Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends (3DS)
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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.
Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends puts most of its focus on the ten minigames, but that doesn’t mean they are particularly robust. 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. 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. 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.
The earlier mentioned Picnic Checkers is one of the better options in the bunch, the player playing against an AI opponent represented by Chococat. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Similarly, a few other games manage their difficulty rather well despite still being pretty achievable and simple for people more familiar with video games. 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. 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 careless player could conceivably lose the pinata game if they don’t time their taps well or let it get too out of control, and similarly the poorly named Hidden Object game that is actually about picking out which of three shuffled cups contains a ball actually gets to a fairly high speed before it wraps up. Some games would definitely benefit from a better implemented time pressure though such as the dish washing minigame, the premise certainly solid in that you need to use the stylus to wipe away grime that completely covers some kitchenware and the game is surprisingly picky about you getting every dot of it off. As it is, the challenge in it is mostly finding the last speck of basically imperceptible grime to wipe away off a utensil, this not helped by the water constantly spraying down on it to cover up some of the visible area, but that last dot can mean you almost run out of time for cleaning. If it was more a matter of cleaning as many dishes as you can it could be more interesting, but it’s often a quick scrub followed by trying to rub the whole object until the last dot of dirt registers as wiped away with the hope that final dot isn’t so stubborn you run out of time.
Only one minigame in the whole batch stands out as outright bad at least, many of them too easy for their own good but quick to play and move on from at least. My Melody and Kuromi are a pair of bunnies who host the most poorly implemented idea in the batch, the player needing to draw a path for My Melody to sneak past Kuromi as she patrols a very small stretch of land. The lead up to where Kuromi moves back and forth isn’t a straight line and so at first it seems like the challenge is to time My Melody’s travel so she slips by while Kuromi isn’t looking her way, but Kuromi’s sprite actually doesn’t change the direction her face is looking even though she can spot you with the back of her head sometimes. Her view seems to be based on if she’s moving up or down rather than where she’s actually looking and she can spot you even if you’re not directly on the part of the path she’s crossing over and over. There are some learning pains to this simple game and it would likely be frustrating for kids to have to learn that the visuals are essentially lying to them, but since no minigame is mandatory even when it comes to unlockables you can ignore it and instead do simpler and easy games like finding cupcakes “hidden” around a park in something close to what is usually called a hidden object game. Luckily, even the slide puzzle is mostly solved by the time you play it so it won’t prove to be a vexing frustration unless you deliberately shuffle it up more, although having it nearly done also makes it hardly something you can invest much time in even though it also has a very small set of variations like the spot the difference puzzles.
A berry sorting game with such a slow pace it’s hard to lose and one where Hello Kitty needs your help finding specific items on her shelves wrap up our ten minigames, each of them playable in multiplayer although it this mostly manifests as just one player playing and then the other takes their turn with no direct competition. Two more modes do exist in Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends though. One is the dress up game where the clothing items unlocked for succeeding at the minigames can be placed on Hello Kitty, but only on the specific screen dedicated to dressing her up. She won’t appear wearing this when hosting other minigames like the shelf search nor will her 3D model be altered to show them, these purely for the purposes of creating one outfit to look at on its dedicated screen. There’s a fairly wide range of outfit styles at least so it might have some legs in terms of dressing up for the sake of it, but room decorating is a bit more robust. Featuring its own wide range of unlockables as well, these take the form of decals you can plaster over the screens where character stand around waiting for you to pick minigames. You unfortunately can’t place them on the Sanrio characters, but it’s still possible to make it look like they’re holding cotton candy or give the backdrop a livelier look with some flowers or party favors. Oddly enough though, the helpful voice over lady present to make this game accessible to even extremely young players won’t help you here even though it has some of the most complex language in its description and strictest rules to how to participate in it. “Decal” isn’t part of a preschooler’s expected vocabulary, but the way you place them is a bit limited. You can place multiple instances of a decal on a scene, but you need to select it each time from the menu to place a single instance down rather than just tapping everywhere you want that object to appear. You have a hard limit of twelve decals per screen as well, removal actually requiring you to tap the object and then click a remove button. It’s not difficult for an older player to understand, but the target audience suddenly being asked to understand this less than smooth decorating system is an unusual oversight.
THE VERDICT: A fair bit of Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends’s small selection of ten minigames are shallow or overly simplistic, but despite its slim pickings it is not without a few that stand out. Picnic Checkers provides a serviceable opponent for young players, the pinata game has an effective mechanic at its heart, and the cup shuffle actually reaches a decent speed before it ends. Unfortunately minigames with more potential like spot the difference puzzles are easy on top of lacking in content, the game with My Melody and Kuromi explains itself poorly, and some minigames are so easy and basic they take seconds to complete without putting up a fight. Some ideas here could be negligible parts of a broader experience, but when in such limited company and with disconnected features like the Hello Kitty dress-up it feels like this game can’t even compete with going on a picnic in real life.
And so, I give Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends for Nintendo 3DS…
A BAD rating. It is understandable that Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends didn’t want to pack itself with too much content considering the famously fickle attention spans of its very young target audience, but you can retain players above preschool age with some fairly safe changes to the formula. Some form of difficulty option could do a lot to give some of its minigames more life. If Chococat had a few different levels of intelligence he could be a fine digital opponent for checkers, if the cupcakes hidden in the park could actually be hidden on harder difficulties it could be fun to find them, and if it was actually a little difficult to grab the dropping berries in the game hosted by The Little Twin Stars than this game might have a bit more life to it. If the developer is worried about kids enabling it by mistake they can obfuscate activating it in some way, perhaps in not explaining it with the voice since they already forgot to voice the Decorate mode’s controls and occasionally omit small details from minigame descriptions as well. Not being forced to play minigames like the slide puzzle or Kuromi’s small maze is a smart decision at least and if you do want more unlockables you can either quickly replay easy minigames constantly or only engage with the ones you like, but nothing present really has the depth required to hook you on its own merits. Ones that could be more interesting are just too basic in the forms they are presented here, but like many games for children, the development team likely thought they could get away with very little since the game only needs to get in the door rather than impress its target audience.
The odd thing about a game like Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends is that for a very young player to play it, they have to own a 3DS. This likely means the parent expects their child to have some level of competency with the system since it’s not as simple as touch screen devices like phones and tablets, but much of the game seems to be designed around the idea that extremely young players without much gaming competency might be playing. Some areas like the cup shuffle at least show they believe the kids can handle a little difficulty, but overall it’s an experience that has little faith in the player and little content to offer you for choosing to pick it up. If the minigames at least had more variations in how they unfold it could be easier to believe a good amount of thought went into making this game, but the different difficulty levels across the minigames is likely just a byproduct of the creators trying to think of ten possible minigame ideas that are easy to make and easy to play. It’s not an incompetent set on offer, but it is a fairly safe batch of activities that are not too hard to play but still too basic to hold the interest of most 3DS owners.