Furu Furu Park Hot

How about this: we pack a bunch of mini-games that take advantage of the Wii motion controls onto an optical disc and sell it! Ever heard of that one before?

There is a right way and a wrong way to do a party game, and Furu Furu Park just doesn’t seem to get it.  While the concept seems harmless enough (albeit not exactly novel these days), the execution is where it all falls apart.  The game features both newly-crafted mini-games based on original concepts and characters, as well as bite-sized adaptations of old-school Taito franchises such as Arkanoid, Bubble Bobble, and Pocky & Rocky, most of which leverage the Wii motion control to some degree.  Sounds safe enough, doesn’t it?  A number of other games have capitalized on this model already on the Wii, and most of them are at least passably entertaining (Mario Party 8, Rayman Raving Rabbids, WarioWare Smooth Moves).  But the biggest problem here is not so much that we’ve got another mini-game collection on our hands (although that certainly doesn’t help); no, the issue is that that Furu Furu Park just isn’t very fun.

Menu Menu Game

Pretty much all there is to (most of) Furu Furu Park is a mini-game selection screen and then the game itself.  Sure, there are a couple of modes for multiplayer where you can structure your sessions in some fashion, but this stuff is absolutely afterthought material.  With few exceptions, here’s how your time with the game is arranged:

1.       Choose mini-game (or choose five mini-games in one of two other “different” game modes).

2.       Play mini-game(s), generally for less than two minutes apiece, and attempt to either tackle challenge or obtain favorable score.

3.       Either end game or choose another (set of) mini-game(s) to play.

And that’s it.  The two other “different” game modes referenced above (one single-player, the other two-player) feature gimmicks that set them apart (in the two-player one you’re rated on your love compatibility based on how close your scores are in each of the games, and in the single-player mode you’re simply ranked based on your score), but other than that, they’re the same.  There is one other mode where you face off against a second player by playing each game in a grid of 16 mini-games, but this is really just a tally of who wins the most games, so it isn’t any different either.  The basic design is completely centered on these mini-games.  So, then, they must be pretty darn good games, right?

Furu != Fun

For those who did not suffer through computer science classes, that != means “does not equal”.

The mini-games might be all that Furu Furu Park has to offer, but if that’s the case, this park needs to close.  Predominantly, the mini-games here are never more than mediocre, often bordering on just plain bad… and even such classics as Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid don’t stand a chance thanks to shoddy implementation and shallow design (it’s the same thing every time you play—no multiple levels or anything of the sort).  Most of them are over very quickly, and outside of going for a high score, there’s generally no reason to play more than a few times (unless you’re really trying to beat those challenges in Free Play mode, most of which aren’t even that tough, by the way).  Because of this, even the most appealing games of the bunch (Camel Maze and Takoyaki among them) don’t survive long.

Worse yet, there’s but a mere fraction of the number of mini-games you will find in the blockbuster collections like Rayman (that’s not to say those are great games, but at least they have some truly amusing and dynamic mini-games to offer).  Furu features a paltry a 24 in all (not including a few which boast wilder variations of themselves meant to boost the difficulty).  This means that, should you spend five minutes on each mini-game here (which is quite a reasonable estimate to be honest, seeing as hardly any of them are replayable by any respectable standards), you’ll have played for around two hours.  And that’s it?

Forget Forget Presentation

If you’re in the market for a game that looks like it was designed twelve years ago for the Nintendo 64, look no further (I don’t mean to mock the game—that’s actually how it looks).  The textures are terribly blurry and, in a word, ugly.  The music is largely forgettable and sometimes annoying, though it does reflect the fast-paced nature of the game.

Beyond that, other problems hamper the presentation as well.  One particularly annoying aspect of the design is that every time you lose, you’re forced to return to the menu and reload the game before retrying again.  Couple that with the fact that the letter grades you’re assigned often seem quite arbitrary and you have a recipe for scaring off even the most dedicated completionists.

Finally, it would be a crime not to mention one other facet of Furu’s presentation that is a little off-putting: the minimalist approach to localization.  While many people stateside are into Japanese culture, there comes a point where things just start to seem too foreign… and Furu Furu Park looks like it came directly out of the Nippon with little more than a quick translation job.  Everything from the music to the subjects of the mini-games is thoroughly Japanese, and maybe to some folks that isn’t a bad thing, but most of us will find it difficult to relate.

Final Furu Thoughts

Maybe you feel I’ve been too hard on Furu Furu Park seeing as it’s only a $20 videogame.  Unfortunately, however, this is an experience so thin and disjointed that I can’t even recommend it as a rental.  If you own a Wii, you have plenty of mini-game collections out there from which to choose—don’t waste your time on the ultra-low-budget Furu.