VideoGame (Survival Kids/first game review) A great start to a series that promptly went downhill
The premise of the first game, Survival Kids, is simple: a boy or girl (you choose) is stranded on an island after their ship crashed, on the kid's 10th birthday. Once on the island, you have to survive, and try to find your way off. By survive, I mean eat food (with randomly generated effects such as causing thirst, quenching thirst, making you less tired, increasing or decreasing life, etc.), drink water, get enough sleep, etc. After you've eaten a particular food for the first time, the game keeps track of its effects for you, so the next time you check out that grass or that berry, it'll say "reduces fatigue", "causes temporary paralysis", etc.
What's so charming about the original game is its presentation and freedom. There are 8 endings that can be obtained doing totally different things like escaping on a raft, lighting a signal fire to get attention from a plane, or even meeting the opposite-sex kid who's also on the island and too ill to care for themself. The in-game graphics are simple (it was made for Gameboy Color), but it shows some nice cutscenes for events such as discovering a marooned ship, finding an abandoned hut, and encountering a storm at sea while on a raft.
Another thing I found charming was that, with the free-form flow to the story, the protagonist still had snippets of dialog based on what kinds of things happen. Being a 10-year-old kid, the dialog is suitably emotional, being all excited, playful, scared or even tragic ("I'm... dying..."). Rather than a linear story you have to play through directly, it almost felt like you were kinda making your own story. You could easily miss many of the scenes, much of the dialog, based on how you play and how you explore. Even with all 8 endings, you could still miss some scenes.
Having enjoyed the first game a lot, I bought the second US-released game, titled Lost in Blue, for the Nintendo DS. And I did not like it much.
You play as a (now 17-year-old) boy, and the teen girl is The Load. She's blind (broken contact lenses) and helpless, and you have to literally hold her hand to take her places.
An even worse offense, however, is slowing down the gameplay. Konami wanted you to physically do many of the island activities yourself. So instead of starting a fire by choosing "merge" "stick" "tree bark" from the menu and creating "kindling" (which can be used infinite times), you instead manually rub two sticks together. You manually cook. Also, the game clock moves much slower as well (the first game ran in an odd system where time only passed when you were moving, and you could make it go by rather quickly). All this slows things down and makes it not fun.
The series continued in this direction, focusing on "island activities" and so on, slowing down the action a lot, making you get hungry and thirsty too quickly, and just making things increasingly tedious. The first game balanced things best, and I wish it had continued this way.
VideoGame (Survival Kids 2 review) A Japan-only sequel that went in the wrong direction
Konami apparently had to come up with something new for the second game to give it a different feel from the original, but I'm not too happy with the direction they chose.
It started off with some genuinely good ideas. Survival Kids 2 starts off with a team of Team Rocket-esque villains encountering two boys - both brothers - and stealing a treasure map that belongs to them. For good measure, both boys are kidnapped aboard the villains' helicopter. One of the brothers yells and demands to be let go, and for his trouble, he is kicked out of the helicopter into the sea. The other boy is taken to an abandoned military base on an island, and locked up in a prison cell. Choices you made during this opening scene determine if you play as the boy who washed up on an island, or the one in the prison cell, which has a huge effect on how the game starts and what you'll be doing for much of the game.
If you start in the prison cell, your job is to find a way out of the prison. If you start on the island, your job eventually becomes to find the prison and rescue your brother.
Here's where things start to go downhill for me.
First off, the game has a silly tone I found rather annoying. You encounter a talking parrot who joins your side. This parrot is cartoonishly useful, fetching objects for you that you can't reach, and imitating the bad guys' voices to confuse them. The parrot, along with the Team Rocket-esque bad guys, is just way too implausible for a series that started out with a more serious and believable tone.
And that tone extends to the dialog, at least in the English fan-made translation. The dialog of the first game made it feel like the poor kids were trapped in this horrifying situation and trying to make the best of it. Here, it sounds more like an upbeat kid adventure.
But forget the story and theme. What about the gameplay?
That's where it really falls apart for me.
This game is basically all about puzzles, not survival and exploration. The whole game is littered with objects that can be picked up, combined with other objects, and are used to solve puzzles. Progress is frequently blocked by puzzle after puzzle. The open exploration of the first game, where puzzles were less frequent and easier to figure out (the fact that fewer objects existed helped as well), is pretty much gone. Instead, it's like I'm playing a top-down version of Shadowgate, except with the constant need to eat, drink and sleep.
It's that change in focus that killed the enjoyment for me. This game does have neat ideas. Each brother having their own separate adventure, which is chosen at the start of the game, is a great idea. And when you rescue the other brother, the two of you travel together rather than forcing you to care for someone who's totally helpless.
But I feel the first game did a better job overall. In an attempt to come up with something different for the sequel, Konami moved too far away from what worked.