What a charming little game. I picked this up on a whim after I saw it was a pokemon snap styled photography game. There just isn't enough of these. And $5 is pretty cheap. A single playthrough takes about 30 minutes, and the story is broken up into several days. There's only a single map (unlike pokemon snap where there's several different areas) and the map itself is quite small (just a single street) so it's easy to see everything in just a minute or two.
The target of your photography, should you choose to follow the objective, are a handful of different harajuku street fashion models. The game is very easy: just line up the person in the shot and take a photo. And later on you need to wait for a pose they'll do after a short period of time. And perhaps take pics with an interesting background (a literal background, not other characters like I had thought). The characters only have a single outfit and one pose, and they move around in the crowd going from point to point. When they stop and become colorful, then you take a pic. Otherwise they just blend into the crowd and don't count.
After each day you can go up to one of the characters and chat with them, learning a bit about who they are, how they feel, etc. You can choose whether to talk to the same person each day, learning more and more about them, or talk to different people and learn more about them. You can only talk to one person each day, and the game lasts 7 days, giving you 7 chances to talk to them. It's impossible to talk to everyone that many times before the game is up, so there's definitely replayability. The days are about 3 minutes in length each, but end sooner if you use up your shots. No dialogue trees or anything like that.
At the end of each day you go into a professor-oak style "select your best photos" area, where you choose three photos you want to "upload" onto social media (fictional) and you get scored on each photo. Very pokemon snap esque. They grade on how much the character takes up in the shot, whether or not there's a background or plain wall, whether they're wearing the right clothes (there's three trending clothing items each day), and whether they posed. Each photo gets "likes" and you get "followers" depending on how well you did. This works as a high score but doesn't seem to change much. Unlike pokemon snap, it's *NOT* on rails. You're free to move around as you please anywhere on the street. But in practice you'll end up stalking the people you wanna take photos of haha.
The game is pretty fun but very short. Not something I'd recommend unless you're really craving more pokemon snap style gameplay, and love stories where it's just learning about the characters. The map is small, story is short, very indie. But I love it all. The characters, the dialogue, the story, the location, the art style, the gameplay. It's a very charming game, even if it's not one that'll have you coming back day after day. It's a nice taste into a genre that honestly should be a lot more common and popular than it actually is.
If you love harajuku street fashion, photography, or pokemon snap, definitely get this game. I know I'll definitely be playing through all of the characters stories.
