Chibi-Robo!

feels undercooked compared to its ancestor moon, a game with similarly novel gameplay that was matched by its vast and modular soundtrack, oddball dialogue, toybox world, and experimental, love-filled story.

in chibi-robo's case, that novelty gradually, steadily transforms into mild yet pervasive monotony.

the game feels two, maybe three times longer than it should considering the lack of areas and things to do in them. cutscenes are sluggish, the soundtrack is mostly just two overworld songs you'll become intimately familiar with, and the day/night cycle is frustrating even with the tools you eventually gain to mitigate it... the complaints continue to pile up the longer you play.

the friendly vibes of being a cute little robot hopping around and helping out are demolished by the game's lack of friendliness towards me. i'm stuck climbing up one area in the same way for the 10th time because it's the only method i have to go where i need to. i enter cutscene after cutscene where characters consistently enter 0.2x text speed, a decision i rarely find fitting to the line it's attached to or the character saying it. a review on backloggd states the game is a 4/5 if you learn a few speedrun tricks and skips to make traversal more technical and speedy, and i believe it.

despite the supposed openness of the world i often felt oddly railroaded in ways i don't remember feeling in moon. areas and items are locked behind ladders i don't have the material to build, so i just need to do other things while i wait for enemies to pop up randomly. quests are locked behind other quests for nebulous reasons. i try to do one thing, and it turns out i need to do one other thing first. again and again.

at one point you need a bone for an important main story quest. if you don't have a bone, or you used it earlier, you must wait a few days for one to spawn in a random room. have fun searching for it.

you also need a bone for a side quest which takes place later on. if you don't have a bone, or you used it earlier, you must wait a few days for one to spawn in a random room. have fun searching for it.

honestly, i don't mean to be that harsh. it's undeniable that walking around as the titular chibi-robo, collecting trash and scrubbing the floors for little hearts is a good time at its simplest. it's just unfortunate that the game is filled with repetitiveness in platforming, dialogue, areas, etc. and i don't know wh-i'm suddenly struck by a washpan falling on my head, knocking me unconscious. that's the 12th time that's happened!

TL;DR: This game is complicated and does a number of things very right and almost as many things extremely poorly. However, it's a memorable experience that I have to recommend for the sheer absurdity of the concept. I think the value of the game is in the eye of the beholder with this one, so feel free to read ahead if you want my thoughts on it.

YouTube games critic Joseph Anderson has often talked about tedium in puzzle-based adventure games being defined as the time it takes you to actually perform something after you have mentally confirmed it to be possible and the correct solution. For example, if you discover a solution to a simple puzzle in your head, but then it takes you 10 minutes to execute, those 10 minutes are wildly tedious because you already know you can do it, and the task turns into busywork.

As much as I found memorable and unique with Chibi-Robo, I will state that if you agree even slightly with the above statement, there is a good chance you will have some major problems with this game. With that out of the way, if you come from a house with divorced parents, I highly recommend playing through this game anyway.

Chibi-Robo is about a small helper robot that Mr. Sanderson buys for his family despite not having the money to do so. The dynamic of the family is very clearly on the precipice of breaking completely, and you discover this by listening to how they talk about one another. The father is between jobs and obsessed with toys more than he is upkeeping his family. The mother is a homemaker that has lost her motivation because of her husband's laziness. The sole daughter is clearly traumatized by her parents' rift and completely envelops herself in a frog costume persona to help cope with the absurdity. All of them grow fondly of you in different ways over the course of the game, as you become an embodiment of what they each desired most in their family - motivation, responsibility, and companionship, respectively. Your unofficial goal is to prevent divorce by making everyone's resolve stronger to fix the household instead of letting it wilt.

To boot, all of the toys in the house come to life when the family isn't around (similar to Toy Story), and they all have their own connection to the family and house that are pretty entertaining. While many characters are obviously supposed to be parodies of pop culture (Drake Redcrest as Ken the Eagle from Gatchaman being the most prominent), I found them to be mostly really interesting because the writing is very strong in this game, even for minor characters. The game is also outright hilarious on a number of occasions, so my personal motivation for most of the game was just to find out what happens next. It also has that point-and-click adventure style dialogue depth where interacting with characters with random costumes and items provokes pretty interesting throwaway dialogue. Basically, they feel like they have some depth and personal thought processes, even if the tone of the game presents it in a specifically Y2K brand of off-kilter charm.

