Tag: chibig

Game Review: Ankora Lost Days (Switch)

written 6/03/2023

Released on September 15, 2022 for Steam and Nintendo Switch, then later on March 30, 2023 for PS4 and Xbox, Ankora Lost Days is the 3rd game released by CHIBIG. It stays in the same world as Summer in Mara (2020) and Deiland: Pocket Planet (2021), following the exploits of Junior Ranger Mûn who managed to crash her ship on Ankora, the home world of the Anks. Similar to its predecessors, Ankora Lost Days is an adventure game with crafting, leveling, cooking, and fighting elements along with terraforming. Mûn works to not only find the missing pieces of her ship to send a distress signal to her Interstellar Patrol comrades, but to help the Anks save their world.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Price: Paid $7.49 out of MSRP $14.99

Recommended: Eh…yes if you’re a series fan. No, otherwise

One Word Description: Repetitive

  • Pros: Part of the Mara world, Mûn is a recurring character, gardening, crafting, no item limits on bag, decent game graphics, many quests, caters to completionists
  • Cons: Fetch quests, random drops, difficult to find the one item necessary for every room, slow, fishing, annoying music, hunger, stamina, and drink bars, mind-numbing

Game Review

The game starts with Mûn, having crash landed, exploring the world, which is grid-based both in each room and on the map. She makes her way over to the tutorial section where a nice Ank merchant directs her through crafting some basic tools. After that, the storyline starts, and Mûn is tasked with some tasks before Koda, the Chief Ank dies. Then it’s Harvir who is her main taskmaster. Each room has terraforming or building obstacles that must be overcome in order to access new rooms. Fighting through enemies, opening up new rooms, restoring Ank “villages,” and fulfilling everyone’s quests unlock new recipes for food, items, tools, and weapons. Finding and restoring quick jump pedestals as well as fishing boats all help to traverse the map. Now, there is NO optional quest in this game. Every quest needs to be done in order to unlock craftable recipes. If you get stuck, it’s likely you need to fulfill someone’s task to move forward. The end of the game culminates in a big 2-boss fight that was laughably easy. 100% completion!

For a completionist, this game is great. You pretty much can’t beat it without getting 100%! There’s no need to go back and get or do anything more.

Game Goods

Flow: The beginning is crazy frustrating without the necessary items and tools to traverse the map. However, it flows well, and soon, money is easy to come by and everything can just be bought. By the mid-end of the game, bridges are a worry of the past and it’s smooth sailing from there. Each room holds onto the revisions you’ve established nicely. Increased stats really help.

Text: If you’re one to pay attention, there’s a lot of read. Each Ank has its own story, problems, and personality. Sadly, I found myself not caring in the least about the text even though someone clearly spent a lot of time fleshing it out, and just button mashed my way through them to get on with the game.

Addicting: Inexplicably addicting. I spent most of the game cussing at it, but I kept wanting to play. Why? I don’t know! I would have given it a 2 out of 5, but I bumped it to 3 because for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get it out of my mind when I wasn’t playing it!

Game Gripes

Random: Ugh. Again with the randomness being a problem with these games! Every herb, every drop, every monster spawn is random! Will you get that flax you so desperately need for the damn bridges that are required in basically every room? Maybe, maybe not!

Frustrating: Oh man. Frustrating is the key word for much of this game. From not being able to find that one single item that’s needed for rope building, to endless back and forth fetch quests, to those 2 GODDAMN rooms (mostly that one stupid room) that look traversable only to find that you actually can’t go through them, but you forget every single time you look at the map, to Mûn’s insanely slow walking speed, to her initially, criminally low stamina bar…this game is just a barrel of laughs. No. It’s full of tears. TEARS. Halfway through the game, I almost quit several times, and kept muttering curse words under my breath as I continued to play because I’m a completionist, dammit.

Lost: Yep. True to its namesake and plot, you’re just lost most of the time. Every room looks the same, every Ank looks the same.

Buggy: I fell off a few ledges when running on the sides. Thankfully the game resets after a while.

Bad Menu/Interface: Switching among tools was clunky even though it should have been straight forward. Sometimes it would switch twice instead of once with one button push. The menu cursor was very laggy. Given how much map reliance there is in the game, there is no dedicated map button. Instead, you have to open the menu and tab then over to the map, which would work and sometimes wouldn’t. Mûn should also have been given a perpetual running feature or at least a toggle.

