As a child of the nineties, it’s been a long time since I thought about Tamagotchi. There was a time though where nothing in the world was more important than these virtual pets, which took over lives and forced many a parent to take up babysitting for a tiny digital poop machine. Although here in the UK they might not be a wild craze anymore, this charming brand continues storming on with new virtual pet products and tie-in games. The latest of these is Tamagotchi Plaza, which also has a Switch 2 Edition at a time where we’re all looking for more to play on the new handheld console.
In Tamagotchi Plaza you play as an unseen character, who you can name as long as you end your name with Tchi. You’re brought from Earth by Prince Tamahiko to Tamagotchi Planet, for one important reason. You’re the only one suitable to serve as the chairperson of the Tamagotchi Fest, and it’s your job to ensure that the city is ready for a massive celebration. You do this by improving various shops and decorating the town square, and all of this means playing a whole bunch of minigames.
Each shop in the Tamagotchi Plaza features its own minigame, which you’ll need to play through multiple times to level up the building. This is pretty much the goal of the game, which would be totally fine if the minigames were all fun to play. This unfortunately is not quite the case though, and it doesn’t take long realise this.
The first minigame I opted to jump into was helping out at the Tailor. This meant creating the outfits that customers asked for, which essentially entailed selecting sleeves and collars from a menu and dragging and dropping the pieces together to match the picture. With a bit of time pressure this could potentially lead to some frantic fun, but instead it was plodding and ultimately a bit dull.
After one session of fashion designing I decided to move onto something new, bike repair. I imagined this would be a wildly different experience, but to my surprise it wasn’t really. Instead of adding fancy sleeves to dresses I was adding fancy saddles to bikes, and it was again a bit of a drag. Making Crepes was a little more involved because of the delicate decoration, but even that felt very similar. Over half of the minigames follow this trend with a twist or two, and I rarely wanted to stick with them for more than ten or fifteen minutes.
There are some highlights in Tamagotchi Plaza though, like the Rap Battle store. I assume we all have one of these on our local high street, where we can go to compete in fierce bar spitting competitions. In gameplay terms this is just a simple rhythm game where you hit buttons as they reach a line, but it’s a nice change of pace regardless. It is also hilarious to watch various colourful Tamagotchi get shocked when you drop a powerful line like “I respect you a lot”.
The main draw for many will be the fact it is a new game that has a Nintendo Switch 2 version, since these are in short supply right now. The biggest change between versions of Tamagotchi Plaza is that on Switch 2 you get a few extra minigames that take advantage of the shiny new hardware. The Shuriken minigame is a just shooting range, where you hold a Joy-Con mouse side up and have to swipe your hand over it to throw a ninja star at a target. This would be really fun if the Joy-Con registered every time you swiped, but because it’s a bit hit and miss the minigame is too. Sushi making is instead a mouse control minigame, where you have to click the shoulder buttons to shape rice. It’s rather similar to the standard minigames to be frank, except your cursor is a mouse.
I’m sure that younger gamers could find some enjoyment in Tamagotchi Plaza, but I just wish it had a few less issues. Issues like the fact you aren’t given any tutorials on how to play the minigames, and are just sort of left to guess what to do to succeed. This isn’t a problem with most of the games, but when I was asked to create a Peachy Cream Tea and given a platter of sandwiches to arrange I had no idea what I needed to do for a three star ranking. It makes every time you try a new game needlessly frustrating, and is such a bizarre oversight. There’s also a minigame that requires you to know the specific names of different Tamagotchi, so I guess only hardcore ‘Gotchi heads need apply for a job at that particular store.
Tamagotchi Plaza has a few bright spots, but ultimately I found too much of it to be frustrating and even boring. Younger Tamagotchi fans might be entertained by some of its silliness (hell I was too) but it’s hard to recommend to most people even with the bonus Switch 2 extras.