hello kitty island adventure: city town dlc review
Previous HKIA related entries: HKIA Guide & Wheatflour Wonderland DLC review
I've been playing the new City Town DLC every day since release now, and I absolutely love it. :) The following will contain mild spoilers, in the sense that I will talk about what new gameplay mechanics, shops and items you gain access to, but no spoilers about the DLC's actual story.
First off: They seem to have really learned from the Wheatflour Wonderland flop. The city is interesting to explore, has an amazing aesthetic, a banger soundtrack, and the characters actually show up there. Wheatflour Wonderland felt monotonous to look at and was very empty; the characters showed up there for some quests, but that's it. In City Town, they have their own spots where they always hang out, and their own little areas, shops and responsibilities. The city feels lively, and Usahana has friends that can move in, as opposed to Cogimyun, who only has her little brother, and lots of empty rooms. The DLCs also interact a little!
By completing more and more quests, you slowly gain access to:
- A cafe, which you can run and take orders in, with more and more recipes unlocked as time goes on; you can also visually customize it (wallpaper, decorations, seating etc.)!
- A record shop where you can buy records, which is great for getting the ones you are still missing, without having to walk around each day collecting them and hoping the missing one spawns.
- A plushie shop where you can buy and customize plushies.
- A boutique that lets you create new, custom color palettes from flowers. It's a super interesting way to let you pick different colors without just offering sliders and pickers, and lets you combine different flowers in different ways to create new hues and depth. You can make your character even more black than the blackest pre-existing palette allows, for example, if you combine 3 black flowers.
- New flower field and orchard with new foods you can use for cooking and baking.
- New puzzle rooms, and new Gudetamas, with new Gudetama rewards.
- An arcade with even more minigames and prizes - you'll love this if you love Moppu's game. Prizes are City Town "merch" and different character figurines and plushies :)
- A clothing store with new clothes and a way to save outfits in outfit slots, so you can just switch between them and keep them.
- The new character, Usahana, has interesting abilities: Her Imaginary Chef ability gives her a chance of creating 2 additional food items while cooking at any of the Cooking Stations. In the Reimagine Ability, while she is accompanying you, she can influence either flowers, mini games, or an inventory item. On flower plots, an empty plot next to at least one active flower can be enhanced to guarantee a spawn at the next daily reset and improve breeding chances (so this is good for the people who wanna transfer rare patterns and colors onto flowers!), with the effect lasting until the plant is dug up. For mini games, interacting with a prize board allows a single re-roll that biases at least one reward toward higher rarity (though this does not apply to Wheatflour Wonderland or games without prize boards). Alternatively, you can reimagine one item, transforming it into another item based on its tags, with a chance to obtain rare or event items. This ability uses a so-called "pity system" that guarantees a top-tier result over time, resetting after the highest rarity is obtained, followed by a 7-day cooldown and a further 7–14 days to rebuild. That means after about 20 days of not using it, you should most likely be able to get a really rare outcome.
Wheatflour Wonderland was a disappointment story-wise; it wasn't very interesting, felt repetitive at times, and the pacing was off. An end-reward was hyped up, just for it being a sad sack of flour. City Town does so much better: There are tons and tons of story quests, different ways to advance forward (leveling Usahana, running the cafe, other means), new twists and turns you don't see coming, and nothing feels repetitive. There is a real mystery to discover that is puzzling and always sort of out of reach, and I can't wait until I finally find out what it is (I am not fully done at the writing of this, but I'll update once I do), because I genuinely have no idea about how the story will go forward, everything seems like a surprise :)
In Wheatflour Wonderland, it was very annoying to collect the Wheathearts; you kept coming across them in the wild, not yet having the means to resolve them all the time, picking away at them as you go. In the end, people kept missing 1-3 and they had to use guides to check on like 100+ locations to find remaining ones. City Town learned from this: Unfinished collectibles are their own quest category now and get put there when you approach it and can’t immediately resolve it. It shows you what you need, and the guiding light will lead you to it if you track the quest.
Performance is also great; no FPS drops, freezing, or anything like that. Everything is smooth.
Three things I dislike:
- Sometimes, your quest tells you to talk to a character, and they were right there in City Town standing at their usual spot, but then they quickly walk to a mailbox and teleport to Friendship Island, so you gotta travel there, talk to them, and then the quest leads you back to City Town. Just let me talk to them... in City Town?
- The Jumping Minigame's jump delay is too much. I get it's likely trying to emulate the janky controls of old arcade machines, but it's frustrating.
- I don't wanna spoil this because it was a great surprise, so let me vague this as much as possible... there is something you have to climb up to, to give resources to something. And climbing up that structure is very, very annoying. You easily fall off the little platforms, or the climbing gets started too easily, so you feel stuck on some ladder-esque thing, jump to get free, and fall back down. It needs an easier way to get up, or a mailbox up top.
Nothing else to complain about so far!
For me, it's soooo worth it price. It's so polished, with so many cute details and creative ideas, great story and cool things to have as a player. I was getting a little bored with the main game and did not go to WW at all anymore (I forget it exists, and there is nothing worth going there after the story ends), so this DLC came at the right time.
By the way, I hit over 230 hours lately, have all the Steam Achievements, almost all ingame achievements, a good collection progress and was finally able to craft the Golden Crown (crafted from 100 golden sticks, where one golden stick needs 99 normal sticks, meaning you need almost 10k sticks) 8)
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