Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (3DS)
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale takes place in 1971 in the specific small town of Fuji no Hana on the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan, and yet its tale of childhood naivety and discovery has a certain universality to its nostalgic appeal. You may not be the son of a dry cleaner like Sohta and you might not live on the edge between housing and farmlands like him, and you especially didn’t have giant monsters showing up every Friday evening near your childhood home to fight, but the general mindsets of the children characters in this 3DS download title feel like they line up remarkably well with a realistic depiction of youth, not making the kids too mature and intelligent or too mindlessly precocious.
Naturally, the potential monster attacked proclaimed loudly in the game’s title is its narrative destination despite starting off as the humble tale of Sohta as his family moves to this new area. What makes this promise of a potential kaiju encounter more intriguing though is that it’s rather unclear how authentic this threat may actually be. Early on you learn a television show about giant monster fights is filmed in the area, but you also encounter enormous footprints within city limits. The adults openly acknowledge the upcoming giant monster attack as they idly muse to themselves, but when you speak to them about it can feel like they are feigning interest in a flight of fancy. The mystery of whether these attacks are real ends up a compelling motivator for interacting with the people of the small town, new developments constantly making you think you’ve figured it out only to throw a monkey wrench into that understanding when the next one shows up.
As a child you don’t quite get direct answers on the affair much of the time, but while you hang out with your peers their shared curiosity about it leads to some investigative adventures as you poke at the mysterious things around town. Some have mundane explanations while others aren’t so clear, this build-up of strangeness keeping the game on a fascinating level of uncertainty that thankfully does have some answers down the line that aren’t just so simple that the legwork looking into things feels like it leads to an empty absolute. Childlike wonder at the idea of the fantastical being so close to home intersects well with some of the more mundane aspects of life in a small town, Sohta just as likely to encounter an oddly dressed gentleman claiming to be an alien as he is a young boy who clearly wants to be liked but acts out aggressively because of the very real problem of feeling rejected because of his different temperament.
A good deal of focus is given to the small set of people you meet and speak to periodically through the game’s short story that takes about three hours to experience. Little subplots and running jokes are only given a bit of room in that time frame, but they still make it so you feel the sense of community present outside of your own friend group. The kids you hang out with are convincingly written as well, doing things like playing a game with an odd set of rules and when they’re confronted on its oddity, they immediately conceive of a possible explanation and figure that it’s as good as fact. They think about the things they come across but more within the limited context they have, but they aren’t quite blindly accepting it either. They’re still trusting of what they hear from adults and on television, but they have their moments when an idea spurs them to go exploring to try and discover more. An interesting choice is made in having occasional narration from a future version of another girl who moves to town the same time as Sohta who still embodies the kind of youthful innocence found in the story, her delight at pointing out the events surrounding how she met him giving the game that further nostalgic edge. Perhaps one of the best lines for embodying the game’s mindset on childhood comes from her as well, where she happily proclaims she was declared the sixth cutest girl in their grade, which she asserts is pretty good on more than one occasion, capturing that sense of pride in the small accomplishments that gets lost when the bars rise higher as your perspective broadens with age.
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale is mostly about that narrative and the surrounding mystery about the authenticity of these kaiju attacks, most of your actions being to go around town to talk to the right people or observe the right spaces. The game gives you both mandatory and optional quests it refers to as Episodes, although they can be undertaken at the same time as others so it’s more a reference to the Japanese tokusatsu superhero shows filmed nearby that create some of that uncertainty about the monster situation. Most of these are just about talking to the right people after certain information comes your way but they do help to make that community feel more tight-knit as you revisit familiar faces and relay messages. These are humble in scope but something nice to do along the way to required activities, but the game does sprinkle a bunch of sparkly dots around the environment to scoop up as you walk from location to location. These sparkling little motes are what are known as Glims, and if you collect enough of them, they will form into Monster Cards used for the game’s more interactive card battling sections.
