This is a long overdue review on a game due to life reasons that I put on the backburner so to speak and restarted recently and I will say Gurumin is a silly charming game that goes in a somewhat interesting direction with it's story and has gameplay that I feel suffers for a frankly silly reason in my book that you can almost entirely ignore and just have fun with instead, which I wish I did XD but it's another great Falcom game with simple yet fun mechanics to it dood.
Okay full review time! So Gurumin follows the adventures of Parin! A young missy who travelled to a miners town to live with her Grandpa, here she discovers some new friends only she can she and she begins on a unique adventure in a unique land not quite her own dood!
The game plays rather basically, you have an attack, (X/A) a dodge (Square/X) and a jump...and that's it! well kiiind of, later on in the game you unlock some skills but those don't really use any more buttons to perform, oh you can also charge attack too by holding the attack button and letting the meter fill, very important dood!
You have two special mechanics in this game too, first off is the critical mechanic, this isn't random and I believe tied to the music! Great coming from Falcom who are very much great with their music thanks to their in house team, you'll see stars on your charge meter, time it to the centre and you get a critical! This fills up a star icon up to 100, 99 if you're full, full of what ya ask!? Full of weapon meter! This fills up to 3 levels (and kind of a max level too) these determine what skills you can use, how much damage you do and finally at max gives you a projectile to shoot out which is very LoZ right there but handy is handy dood!
Dungeons are interesting and lively no less, you go through defeating monsters, breaking jars, finding treasures and solving puzzles but this is where the game can feel kind of eh if you play it a certain way too, what way you ask? For rank! Ya see to get rank you need to kill all enemies, find all jars (trash cans and piggy banks too) and beat the level decently fast too without getting a game over to get S ranks, this gets you a gold medal which let's you buy unique accessories and depending on the difficulty outfits too, which are awesome granted but slows down the gameplay aspect, especially with how well hidden some of them are, I often found myself getting bored playing a level over and over to find a well hidden enemy or the like but that said I believe you can grind them on an easy level anyway and it's all only really in aid of an achievement which seems broken anyway? I'd suggest looking up a possible fix if you're an achievement hunter and if not just to enjoy the game for what it is dood.
So I mentioned accessories and this is where it gets interesting because they not only function as a slight change of wardrobe but also have effects to them, all different ones, ranging from damage protection, increased attack power and even immunity to certain aspects of dungeons, they are fun but it does make you wish you could trade/toggle the effects between them to have a custom look, you also enhance them up to level 5 for even more effects! How? By collecting junk, lot's and lot's of it, too much honestly! But I guess level 5 isn't all that necessary really outside of a super boss and possibly hard mode dood.
All in all it's a very simple game as you can probably tell, it was a PSP game I believe originally after all but between it's charm and humour it's something I feel anyone can get into, heck even young ones, that said it does have some let downs, it's NG+ is severely lacking in the plus aspect, only adding sub quests, taking all you accessories away, (thank goodness not your outfits though) all your items and coins away too, leaving you to buy everything all over again, a kind of exception being the gold coin accessories which you can buy 2 of for just 1 coin, then the other costs 28 suddenly...yeah that's real mean devs lol, there's the achievement issue I mentioned, you do however keep your money, junk and the levels of your accessories remain, (praise Adios for large mercies there) plus ya can also buy all skills right away, I mean it's all expensive so save money for round two if you plan on it dood.
And that's it! For a PSP game it was a great time, if the NG+ was a little better I'd even consider playing it a second time, hopefully if you pick it up you enjoy it as much as I did, thank you for reading dood! ^-^7
