Giraffe and Annika (Switch)
Giraffe and Annika is a very cute game, and considering that seems to be the main goal it’s shooting for, you can at least say it succeeds in that department. The character designs, animations, and story scenes all really seem built to charm you into finding its fantasy world and its adorable characters appealing, but it can seem at times like developer Atelier Mimina was too focused on the cuteness to develop some of the vital components Giraffe and Annika would need to succeed as a video game.
Giraffe and Annika, despite the title, does not feature a single giraffe, Giraffe instead being a blue-haired cat boy who assists the main character Annika as she explores the island of Spica. Appearing on the fantasy island with no memories, Annika’s search for a way home involves her uncovering her abilities as a special type of cat girl known as a Felycan and using them to gather star fragments. Along the way she’ll encounter characters like an artistic cockatiel, a family of a bunnies, and a witch who aims to halt her progress. The witch Lily is an especially lively and quirky character who spices up your encounters with her due to her odd insistence on reinventing herself to try and match her appeal to the current environment. Your main quest in Giraffe and Annika is a bit of a basic adventure about going to some newly introduced location or speaking with a brand new character to find the next dungeon or area you need to visit, but near the end of the game the plot does begin to reveal a greater depth that enhances what could have otherwise been a fairly bland and straightforward journey.
A lot of the plot before the game starts to get serious does satisfy the game’s goal of presenting plenty of cute scenarios for Annika to find herself in. Already the young heroine has a mix of cherubic youthfulness with simple feline features, but she’s exceptionally expressive when you’re viewing the comic panel cutscenes and her innocence and exuberance leads to many fun reactions to new situations or the willingness to engage with something simply for the sake of doing it. It could almost be compared to a mix of watching your daughter and your pet at play, and the game will take opportunities to set up little activities like playing a bongo drum or poking her smiling head through a photo standee if you want to take a screenshot. The game’s almost optional collectibles, the Meowsterpiece art you find by going off the beaten path, also features illustrations of cats that Annika has pretty delightful reactions to, although finding out late in the game that you actually need to have collected plenty of these Meowsterpieces to progress the plot is just one of the many ways that Giraffe and Annika fails when it comes to actually designing a game around all these cute touches.
Most of your time playing as Annika involves adventuring across the island, and there are many unusual choices made on how this platforming and exploration plays out. Before the first dungeon Annika doesn’t even have the ability to jump, but perhaps even more baffling is how awful the swimming is in the game. Even before you get your swimming upgrade that is meant to help you stay underwater for longer, there are mandatory swimming sections that involve both awful controls and an unusual method of limiting how long you stay under. Annika’s regular health bar is also her oxygen meter, so any damage you have when you dive impacts how long you can swim, and when you do get out of the water, you’ll suddenly have a huge chunk of life missing due to the time you spent submerged. Crystals that radiate healing energy are often put near these swimming sections to top you off, but these crystals are also so abundant that more legitimate threats like the ghost enemies are robbed of what efficacy they could have achieved by the frequent healing opportunities scattered about. This isn’t even the biggest problem with swimming, since getting out of the water can sometimes be a battle with whether or not the game detects that is your goal, Annika sometimes flopping in and out over and over as it refuses to spit you out on land, and at other times it seems to yank her out with such force you might not accommodate for the suddenness and end up back in the drink.
Swimming isn’t an omnipresent problem because the different area themes can pull you away from it for a while. However, once jumping is on the table and later joined by the dash, the platforming seems to come up short as well. Annika’s jump starts off with you fully committed to its speed and trajectory, the power to control your flight path kicking in late in the leap and sometimes after the point it would have even mattered. Sprinting makes it even harder to time this often necessary midair adjustment, and sprint jumps became an annoying feature in the game’s last sections as you need to be fast and precise while Annika resists your wrangling efforts. These fundamentals being so flawed is certainly strange, but it does seem like the game would rather prioritize an animation of Annika stepping into an outhouse for a break than making a proper ladder climbing animation, so what’s deemed important to the developers seems to be all over the place.
