while you meet more characters who need help, and then you meet a couple more, and after a while you aren't cleaning stains at all anymore - you're delivering divorce papers. It's impressive how suble the change is in gameplay, you hardly even notice how different things have become. There's a huge cast of characters scattered around the house and they're all equally memorable. My favorites were probably the egg soldiers and plankbeard, but I did miss a few. Their stories are all pretty unique and funny, I liked seeing how they advanced and intertwined with eachother. It's cool that some stories stop and you'll need to go and finish others in order to progress them; it makes it feel like you're progressing in some way no matter what you're doing. It's nice to play as a vessel of happiness and bring joy to everyone around you. More games need to be wholesome and whimsical like this one. The main narrative gets a little confusing at one point, I was unsure what to do in order to advance for a long time. It also becomes pretty unclear what parts of the game are progressing the 'main' storyline, which isn't a big deal but I would have liked to know. The sheer volume of side quests and characters that need your help can get a little overwhelming at times, especially with the time limit system in place. In chibi robo, gameplay is split into two segments - the daytime and the nighttime. In the day, there's more of a focus on helping the family around the house. There's 3 people - The dad, who can't stop buying expensive toys despite the families financial woes. There's Jenny, the daughter who only speaks in ribbits (unless you wear the frog costume) and the mom, who's had enough of her husband wasting all of their money on useless junk. Their relationship is going through a rocky period when Chibi Robo shows up, and it's up to him to try and fix it. This is the 'main story' of the game, with the toys making up the majority of the sidequests. At nighttime, you mainly interact with the toys, and occassionally some family members if they're awake. This system is unique, but it can hinder your progress alot purely because you'll completely forget what you were doing last time it was night. I felt like I was running around doing a bunch of unrelated stuff sometimes. I'd also forget what I was supposed to be doing for certain characters after getting sidetracked for a while, some kind of simplistic quest log probably would have been nice. After you play the game for a couple hours you start to understand it's systems, and some of the tasks become a little tedious. By the end of the game I was pretty bored of walking around slowly, recharging and cleaning stains. It would have been nice for them to add some kind of progression system to let you move around easier, other than the warp points. Let me drive that little car around!! Or at least let me move the Chibi House to different rooms. There's a wide range of different tools at your disposal, but you only really use the Chibi Copter. It would have been cool if there was some other movement-based items you could use as quick as the copter. Pushing around those ladders is extremely tedious.

Chibi Robo has extremely fun sound design. When his little feet are tapping against different surfaces, they make different noises of various musical instruments. The patio is a nice piano, the basement is more drum-like. I really like dynamic aspects of games like this, involving the player in the creation of the soundtrack reminded me of Tetris Effect. When you clean up stains on the ground it does a little guitar riff which is super fun. Alot of the sound design is acapella too? It sounds like most of the inventory navigation and tech you interact with was made by someone making noises. The characters talk in this Animal Crossing style chopped up vocals, which sound really satisfying? I'm not really a big sound guy so I wouldn't know what to call it but I liked listening to that duck talk very much. Alot of the music sounded great, I escpecially liked this track.

Overall, I think that Chibi Robo was an extremely wholesome and fun little game that made me smile but was weighed down by alot of tedious systems. Movement, talking, cleaning, sleeping and recharging all get pretty tiring fast. A couple quality of life changes and tweaks to gameplay could bump this game up quite a bit for me. It's a shame Nintendo is probably never gonna touch this IP again. Maybe at some point this'll randomly get a remake announced at a Nintendo Direct or something. Also I made a little play-doh blender render of Chibi Robo and Telly Vision, you can see it at the top of the page :D.