So i was kinda confused by some early negative reviews on the game saying that progress was too hard or that things were too slow, cause thats just kind of how chao garden always was unless you were specifically using the feeding glitch in SA2 (and even then it was quite the grind)

but after playing it a bit i kinda get it? Like by all means this is a fantastic chao garden game and it can give ya hundreds of hours of entertainment if this is your thing like it is for me, so of course i'd recommend it if you're a diehard chao fan or someone that doesn't care about progress and just wants to play with cute little virtual pet for a while.

However, looking at it from a modern game perspective, oh my god is this game slooooooooooooooooooooow, and thats with some of the more streamlined stuff like being able to just skip days. I really can't blame people for being turned off by that, though at the same time for people that liked the chao garden but are turned off by this: im really not sure what else you'd expect. This is what chao garden is and was. Playing it naturally it'd take dozens of hours to actually acomplish any major feats, though that did even make me question if i really wanted a more accurate chao garden game.

Like, i think the progress being slow in chao garden isn't as much of a problem because the actual story and general sense of progress comes from the game its attached to. This game only progresses if you raise and breed bobo properly, and it is quite a bit harder to do so than in SA2 due to the lack of means to give bobo's stats per day.

Only 2-3 meals per day, and almost all of the main major ways to give bobos stats is through food, which means you really have to pick and choose, even though the game outright demands you have a bobo that is good in a lot of traits to progress. In chao garden, the stamina stat wasnt an issue at all because stamina was always given through food, and the rest of your stats didn't rely on eating to grow. You could get as many or as few stat ups as you wanted in chao garden by simply playing the game and picking stages that gave you what you were looking for.

You have very little agency in Bobo bay, with the most you are given being the daycare stat ups, choosing from a select few items you find in treasure hunting, and picking races to do (though also limited to 3-6 per day). It feels a lot closer to SA1's chao garden if that makes sense, and even then its a unique type of limitations imposed upon the player. The way it's designed makes it great for casual pick up and play without worrying about the Saga story stuff at all, but will probably frustrate you to no end if you want to try and math out the best bobo to do like, *anything* of value in the game.

On that note though, i find it a bit odd to tie the games only few senses of story beats to an immediate brick wall of feats, while ENCOURAGING the player very early on by nudging them with letters to try and follow along with it as if thats something they're going to be able to do within the first 20-60 hours. Your first quest based mission is very straight forward and can be done however you want fairly quickly, but your second requires such a specific set of stat lines across a single bobo that im kind of baffled that thats the *second* step in progress? It's also the first Saga, and I've only managed to beat the first race of it because i happened to get a bobo with varsity swimming and a decent starting stamina stat. Though if i wanted to let that bobo be the one to finish that saga i'd probably have to invest so many days and so much breeding into making it viable in multiple stat lines. There might be a better way to raise a bobo to do these sagas (with the right luck in item spawns and bobo traits) but that bar seems so high that i kind of just don't care to even try. I feel like i'll just at random eventually raise a bobo that happens to be able to beat that saga, but i have no idea when or how. It's just weird to have the games progression be Step 1: win a few races and buy a bench fix! Step 2: spend 100 hours getting just the right bobo for this one competition, no to mention the other hero and dark race equivalents that the game from the getgo establishes as your main goal but that i think is a fair end goal even though you get the letters reminding you to do them when you've been there for like 3 days and have newly started D rank bobos

I think what kinda made me give up on worrying about the Sagas and plot was when i DID get around to having a C grade bobo stated up, i tried to enter them into a saga only to be told they were too high rank to compete. In universe, makes sense! probably not fair to the other bobos. In game context however: HUH??? You want me to raise a bobo and raise it up from it being young and understated aaaaall the way through various evolutions and reincarnations just to beat one competition??? In chao garden you could take any chao into any competition as long as it wasn't a hero or dark specific one (and even then thats why you make a neutral chao your progress chao), one of the most satisfying things in these games is being able to blast through competitions with the pet you raised, why limit that? Is it not hard and time consuming enough to raise a bobo with decent swim and stamina and agility and acceleration ect? Why do that to the player??