Art: It’s like several different people created art for this game. The Start menu art is great! Mûn is like she is portrayed in the other games. Unfortunately, the animated scene Mûn, the gameplay Mûn, the status gauge Mûn, and the text character art Mûn are completely different from each other. I, myself, particularly disliked the portrayal you see most often: the text character art. The excessive emotions were honestly off-putting. Both that and the status gauge face make her look like a little girl and not the young woman she’s supposed to be. I found myself skipping through all the text so I wouldn’t have to look at her ugly mug. Why create a character and then change it 2 games in?

Repetitive/Boring: When it comes down to it, the biggest barrier for this game is the game at its core: fetch quests. That’s all there is to it. The entire game is about fetch quests. I’m all for side quests, but dang, all the backtracking and trying to remember the best paths…To be fair, I should have known better because all 3 games by CHIBIG so far have been fetch quest games. The story is super flimsy. You only hear of the main baddie towards the end, and he doesn’t really seem all that bad given the other Anks just sit on their butts and tell Mûn what to do.

In Conclusion

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this game to the average gamer. It’s way too repetitive, and the main plot is as thin as cheap toilet paper. The only people I’d recommend it to are those who have played the other 2 games and are ensconced in the lore. With that said, the peculiar addictiveness of the game influenced me to finish it all the way despite several attempts to just quit. There’s just something about it… You know what I find interesting is that Summer in Mara came out first in 2020, and yet, of the three games, it is the most solid and most fun one of them all. It runs the smoothest and is much more intriguing. I was appalled to see that Ankora Lost Days came out in 2022. I would have bet money on it going Deiland then Ankora then Summer in Mara. I hope that CHIBIG’s next games (their website shows 3 new games coming out this year) are better because these last two have been rather disappointing in my opinion.

Game Review – Deiland: Pocket Planet (Switch)

written 7/06/2022

Deiland: Pocket Planet, released April 15, 2021, for Switch by developer CHIBIG, is an adventure/simulation/RPG remade from Deiland which released for PS4 and Steam in 2018, which was also a remake from the original Deiland: Tiny Planet which was released for iOS and Android in 2016. Pocket Planet is a farming adventure on planet Deiland where the protagonist, Arco, is the sole inhabitant. The young boy must care for the minor planet through farming, crafting, building, fishing, mining, and protect its heart crystal from monsters and those who seek to use the power for themselves.

Rating: 2.8 out of 5

Price: Paid $8.16 out of MSRP $19.99

Recommended: No

One Word Description: Boring

  • Pros: Throwback to Summer in Mara (if you played that first), good initial/basic gameplay, smooth beginning advancement
  • Cons: Time, random events, RNG mining/drops, waiting, lack of clarity, boring, fishing mechanics, fighting mechanics, minor glitches, punishing hunger meter, lack of pause feature

Game Review

The beginning of the game shows a young boy drifting down to a small planet. All he has initially is a tent and you get to run around a little to see that the planet is a sphere that rotates (kind of like Mario Galaxy) as you move. This made my initially worried that I might get motion sickness because I’m really bad about that, but I found that the more I planted trees, the less I noticed the movement. Immediately, a space traveler appears, introducing herself as Mun from the interstellar troopers. I was excited because having played Summer in Mara first, I anticipated seeing characters I recognized. She gives you recipes and quests to start you off. The beginning smoothly pushes you into the building/farming aspect. I was busy planting trees as I saw fit, their placement limited by water supply which required materials. Building new constructs unlocks further recipes. Mining is heavily random in what is mined. You could get rocks, or gold/silver ore, or crystals, or in the winter, ice. New characters/merchants arrive, and you have 30 seconds to decide where to land the spaceship before they give up and go away. Then, when they land, they only stay for about 60 seconds.

After the initial excitement of placing trees, building, upgrading tools, etc, came the frustration that would plague the rest of the game: random chance and time.

Everything is random, which isn’t initially bad until it is.

  • The fishing mechanics are just muddy and plain obnoxious and especially in the beginning I kept wasting the precious bait from hitting the wrong buttons which are completely random.
  • The arrival of visiting characters doesn’t seem to follow any particular order unless it’s to satisfy a dialogue quest. Given that the quests and gathering of items specific to each character/merchant are dependent upon their visits, this gives a sense of helplessness to the player. There are only 2 characters able to be called to the planet on demand and even then, they won’t come if certain variables are not in line such as storms, or another character is there, or sometimes I have no clue why they won’t come.
  • The mining mechanics are just terrible. Completely random rate of drops which is super frustrating if you need a particular mineral. There is a mining cave in the game where Arco can mine for crystals and then uncover something in the back of the cave. To do so, you are allowed 4 mines before the cart is full and now you have to wait for Goliath to randomly come so that it can be emptied, and you can further mine. (*spoiler* it’s the crystal heart and adds nothing to the game and has no purpose)
  • Meteorites or items will randomly fall on the planet regardless of what you’re doing. You could be fishing where it strangely changes the view, or even sleeping. If it hits your plants, they will burn
  • Enemies randomly spawn. The number ranges from 1-3 and what appears is random, too. Their drop rates can also be random depending on the enemy. For instance, you need insect wings for a quest, but the bees can drop either honey or wings.

