The minigames can be lost based on a heart grading system seen afterward, a success not progressing any sort of plot but providing some goodies for the two non-minigame activities in the collection. A pinata game has you tap the center to try and break it, but every tap makes it swing around wildly and tapping the center becomes harder as it moves around so much. Similarly, a few other games manage their difficulty rather well despite still being pretty achievable and simple for people more familiar with video games. It feels like he understands the game but simply isn’t attentive enough to notice his follies, Picnic Checkers being easy but at least presenting a competent checkers challenge for the game’s intended incredibly young audience. An older gamer will defeat Chococat with ease thanks to him sometimes putting his pieces in danger for no good reason, but he also will go for jumps he can take or try to put you in a tight spot on occasion. This means young players actually need a bit of board awareness to get their jumps in and won’t be frustrated by having the freedom of choice taken away from them, but perhaps more importantly the AI is just competent enough to be a suitable foe for a young player. This version of checkers plays like the regular board game but unlike many digitized versions of the game it won’t force the player to make a jump to take a piece if its available. The earlier mentioned Picnic Checkers is one of the better options in the bunch, the player playing against an AI opponent represented by Chococat. Almost all of the games are similarly shallow, able to be completed quickly and offering very little replay value, but there are a few games in the bunch that aren’t so basic. Not only is there a small selection that will repeat quickly, but the differences are the same each time, making the content recycling even less likely to entertain since it’s not too hard to learn every variation in a short amount of time. This is perhaps best shown by the spot the difference challenge where the four differences between small images are usually pretty easy to spot but replaying it shows that there are surprisingly few images to work with. Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends puts most of its focus on the ten minigames, but that doesn’t mean they are particularly robust. Even with such simple images for most of the art, you can still tell that some assets were stretched beyond their normal resolutions, The Little Twin Stars having some clear pixelation when blown up to a larger image on the top screen even though the game is in full command of depicting them that way so there’s no excuse for why the images weren’t tidied up. It almost makes the presence of the 3D model feel pointless especially since it has a mostly blank stare, but the game in general has a bit of a problem with its visuals. The Sanrio character will usually appear in 3D on the top screen while you play on the bottom screen, some moving around but still being a rather passive observer most of the time. These hosting duties aren’t particularly meaningful though, the game receiving one blanket voice over from a narrator who reads aloud most text on the screen and explains how the minigames work so a particularly young audience can participate even if their reading skills aren’t too expansive yet. Each screen features a few characters from the Sanrio family of merchandising mascots standing around on the touch screen waiting to be tapped, most of them serving as hosts for one of the ten minigames you can play. These can include things like preparing in the kitchen or being in transit to the picnic, but all minigames and screens are available at the start so you can just rush to the picnic if you so choose. Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends contains six screens you can swap through at any time, the idea being these are the different stages for preparing for the picnic. The game does try to slip a few in with a picnic-focused rebranding to make things a little more cohesive, but simply calling checkers Picnic Checkers doesn’t make it an appropriate fit even if a typical picnic blanket has a checkerboard pattern. Rather than actually acting out some playful sunny picnic excursion it is instead a very small collection of minigames that often only loosely connect to the idea of preparing for or participating in a picnic. It’s hard to imagine a game premise more pure and innocent than having a picnic with Hello Kitty, but perhaps unsurprisingly such a concept isn’t exactly what Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends provides.
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