Reviewed on:
Nintendo DSAlso available for:
XXX
The Good:
Incredibly charming, with fun touch-screen use, a fully customizable park to play with and plenty to doThe Bad:
Characters are needlessly long-winded. Raising flowers is the main task in the game and can become repetitive.The Verdict:
Though occasionally repetitive, Chibi Robo: Park Patrol has bags of charm and hours of fun to offer players of all ages
Released late in the Gamecube's life, the original Chibi-Robo was typical of the system's best: brilliantly realized, wonderfully playable, critically acclaimed and almost completely ignored by consumers. While this made Chibi-Robo arguably the finest swan-song the system could have received, it's entirely unfortunate if the title's underperformance with consumers led to the tragic decision to release the Nintendo DS follow-up, Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol, as a Wal-Mart exclusive in the U.S.
Though the title is free of such sales restrictions north of the border, finding it anywhere is a challenge, with seemingly tiny quantities of the game on offer in stores. As a result, it's utterly imperative that you snap this title up if you see it; though occasionally repetitive, Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol has bags of charm and hours of fun to offer players of all ages.
Flowers Power
In the original title, the titular tinpot worked to unite a divided family by taking care of their chores, but in Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol, Chibi-Robo has a much bigger task at hand: saving the world from global warming by taking care of a local park. Chibi-Robo does this by raising flowers, improving the park's features and defeating the polluting enemies the Smoglings, led by mysterious antagonist Seargant Smogglor.
Beginning to clean up the park is easy enough: the player simply (if unusually) helps Chibi-Robo to dance next to white flowers by spinning records on the DS touch-screen to coax them into releasing seeds. Chibi-Robo can then water the resulting buds to grow more flowers until the patch of land he's currently working on turns a lush green and he can move to the next. However, particularly in the early stages, the player has to keep a close eye on Chibi-Robo's battery, making sure to return to the Chibi-House to recharge regularly until larger battery sizes are unlocked.
All of Chibi-Robo's "Chibi-Gear" is controlled with the touch-screen, and while in some cases the gimmick is slightly detrimental (pedalling using the touch-screen to ride the Chibi-Bike is quickly tiring!) it adds a nice level of interactivity to the proceedings.
Toy Town
Chibi-Robo can also head into the town the park is situated in, to sell flowers to the local flower shop and meet the local toys. The toys include such idiosyncratic characters as Francois, a French marionette dreaming of "liberté" and Fizz and Pop, a pair of violently disagreeing soda mascots. After performing trivial tasks for the toys they join Chibi's quest and are able to aid Chibi in the most exciting aspects of park improvement: landscaping and feature addition.
Though each of the improvements costs a lot of watts (Chibi-Robo's energy and currency) it's more than worth it, allowing every player to create their own unique park full of greenery and features such as trampolines and swings. It's a shame that Nintendo didn't choose to include any online functionality to allow Nintendo DS owners to visit each other's parks.
Green Days
Though "green" themes are becoming ubiquitous, Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol is never forced: Chibi-Robo works to make people happy, and pleasant parks make people happy, giving Chibi-Robo "happiness points" which he can convert into watts. This is not a video-game equivalent of An Inconvenient Truth (though I'm sure one is coming eventually).
If there is one thing that Chibi-Robo shares with An Inconvenient Truth, it's a slight tendency toward long-windedness. A problem with the original title, characters in Chibi-Robo regularly talk at length but rarely say anything. The prime culprit is Chibi-Robo's faithful assistant, Chet, who greets Chibi-Robo each morning. He recounts the entire process of converting happy points, counts the park's flowers, discusses the next shipment of upgrades for Chibi-Robo and then asks the player to save. The routine can't be skipped and is quickly tedious, but mostly bearable.
Similarly repetitive is the mechanic of raising flowers. This takes up the majority of the game's play time, and while the design is cleverly paced to ensure you're always in reach of the next reward for diligent care, the player has ultimately only one resource to care for with no variation. A gorgeous park is its own reward, but caring for only flowers can begin to drag.
Park Life
Despite its repetitive aspects, the title truly is a joy to play from beginning to end. Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol joins its predecessor by being one of its system's best games: brilliantly realized, wonderfully playable and, now, critically acclaimed. Don't let it be ignored by consumers.