Its a game that demands a lot of planning and thinking from you despite not actually letting you control what you get and do very much (from what i understand 12 hours in). It wants you focus on a few chosen bobo to progress, yet you're heavily limited on how much you can actually focus on just one bobo. You'll have a great time if you just do the daily trials and casually raise up bobo, but you wont be allowed to even use them if you raise them TOO WELL for certain competitions. It's got a lot of rules for a game that seems to want you to just relax and just casually pick up the game every now and then, and it seems to fight the player at every chance it gets if they TRY to play within those rules.

...that said i keep picking it up and playing it so hey that's pretty fun! Just don't think about it too hard okay? also i do like some of the weird implications of the treasure hunting semgents and overall state of the world, thats neat. Fun cute secrets to be had.

Love this game! Perfectly captures the essence of the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2. However, it does feel very slow and could benefit from some quality of life and additional gameplay loops.

Right now, everyday gives you one excursion for resources, one stock of resources from the shop and four(6 with the upgrade) races to do during the day and during the night. This does make it feel heavily time gated, as Bobos will only eat a specific number of food each day (ranging from 1-3) so you have to keep progressing days to raise your stats.

Bobos increase stats based on the food they are fed and develop skills depending on the races they perform in until their "potential" is maxed out. At that point, their stat cap will not increase until they have matured and reset to babies. You can breed them to try and get a higher cap on their abilities, but if the parents already have max potential then the offspring will already have max potential. This made it feel like it wasn't worth breeding them until they reset once, unless you want to hunt down a good combo of traits.

I would really appreciate having some additional gameplay loop to do each day. Right now I will do an excursion, buy out the shop and do all the races each day. While this does take a while, it is starting to feel a bit stale as I wait for my Bobos to eventually mature and reset to continue training their stats. Having something along the lines of a farming activity could provide another source of food to collect and focus on for whatever stat you are training.

The sagas are kind of underwhelming after a certain point. They just become stat checks for your Bobos as the competitors are always the same stats it seems. It's also pretty annoying because you almost need an optimized Bobo for each saga, as they tend to feature activities in a range of skills and you need to use the same Bobo for progressing the saga. I had a Bobo that I was training in climb and jump for the Seaweed(?) saga but didn't know I would need swim for the next level. I think you can look ahead so I could've seen this coming, but it took me a while to get a Bobo that had a decent swim stat.

I do really enjoy this game, I just feel like there's room for additional aspects to be added on top of the original inspiration.

While I can appreciate the time and effort that went into this game, as well as the art style and the polish, I just dont agree or like a lot of the gameplay design choices.

A lot of the details or gameplay loops I enjoyed about the old Chao Gardens are changed here. Time doesn't pass organically, you have to manually pass time using a "day-by-day" system rather than a naturally progressing time system. Bobos dont naturally become hungry and eat or have a bar to refill over irl time, it's more of a box you check every in-game day and points that refresh every day cycle. So the system feels very static and formulaic instead of being a more dynamic system.

While most people probably prefer that because it allows them to go at their own pace, I feel like that core time component was what made the old Chao Gardens feel more alive, like they werent just nodes standing around waiting for you to pass to the next day.

The game is probably a good "cozy game" (as much as that genre is kinda over-saturated these days), and it probably scratches the Chao Garden itch enough for most modern gamers to enjoy, it's missing a key gameplay component that I think really made the original stand out as it's own thing rather than a standard collector game.

So it's a good "cozy vibe" and "pet collector" sim, but not a very good PET sim.

Maybe down the line if it gets a good modding scene, it could be molded into a more faithful Chao Garden experience, but for now I'm going to refund and pass on it. Well wishes to the dev(s) and I appreciate the effort, just not for me.