I beat Chibi-Robo for the Gamecube. It was a cute little game about helping people out and collecting 'Happy Points'. It's kind of strange how obsessed the developers were with this concept. There used to be a developer called Love-de-Lic that made a game called Moon: Remix RPG Adventure which was a cute little game about helping people out and collecting 'Love'. Then Love-de-Lic went belly up and the staff went on to create 3 companies: Skip, Vanpool, and Punchline each of whom went on to make a spiritual successor to Moon with Chibi-Robo (also Giftpia), Endonesia, and Chulip respectively.
The gameplay revolves around a tiny little robot cleaning up after the biggest family of slobs you can imagine. Muddy footprints on the rug, trash and crumbs everywhere, every single day. I cleaned like mad for a long time. I think I cleaned around 350 stains, but eventually I gave up. A day lasts 15 min at most and that just isn't enough time to clean the house, and the mess respawns the next day anyway so there isn't actually any point except earning Happy Points, and the best thing about those is that they are completely pointless. Collecting Happy Points let's you rank up the Chibi-Robo leaderboard granting you extra batteries and prestige, but rank #1 is granted automatically by the plot no matter how many points you have, robbing the accomplishment of any meaning.
It's a good thing that collecting happy points isn't all there is to the game, the main reward is actually discovering all the little character interactions and progressing each character through their plot line, which was pretty fun. The problem here was that I got stuck pretty hard on a handful of these because I lacked one costume. It was near the end of the game and I had been everywhere and done nearly everything. I had collected every item in the house and was missing two costume slots. I figured I needed one scary costume to progress the princess plotline, but there was no hint anywhere for how to get this and eventually I had to look it up. So when you run out of batteries you end up back at the chibi-house all covered in bandages, which is its own costume. I only ran out of batteries once, and it's a good thing I did or I would have been even more confused. Once you have this costume you receive a tip that you can use it to return instantly to the chibi-house, which is something I never wanted to do, so I didn't. What they don't tell you is that you actually return to the chibi-house wearing a ghost costume which is a key item! So annoying!
Another major problem is that everything is extremely slow. Running is slow, cleaning is slow, and for everything that you do or witness you have to watch a painfully slow animation or wait for some text to slowly crawl out informing you somebody just gave you happy points, which you already knew. If you could skip repeated dialogue and cutscenes the game would be half its length.
It's a shame, because with a bit more polish the game could have been really great! Especially if the game wasn't so allergic to letting you have some permanent progress. As it is it's a bit of janky mess that has a ton of charm. I'm not even going to talk about the space scrambler minigame.