While not so common they can really be said to be the definitive form of play in Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale, every now and then kids will want to play Monster Cards with you, the winner becoming the boss of the other person which mostly just manifest as casting a “curse” on the other kid to make them fall down. Monster Cards has you and your opponent pick five cards from your personal collection to play face down across from each other, the kid who won the most battles between the cards declared the winner. On a basic level, each card has a symbol meant to represent the hand shapes from Rock, Paper, Scissors with the usual rules in which one wins. However, if two have the same symbol, the draw will be settled by a power amount shown on the card, and if you end up getting duplicates of certain cards through Glim collection, you can fuse them together to make that number higher. Later cards will start to have a few unique effects like ones that beat every card but one with a specific symbol or one that tells you the number of symbols the enemy’s five cards have but not where they’re positioned, but if it was merely a matter of luck Monster Cards would be quite a nuisance. Instead though, after the game determines the winner of each match-up without revealing what the cards are yet, it will give you hints on how the match-ups panned out and both players get to swap the positions of two of their cards. While not too complex, these clues give you some information that informs just enough strategy so you can make a swap to change your fortune without being totally reliant on luck. Some rounds will be doomed from the start if your choices just line up that way, but usually you can expect to at least think a bit about your swap and there’s hope the match-ups are now in your favor.
When played in small doses, Monster Cards is an alright way to add something more than talking to people around town. However, if you lose a round in Monster Cards, you are taken out of it, forced to listen to the long “curse” your new boss casts on you, and then after that you can try again. Losing multiple times in a row can lead to this animation becoming old rather than endearing, and while on some levels it makes you feel as bad as Sohta does for being forced to play along with the curse, it can make those moments where luck of the draw pans out poorly a bit irritating. Trying to flesh out the collection will encounter some randomness as the Glim you get for beating someone is somewhat random and it’s not even guaranteed you’ll get one, but the ones littered around town can give you a strong enough deck that you won’t often be stonewalled by someone with stronger cards than you. Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale is undoubtedly more about drinking in the rustic atmosphere of its small town than this card game, that ultimately for the better as any time you spend too long engaging with it begins to make you wish some of the game’s charming commitment to aesthetic would move aside for a simple retry button.
THE VERDICT: Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale sits at an effective set of crossroads, the fantastical beliefs of youth intersecting with a childhood desire to better understand the world around one’s self. The mystery of those monsters that come on Friday is made deeper because it is seen through a child’s eyes where the line between the wondrous and the logical isn’t fully formed, the truth not so easily grasped but not frustratingly out of reach. The cozy Japanese suburb is a comfy place to explore with a cast of characters you enjoy getting to know during your short time with this downloadable title, Glim hunting giving you a simple little side activity along the way to funnel into those occasional Monster Card battles that work in small doses.
And so, I give Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale for Nintendo 3DS…
A GOOD rating. The simplicity of the game’s interactive side may be a weakness to some, but there is a reason I wouldn’t recommend expanding Monster Cards into a more robust card battling activity. Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale clearly cares most about its narrative that is aiming to capture a slice of time while also having a broad applicable nature in how it portrays certain parts of life. As you grow up the line between fiction and fact gradually gets better established, Sohta and his friends existing in that nebulous state where they both have the urge to understand things better but haven’t discounted many of the concepts they’ve heard in stories or seen on T.V. as imaginary yet. The specific town they’re in proves to be a good place for straddling that line in regards to the mysteries it holds, the fact things aren’t so clear cut keeping the player in that same state as the children while the narrator and the interactions Sohta has with others keep cementing that feeling that this story really is about young people rather than something written by adults who have forgotten what it was like to be so young. The mystery is a nice way to keep things from being too indulgent, the game not just trying to evoke a nostalgic sense for days gone by but also giving you something to investigate and a proper story is told through it. Monster Cards cropping up to give you something a bit more substantial to do then walk and talk was likely a wise idea though so you have something to work towards with the mildly satisfying Glim collecting and you’re made to think a bit more tactically for a moment without it being too complex, but it does have the build of a minigame meant to be visited in small doses and it works best that way because of its quick random nature. The kids you play don’t always make the best moves though, looking to add a little immersion to this angle of the game too as the focus is more on transporting you to this very specific type of experience even with the unusual trappings that push this away from being just a slice of life story.
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale is certainly an idealized depiction of childhood despite it writing its young cast fairly convincingly, but viewing things through Sohta’s perspective also gives it a charm that it doesn’t hurt to indulge in for the few hours it lasts. Its title perhaps makes its sound far more electric than this mostly cozy adventure warrants, although that doesn’t mean the game lacks any exciting moments worthy of an exclamation point in the title. While it can find that energy eventually, the setting and social interactions easily construct a space that is comfortable and accommodating to a low pressure story time experience.