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Drrrriiiillllllllssssss…. *ahem* I’m sorry. What I meant to say was… Driiiiiiiiiiilllllllllllllllssss
Did you ever wish you were a kid again? You know, the whole “adults are boring, there are no kids to play with so I’m going to invent my own adventure” part of being a kid? Well that’s Gurumin and it’s done so well. You play as Parin, a young girl who moved in with her grandfather for the summer. The town her grandfather lives in is a miner’s town so with no kids at all to play with, Parin quickly finds herself bored out of her mind… that is, until she bumps into a monster.
After that, her whole summer changes as she’s introduced to the monster village. “Monster” here may be a bit misleading of a name, considering that they aren’t threatening at all. Most of them like having Purin around and she looks out for them when they get in trouble.
One day, Puko (a green-haired boy monster) gets kidnapped by the “phantoms.” I’m not sure exactly what the difference between monster and phantom is other than a phantom is just an evil, monster. Of course, when I say “evil,” I’m talking 5-year old levels of evil, so they usually just commit acts of humorous mischief (although they did completely destroy monster village). Discovering that the phantoms kidnapped the denizens of monster village, it’s up to Parin to hunt them down and rescue her friends.
Gurumin has so much spunk and flare. Characters have a lot of goofy animations, some enough to even get me to laugh. The music is excellent. Overall, the game is nothing deep or complex, but it has the same sort of spirit as anime for children that came out in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. It just feels like clean childish fun. Unfortunately the mechanics of the game aren’t terribly complicated. Mashing the attack key is usually enough to get through normal enemies. If you want to get fancy you can charge up your drill or do a jump attack, but it’s not really necessary. You’ll break walls and pull switches which is a sadly stale formula that needs to die.
Gurumin is an easy Tier 2. Frankly, I wish I could just watch a TV show of it. I don’t really want to play the game, but I want to see more of the monsters and Parin’s interactions with them. That being said, this is a clear example of a product aimed at young children that doesn’t play them down or play stupid with them. Just because you’re creating a product for children doesn’t mean you have to make it unintelligent–if I had kids, I’d let them play this in a heartbeat. It’s awesome.
