Shin-Chan: Shiro And The Coal Town Review

When I started Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town, I expected it to play out similar to Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation - spending summer days catching bugs and fish. The slice-of-life vibes are back in Shiro and the Coal Town, but on top of that, there are new places to exp♕lore and a lovable cast of characters that take this entry higher than before.

If you aren’t already familiar with Shin chan, this spirited five-year-old is originally from the Japanese manga Crayon Shin-Chan (somewhat annoyingly, the game and manga use dif𝄹ferent spellings). After debuting intꦕo the video game world with Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation, he’s now returned in the sequel Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town.

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The game begins in Unbent Village, where Shin chan, his family, and their dog Shiro are visiting Shin chan’s grandparents. The village is tranquil and picturesque, with rolling hills, rice fields, and lush green forests accentuated by an art style that evokes watercolour paintings. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I mentioned this in my preview, but it’s a step up from how Me and the Summer Vacation looked - the backdrop💮s are incredibly detailed and when the sun sets, the warm golden hue over everything is stunning.

A Slow, Rural Life

You’re quickly introduced to catching 🐓bugs and fishing, growing vegetables, and collecting minerals. Each new one you find is recorded in a book, which one of the locals, Kazuko, works with you to write. While every item has an informative description (and helps you to find future ones), I missed the feature from the first game where Shin chan wrote his own caption and a little bit of his personality shone through. Regardless, there’s a lot more to collect, as well and as a purpose for collecting more thanks to the introduction of side quests, which the first game lacked.

After a few days of learning how to fish and catch bugs in Unbent Village, you’re taken to Coal Town for♍ the firs🍸t time with Shiro, in tow. This is where the game opens up and gives you more to explore.

After going to Coal Tꦚown for the first time, you can cho🍌ose whether to spend the day in Unbent Village, Coal Town, or a mixture of both, but you’re limited to when Shin chan gets sleepy and has to go home for dinner.

Coal Town is visually the complete opposite of Unbent Village - where the village is natural and bright, Coal Town iꦅs industrial and dark - but it has the same strong sen🦋se of community. You’re immediately swept up into helping the local people, with one of the main quests being to help a woman named Yosio bring more customers into her family’s diner.

Getting To Know The Locals

Rather than being simple fetch quests, which they easily could have been, each customer’s meal request reveals something about who they are. Two kids squabbled over whose family recipe was better; an older NPC reminiscesd over a recipe he hadn’t tasted since childhood. It was always a treat to discover why e⛎ach recipe was special to that NPC and learn more about each character.

Alongside that, the more meal recipes you added to the restaurant, the more characters would be dining when you visited later. It gave me the🐭 feeling that I was making a real difference in the town, as it flourished with my help. Who knew a five-year-old could be so good at business?

Later, you unlock the trolley cart racing minigame in Coal Town, which turns out to be much more substantial than it initially seems to be. Narratively, it’s a significant part of the town’s culture, but , more importantly, it’s a lot of fun to play. Instead🎀 of a r𝓀ace, it’s a contest to get the most points, earned by collecting gems throughout the track, while you can also deduct points from your opponent by ramming into them or hitting them with a beam.

To get the highest scores and earn more prizes, you need to plan your 𝕴cart’s set up and use the equipment strategically throughout the course. For a minigameꦬ, it was surprisingly well-developed (and even tied into the main story later), and my only complaint was that there weren’t more courses to complete once I finished them all.

The Narrative Needed Some Fine-Tuning

While the game focuses heavily on day-to-day life, it also has an overarching narrative focused on Coal Tow𝔉n. As you’re trying to improve the town with the help of local inventor Yuri, people wearing hazmat suits pop up across town under the orders of a strange man called Chuck Discardson, who aims to make Coal Town completely free of waste. Unfortunately, he also✃ considers things like trolley cart racing and eating at a restaurant to be wasteful.

The story is slow burn, building up over the many days you spend visiting Coal Town, but it’s the weakest part of the game. Discardson’s motivations for wanting to make the town waste-free are vague and unclear throughout the majority of the game and only truly revealed at its climax. This is likely because his backstory leads into the story’s plot twist, which would be extremely easy to guess if you had this small p🦂iece of information𒊎.

A game like 🎶Shin chan doesn’t need a huge plot twist, so Discardson’s story and attempt to take over Coal Town could have been more impactful if we learnt more about him throughout the game instead of at the very last moment. However, because the game is more about the smaller tasks that add up to something bigger and being part of a community,ඣ this didn’t impact my enjoyment of it too much.

That theme of community is the real highlight. Though Unbent Village and Coal Town are, on paper, completely opposites, the people at the heart of them are what makes the game tick. I was more intrigued to see how Sora and Kazuko would get along on their date than to uncover Discardson’s plans, but✃ I think that’s part of the point.

Just like the first game, Shiro and the Coal 🦂Town highlights the joy in ordinary tasks like collecting bugs and getting to know your neighbours, but with its stronger cast of characters, array of side quests to complete, and well-developed trolley racing minigame, it has a lot more to offer and is a significant improvement on Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation.