Narita Boy

Developer: Studio Koba

Publisher: Team 17

Release: 2021

Gameplay Stats: 9 hours, 37/37 achievements

I waited too long after finishing this game to write up my thoughts, so I'm just going to give my general thoughts after mulling it over for a bit.

When I finished the game I felt a little negative on it because I was burned on some achievements. For some reason the game has several points-of-no-return for different areas that aren't communicated to you and many of these areas hold parts of or whole achievements. So I played through the game ~1.5 times to get everything done and that left a bad taste in my mouth. It left a bad taste in my mouth because this game is so linear that there really wasn't much fun to be found in replaying sections. On a similar note, I don't think I'll return to this game at any point.

The visuals and soundtrack are excellent but I don't think they do enough to prop up a wordy story. There are kind of two stories unfolding throughout the game, one in the past and one in the present. The present story is pretty lackluster in my opinion, but I thought the past story was pretty interesting. It was way more human at any rate. The text dumps for the present section were lots of nonsense it seemed. It was kind of like bad sci-fi where they over explain in a way that doesn't make sense. Maybe that was the point? To harken back to 80's sci-fi with the 80's aesthetic.

I think overall I would recommend this game based on the aesthetics but I wouldn't really recommend trying for all the achievements and I don't think I'll replay for any reason. I dunno, I'm still of two minds about my experience here.