Time’s flow was an issue for me. It is unclear how the game tells time because there’s no clock showing, just the sky will change colors sort of. Each season lasts for 7 days with winter being the worst because very few things grow and it’s just boring to wait it out. Sleeping only advances time somewhat and even standing still didn’t seem to advance time much, either. Other times, time appears to move too quickly, and I’ve lost the opportunity to plant a particular crop that is necessary for a quest, or that character/merchant has already left the planet. Towards the end of the game, there’s nothing left to do except wait for time to advance and it became unbelievably boring. Also, time never stopped. There was no pause feature at all. I’d have to hit the Switch’s Home button to pause.

The story advances via the main quest line through Mun. Similar to Summer in Mara the game is heavily quest dependent. Each completed quest will unlock new items to buy from the merchants. It was really nice to see Brram from Summer in Mara and see his story when he’s clearly older (even at one point trying to woo females on his planet). Not only was his music nice, but he had the fish bait and food necessary to satisfy the hunger meter. Eventually, the story allows movement to Ankora which was nice because finally, some other place than the tiny little Deiland. Finally, the end boss battle shows up and the game is over unless the player wishes to completely finish out the side quests.

The RPG element – the level up system – seems completely useless with somewhat appreciable upgrades to stamina, strength, intelligence, and agility. However, the illustrations are eye-pleasing.

That brings me to the fighting mechanics. Well, it’s primitive, and many times physical attacks would miss the enemy altogether if Arco was juuuust turned the wrong direction. There seemed to be a best weapon to use against each enemy, but I ended up either just whacking them to death or using magic. Fire magic would burn all of my plants or chickens, the lightning didn’t seem to work well on the monsters I tried, the ice spell seemed useless because it encased the enemy in ice but then made them impossible to hit. The frog spell was probably the funniest one, but I received that too late in the game to really take advantage of it. Healing was hard because the healing potions are set all the way at the bottom of the item list and since pausing is not an option, I was killed a few times trying to use a healing potion. The game is by no means, hard, though. Healing was only necessary for the last boss and the demon monster that dropped horns. Speaking of the last boss, that battle was plain obnoxious. There was literally no way to get out unscathed and you had to direct Mun to fire otherwise she wouldn’t.

The lack of clarity was frustrating. I turned to the internet a LOT in this game. How does the mine cart get emptied? How to get sheep’s wool? Where is the plantmutate seed? How does one get dandelions? Who the hell is Bom and why do I keep having food stolen? How to get chicken for Goliath (OMG you have to BURN the wild chickens????)? There’s just too much that’s not obvious or explained. I can’t imagine trying to play this game before the internet made it easy to look things up.

Overall – I, unfortunately, do not recommend it. If you played Summer in Mara it could go either way, but I’d still likely tell you to skip it. The game does flesh out Mun and Brram a bit, and does mention the pirate races and Ereti, so if that’s what you’re looking for, go for it, but definitely don’t pay full price. Ultimately, its flaws outweigh the simplistic charm of the game (namely, time progression and random chance) and it’s almost like the developers wanted to make a game that has a little bit of everything. I understand that it’s 6 years old and was originally a mobile game. I mean, it certainly plays like a mobile game hoping to push microtransactions. Regardless, I felt like I wasted my life playing this (took me 2 full days) game that left the taste of BOOOOORING (I even texted that I was bored out of my mind to my brother while waiting for the rest of the characters to visit so I could 100% the side quests) in my mouth, which is not how I feel about Summer in Mara, and don’t wish that on someone else.

Glitches

Thankfully, there weren’t too many glitches in this game, but here are 2 that I found, both late in the game.

When trying to land in Ankora

Attempting to put a tracker on Goliath’s ship. Mun, who isn’t there at all would appear. Later, when she was on the planet and tried to talk to her, the dialogue that Goliath would have spoken pops up instead.