The actual gameplay is pretty straightforward - you walk around cleaning up the place and doing simple tasks to make everyone around you happy, basically proving your worth to the family. You are limited by the fact that you need to be plugged in to recharge your battery, but scoring Happy Points brings you closer to upgrading your battery life. Some events trigger others in the house, progressing the story and unlocking new events and environments to solve and play around in. The appeal of being really tiny and having the sort of strange obstacle of real-world objects is kind of obvious, since it makes you think about the usefulness of the geometry of these things in ways you probably haven't considered much before. This is fun and exploring a new room for the first time was my favorite part of the game in most cases. It's a weird brand of gameplay but I think it poses 3 distinctly annoying challenges.

The first problem in the game that will probably annoy you is that your battery starts very small in capacity, meaning you have to frequently interrupt your exploration to recharge. You might make it to the top of a structure with a fork in the road and only be able to explore part of one path before having to retreat to recharge. This isn't fun since it basically taunts you with the idea of a place that you already know exists and that you have been to, but just can't actually move around and explore. Add to the fact that charging wastes even more of your time by prompting you to save every time you plug in, and the early game can be pretty rough. It's annoying, and begets the next problem.

The second is that some structures, like stairs, take an absolute eternity to traverse because Chibi does not have a true jump mechanic. He instead has to hold the directional stick toward a grabbable ledge and pull himself up, kind of like the 3D Zelda titles but it takes twice as long. Given that you have to make frequent trips up and down these structures, that tedium concept presented before starts to rear its head when the challenge of hoe to climb this bookcase has already been solved, and you just have to spend 5 minutes doing it again. There are eventually ladders and warps and bridges and make these slightly more tolerable, but Chibi's slow run speed means there is always some teidum when traversing across the house. When limited to just inside one room, it's a bit more forgivable.

The third is probably the most frustrating - there is a day-and-night cycle that is on an active timer that depletes whenever you are unpaused. Different things happen in the day and the night, namely the toys getting more lively when everyone goes to bed, but there is 1) no way to accelerate the day/night cycle by sleeping like in Animal Crossing, and 2) reaching the end of the timer takes you back to your home base in the living room. The first time I walked out of the Chibi-House and realized I had to climb all the way back up the stairs to continue what I was doing (a 5 minute process just to return to the area I was in), I got so flustered that I turned the game off. That is the definition of tedious. I get that they needed a way to initiate the two "states" of the house, but holy shit, literally anything but what they have in place would have been better.

Those three concepts might sound irredeemable, but they get better with smaller play times. The fact that the color palette so closely resembles Super Mario Sunshine makes me actually angry just thinking about how much more quickly Mario and FLUDD could traverse the house and get stuff done. I can't shake the feeling that if this game actually had fluid exploration and movement mechanics, and respected your time, the exact same game would take maybe 1/3 as long as it took me to complete 100%, and entirely for the better. That is something like 10 hours of wasted time.

At the end of the day, I feel like this game is almost too unique to not still recommend to the generally curious. The storytelling is really well done, even with its simplicity, and kids who grew up in similar environments will probably find the character of Jenny very affecting. The art direction has aged extremely well thanks to color blocking and focus on caricatures over realistic portrayals, and the game supports progressive scan so it looks sharp even today. The soundtrack is really well done early-00s acid jazz electronica, and the sound design is charming (even though the footsteps can get grating after a while).

This is a complicated and heavily-qualified recommendation, but the high points reached with the ambition of the storytelling and your interaction in fixing the family simply by making their lives easier slightly outweighs the clunky gameplay. This seems like a game that is practically begging for a proper sequel, and though I haven't played the sequels I still plan on it just because of how original this concept is. Even if it's just novelty, it's good novelty, and a version of this game with stronger movement mechanics and more respect for the time of the player is a contender for best game on the console, period. I also feel like this game is maybe the ultimate bait game for a Switch remake, and I hope if it happens that my problems are somewhat alleviated and it's not just a port. Until then, I'm sure you can probably figure out if this is worth it or not.