When a flawed mechanic isn’t at the heart of the current action, Giraffe and Annika has some passable moments that are easy to mindlessly go along with, healing crystals robbing some of their bite of course but things like shooting obstacles in your path while riding a mine cart or searching an area for a few items is fine enough all the same. Another oddly done system pokes its head into your efforts to continue the plot though, as the island of Spica has a day and night cycle that doesn’t really contribute anything but pointless downtime. There are many points in the game where you can only do something at a certain time. Some characters only show up during night or day and some dungeons are only open at these times as well, and while time is somewhat fast so you can wait out the clock, it feels pretty frivolous. Beds are placed throughout but they only skip ahead to morning or evening, meaning that if something happens at an odd hour as it often does, you just need to stand and wait for time to pass. Some things like the astronomer only letting you in at night make a degree of sense, but so much of it feels arbitrary or like it could have been done some other way. A bunny finding mission didn’t need to take place between set hours when it could just be a timed event whenever you talk to their mother, and the girl who sews scarves and outfits shouldn’t ask you to come back to her in a few days when there’s nothing else worth doing. All you can really chose to do is sleep away the next few days in a bed unless you just so happened to have ignored activities you could have done on your journey up until then. Mostly, the passing of the hours is a hindrance, and its few moments of potential justification aren’t worth the times it forces you to wait around.
Strangely enough, while Annika’s adventure is non-violent and enemies are usually just obstacles, there are a few boss encounters, and they completely break away from the game’s adventure platforming controls. Suddenly, you’re playing a rhythm game against whatever Lily’s cooked up for that particular skirmish. Whether it’s just her fighting with her own magic or something like a giant crab assisting, it’s mostly a battle of being in the right position and pressing your buttons at the right time. Annika will be locked to a two-dimensional plane where she can move to circles on the right and left, the player pressing a button whenever balls launched by the boss hit the circles or holding down the button if it is a stream of energy instead. Bosses will fire dangerous attacks into your area to try and mess you up too, and all things considered, this is a decently designed rhythm minigame that matches inputs to music well. It’s strange that it only crops up five times total on an adventure that is many hours long, so it’s hard to get a feel for it because it’s infrequent compared to the exploration side of things. The genre shift is strange and feels at odds with the rest of the game in concept despite the bosses being competently designed, but you can set your difficult every time these skirmishes start so this break away from the game’s main formula is at least not going to completely halt the progress of a player who is not really given a chance to grow accustomed to the rhythm game action.
THE VERDICT: Focused more on providing cute moments than it is on providing enjoyable gameplay, Giraffe and Annika banks too heavily on its character appeal and allows flaws to creep into its adventure as a result. Sloppy swimming, a strange approach to jumping, and a day and night cycle that mostly just hinders your exploration all harm your ability to appreciate the adorable touches elsewhere. It does have plenty of successes when it’s aiming to be adorable, but the choice to skew attention towards these rather than polished mechanics makes it harder to appreciate what it does well. Even the rhythm game bosses just seem to be thrown in with little care, turning out decent but not really having a specific vision beyond the developer thinking they might be a nifty addition. However, this “throw it in” attitude means the core experience of Giraffe and Annika was weakened, the small touches receiving too much thought while important systems weren’t ironed out properly.
And so, I give Giraffe and Annika for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. The precious protagonist, adorable animations, and heartfelt angle when the story reveals its true colors can make it hard to be justifiably harsh with Giraffe and Annika, but the sloppiness of many of its systems should not be overlooked just because it can make you smile sometimes. The player won’t be smiling as they stand in place and wait for a specific time to finally be reached, the player won’t be amused struggling with the flawed swimming system or unusual jump adjusting, and even if they did look past these problem areas, the rest of the game’s activities are fairly basic at best. The rhythm game portions are perhaps the best moments from a gameplay perspective and they are infrequent and deemphasized, not nearly having the time to grow into their potential no matter what difficulty you choose to play them on.
If the exploration and action were negligible or less of a focus, then Giraffe and Annika might coast by just by being constantly cute, but most of your time will involve running around to explore dungeons, backtracking across the island when you have keys or need Meowsterpieces, or otherwise running up against situations that demand some activity that scrapes up against the gameplay’s core flaws. Had the story been the focus instead of the gameplay it might have gotten away with leaning so heavily on its artistic appeal, but as cute as Annika can be at times, she can’t make up for the fact the bulk of the adventure is unappealing exploration.