You Eat Strawberry Shortcake To Replenish HP (Just Like Real Life)
Gurumin puts the player in the shoes of Parin, a twelve year old girl who gets bored easily. The story begins with her arrival in a small mining town to live with her grandfather, the incredibly forgetful Mayor of this little town. She didn’t realize until she got there that there are only adults in the town, and so she thinks she’ll be bored for certain. However, after a few minutes of walking around the town meeting folks like Disk, a handyman who will sell or upgrade your gear, and Fan, the young baker, Parin suddenly meets Pino, an invisible person that no adult can see. She explains that she is a monster from a nearby village; very nearby, in fact. She leads you to Monster Village, which is just behind a damaged wall in the town. Once there, you meet Rocko, Puku (her brother), and a couple of other silly looking monsters. They remind me of the Tentacles in Day of the Tentacle, just simple looking blobs with some facial features; they fit the art style of the game nicely.
No sooner than Parin pulls out the legendary drill weapon, a la Sword In the Stone style from the center of Monster Village, do the Phantoms destroy the entire Monster Village. Parin’s new friends are captured and taken to remote areas throughout this mystical world, and it’s up to Parin and her modified miner’s drill to take on the Prince and his minions. You will need the aid of cookies and strawberry shortcake to heal yourself, goggles for reducing water damage, and elemental attachments for your drill to have a chance.
The premise is admittedly pretty goofy, but I’ll be darned if it doesn’t work. Just looking at the somewhat cel-shaded, anime style art, I wasn’t so sure I would enjoy this game, but I was wrong. The mix of platforming and action RPG action is a treat as you set out first to rescue your friends, and then make them feel better so that the Dark Mist hanging over Monster Village lifts. How do you make them feel better? Why by going deep into Phantom controlled territories and finding the Monsters’ furniture, naturally. Yes, at the end of the ten to thirty minute stages you will find everything from a boom box, a couch, a shoebox, and many other miscellaneous comforts that the Monsters need to give them a better state of mind. By improving their spirits, you lift the Dark Mist (which reveals more areas for you to explore and conquer) and it simultaneously continues to motivate the Monsters to rebuild their destroyed little village. Seeing the village go from rubble to slowly back to normal as you play through this adventure is a rewarding sight.
Addictive And Enjoyable
Gurumin has that intangible “come on, just one more level,” hook that keeps coming back time and time again as each level you play opens up yet more. The difficult y in Gurumin seemed just right, not too easy, and certainly not too hard, just right to keep it interesting and rewarding. Furthermore, exploration is a small, but enjoyable part of the adventure. While there aren’t many alternate paths to take, there are coins to collect and dozens and dozens of objects, walls, and enemies to smash in each stage, with an x-out-of-x score presented to you at the end of each level. You can even replay levels later to earn a higher score, which gives you a metal that you can then sell or trade to your grandfather for currency to buy HP items. Along the way Parin also picks up Junk from the Phantoms that she can take to Disk to upgrade her gas mask, helmet, goggles, and other items that you can purchase.
Gurumin has a colorful, simplistic but effective visual flair about it. It looks part cel-shaded, part anime (just look at the eyes of Parin) and it works well. As far as audio, expect poppy instrumental tunes typical of platforming titles like Sonic and Mario; they’re just little tunes that repeat and just bring the experience full circle. The effects in Gurumin are nicely done; I was pleased with the quality of the voice acting especially. Dozens of voiced cutscenes help carry the story, along with a considerable amount of simple text conversations and sign reading.
The controls deserve much praise, too. You can use either the d-pad or the analog nub to move around. Each face button performs a simple function, but to fight you really only need to know Square and X. As your character slowly levels up, you can purchase new special attack moves from Cylinder, a shady miner who walks around town. As you go from Drill Level 1 to 2, for example, two new moves replace the previous moves. I really liked the execution of these moves though; they’re interactive, but at the same time it’s not hard to consistently do these moves time after time. For example, one common attack is pressing Square to do a Guard Dash, then immediately swinging the analog nub in a counter-clockwise circle, then pressing X. The result is a colorful and powerful move that will send many Phantoms to the ground. Holding down X to charge your drill attack is vital for destroying objects (to find coins and create paths) as well as Phantom armor.
With all of this positive talk, it’s certainly proper to bring in some of the (potential?) negatives about Gurumin. For one, and this may be something you can overlook, there are a lot of load screens. These load times don’t tend to be long, but expect to see “Now Loading…” a bit more often than you’d like. Secondly, the gameplay in Gurumin is fairly repetitive, but in the same token it doesn’t get really get old very quickly. I ran into some minor camera problems, especially when pressing Triangle to center up the camera behind Parin and the existing camera shot was too tight to begin with, resulting in some clipping and difficulty seeing, for a few seconds, where I was heading towards.
A Gem
I hate to say it, but Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure is one of those games I would have probably never played had it not been assigned to me for review. And that’s a real shame, too, now that I’ve spent some time with the game and seen just how addictive and fun it is. Sure, it’s kiddy with its casual art, goofy enemies, and bizarre objectives, but it’s a ton of fun and quite frankly everything comes together nicely in this title to make a solid package.