Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation The Endless Seven-Day Journey

I really enjoyed pretending to be a 5 year old on summer vacation in the Japanese countryside! The backgrounds are hand drawn and gorgeous, the sounds are relaxing, and the humor is a bit slapstick but if you just roll with it it works. I unfortunately had a bug that prevented me from getting the last two achievements, but other than that it works great.

My own preference when it comes to "cOsY" games (sorry, that adverb is SO overused it's now really annoying to me). No crafting, no fetch quests either tbh. Everything is just, easy and nice. The stagnant camera is what makes it. Gives me the feeling like I'm in From Up On Poppy Hill, but any Ghibli game would work here -- Kiki's Delivery Service would be more accurate but UOPH is my fav.

"Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation The Endless Seven-Day Journey" is the first game I have played from opening credits to end credits entirely in Japanese (if we exclude a handful profoundly language sparse games i.e. Umihara Kawase Shun). I state this information so that, if you should like, you may use it to discredit the following opinions. I believe the narrative is written for children in all the worst of ways; I believe that the gameplay is a façade of that of the Boku No Natsuyasumi series, morphing the design of Millennium Kitchen’s previous works into a crude, achievement-laden modernisation with all narrative interweavements precision-extracted; and I know that Shin-chan is a foul little runt. Though, I must admit, amongst text heavy games written in a language I am learning, it is utterly fantastic. All text is presented with furigana, most of that is voice acted, dialogue can be read at your own pace, and you get to look at incredible background art as you hack away at sentences. However… one time game director Kaz Ayabe did make a credible threat on my life when he threw a few paperback pages worth of text at me whilst this song was looping, so make of that what you will.