Tamagotchi: Party On! From Bandai-Namco is ostensibly a party game based on the "classic" virtual pet property. Now, I lived through the initial Gotchi assault on the North American continent. I was of the proper age to be a prime target for their machinations. However, I remember very little about the phenomena other than I had avoided it like the plague. You have to understand that this was a time where they still gave high school Home Economics students eggs to carry around and take care of in order to teach them child rearing responsibility. Tamagotchi, these shiny plastic noisemakers seemed to me at the time to be annoying, battery powered upgrades from those eggs.
Party On!, though, is a fancy, new, and oddly unportable take on the franchise that seems bent on teaching kids about politics, especially such universal truths as the fact that winning an election is more about how wicked awesome your campaign headquarters looks, rather than any sort of platform based on issues.
The game proper takes the form a board game. Actually several boards, each representing a different town, with a separate board, which effectively consists of a single space, acting as a hub among them. A "meta board game" if you will.
The game is for four players, no more, no less, so if you play it with fewer then four humans, the game forces you to pick enough CPU players to round things out. It is a board game, after all, and simply wouldn't work well or at all with too few players (like the one player I was able to rally for review purposes). However, when playing 1p as I was, I found that there was very little opportunity for skipping through the CPU's turns a bit more rapidly. That, in my opinion, gives Party On! one strike right out of the gate.
Movement on the boards is driven by rolling a single die, or rather something that appears to be some form of "dice" Tamagotchi that you launch from a lever catapult by smashing the other side with a big squeaky hammer, (which for spoiler's sake, I'll tell you right now, was the most gratifying use of the Wiimote in the whole game) and then choosing in which direction(s) to move the indicated number of spaces. These spaces all indicate a certain type of event will occur when landed upon, like playing a minigame or the ever popular "random event". The minigames come in two flavors, one that you play for popularity and another that you play for Gotchi, which is to say, cash.
The minis played for popularity are the core draw of the whole game. They use the main game graphics and the Wiimote's motion control capabilities. Unfortunately, they are single player only and almost exclusively involve shaking, waving or wiggling the 'mote in a manner that still mostly leaves control of the game up to the computer.
Most of the time I just felt like I was hand-powering a generator that made the game go, as you can get the maximal score (10 flowers, which equates to 100 Popularity points) on some games simply by shaking hard enough, no skill or even reflex used at all. And without the added impetus of trying to out-shake your friends, there's really not much to "play" here. Adding insult to injury is the fact that there aren't very many different games, total, and with so many being quite similar, they mostly just haze together.
The minis played for Gotchi don't even fare that well. They simulate an old school Tamagotchi handheld toy with low res mono color graphics and three buttons (left, right and down on the Wiimote's d-pad in this case, which actually works less well than three discrete buttons). These require a bit more reflexes and coordination as they're basically games where they flash you an image (undersized, as they are literally on the screen of the image of the Tamagotchi device on your screen) and you need to respond to them. Most are rock, paper, scissors style or matching, with very little variety. These are much harder to max out as you can play up to 5 rounds of whatever the game is this time, as long as you keep winning, and you earn 20 Gotchi for each round won. Simpler, uglier, more difficult, and still no multiplayer. Got that?
To start the game, you choose the participating Gotchi and then the number of elections you want to play (didn't think there would only be one, did you?). The default is three, and the game estimates your play time at this point, basically half-an-hour per election. An election occurs every few "days" or turns of game time, at which point the Gotchi with the greatest popularity wins (automatically, no less; forget about the Gotchi's stand on educational reform or any sort of due process). The campaign speech for each election occurs on a particular space in a particular town, so while you are not forced to go to any certain town, its wise to follow the crowd and try to be the first to the Campaign Space.
Now, the Campaign Space is about as far away from the connected end of the town's game board as possible, which is a double edged sword. You want to get there first to garner the large reward of popularity and Gotchi, but if you do, you are all of a sudden in last place in the race back to the hub town to get on the board for the town where the next Campaign Speech will occur.
In a one election game, it is entirely about who gets to the Campaign Space first, as it is impossible to gain enough popularity just off the board to compete. This reduces a single election game to a race ruled by the dice and the odd random event (get scared by a dog: move six spaces to get away), which removes most of what little "game" is present in Party On!
Multi-election, multi-player, is really the only viable way to play Party On! in order to extract any enjoyment. In this form of play, the strategy is to gather as many Gotchi as possible during the first election, purchase upgrades for your Campaign Headquarters which you can install when passing through the nexus town between boards, and then hope the dice allow you to win out to the Campaign Space at least once. The upgrades to your Campaign Headquarters provide multipliers to the popularity you gain from minigames and other events thereafter. All the rest is focusing on maximizing the results of any minigames you find yourself playing and the luck of your "diceagotchi" rolls.
The graphics of Party On! are nothing special. The combination of cell shaded elements, sprites and bitmaps presented here is barely cause to fire up the Wii's GPU. Mainly, I'm sure, this is due to the source material, to which it appears very faithful, consisting mainly of scribbly little two toned critters. While this is the best the license has likely ever looked, I found it vaguely annoying that it wasn't more interesting to look at. The environments are very bland and there doesn't seem to have been any effort channeled into an attempt to catch the eye. Sound wise, Party On! is a mixed bag of irritating little sound blurbs and distracting sound effects. This is a party game, though, and one based on a noisy, distracting franchise, so this was pretty much expected.
I feel that Tamagotchi: Party On! falls short on a number of counts. Tamagotchi seems like it would be a great license for a kids game, and Party On! certain looks like it would be a kids game, but its really not. The game has an odd, adult concept and too many details for kids young enough to enjoy the sights and sounds, but is a little babyish and shallow for kids old enough to be able to master it. It's certainly not a game for adults. Even for diehard party game enthusiasts, I would rate Party On! as a cautious "Rent Only".
