As many readers of this humble blog already know I both love Mii-centric games and the mascot Kumamon so it was inevitable that I was excited for the release of Bandai Namco’s latest party game Gotouchi Tetsudou (Your Local Railway). Releasing just seven days after another similar game (Fujiko F. Fujio Characters: Daishuugou! SF Dotabata Party, again by Bandai Namco) and just eight months (in Japan) after Nintendo’s own Mario Party: Island Tour, Gotouchi Tetsudou is obviously not without competition.
Where-as Nintendo’s popular party series have an ever-rich array of colourful characters at their disposal, these are somewhat of a two-sided coin delivering both the charm one has come to expect from Nintendo but also entrapped by the boundaries of the respective intellectual properties. Fortunately Gotouchi Tetsudou includes a whopping 120 gotochi characters which are arguably wackier than their Nintendo counterparts and are no less colourful with Melonkuma, Kumamon and Funassyi just three of my (many) faves.
Promoted as a sugoroku board game, Gotouchi Tetsudou is unique in that it amazingly includes NO mini-games. Instead it aims to replicate an actual board game with the aim of your featured Mii (and party of two – four gotochi characters) throw a die to travel around Japan (the board) in order to encounter new gotochi characters (who can then join your party) and discover local products and events. The winner is determined by points scored with the outcome lengths depending on the chosen points tally (chosen by you of-course).
Games are two – four player with the remaining players either being computer controlled, local multiplayer or on the same 3DS. The characters are mostly super cute with your Mii animated similarly to how s/he is in Tomodachi Collection and not as placid as say, in Enjoy Up Games. The closest to mini-games are a Vs. (die-throwing) game and an occasional multiple choice question (all in Japanese). The journey isn’t as simple as perhaps assumed as obstacles (namely Ojapon) trys his best to make it as unpleasant as possible.
Unfortunately Oscar Wilde’s declaration that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” holds true not in form-factor (Ojapon is I guess a dog complete with bucked teeth and comedy magistrates wig) but in the unpleasantness which transcends from the artform into one’s enjoyment of the actual game by repeatedly trying to effectively sabotage your (or with any luck your opponent’s) efforts. It’s the relentlessness of Ojapon rather than any specific action that detracts from the overall fun experience of the board game.
Ojapon alone does not make Gotouchi Tetsudou a bad game (it is not) but the game’s faults are also not singular. The slow pace of most board games -whilst alleviated somewhat due to the absence of mini-games- still rears its ugly head with numerous gameplay interruptions (score recaps, Ojapon scenes etc) where once again developers haven’t followed the ingenuity of the StreetPass games and their ‘R’ button fastforwarding techniques. The lack of stereoscopic 3D is also disconcerting although not in anyway a deal breaker.
What is more of a dealbreaker is the fact that multiplayer enjoyment overrides singleplayer fun and with it -due to the inherent nature of being a board game- the home console version (it simultaneously released on Wii U) by necessity almost eliminates the need for a portable version of what on one-hand is a reasonably fun board game with adorable characters but on the other is like a failed roll of the die in being the inferior version of a game which is already far from what you have come to expect for a full-priced retail game.
3/6
Review by Bri Bri. For more information about Gotouchi Tetsudou: Gotouchi Chara to Nihon Zenkoku no Tabi go to http://gotouchitetsudou.bngames.net/ or http://www.nintendo.co.jp/3ds/software/bltj/index.html
