Chibi Robo

When it was announced that Nintendo was finally dusting off the old purple console and bringing Gamecube games to the Switch Online Service, there were a handful of games that I was hoping to see ported over and Chibi-Robo! is one of them. It’s been on my list of games that I had wanted to explore for years but never got around to. So today, with an impending rain storm on the horizon, as well as the imminent arrival of some Christmas time off, I’ve decided to give it a real shake!

My first impressions are this game is pretty weird! Way weirder than I would have expected, to be honest. The game opens on a small family that are celebrating the birthday of a young girl who refuses to remove her frog-hood-costume-thing while her parents squabble about everything including money.

The broke dad decides its time to deploy what I can only imagine is the world’s most expensive toy, the Chibi Robo. From there you begin your tiny, housekeeping platforming adventure and honestly, it’s amazing. The hook of the game is to be helpful! You want to get trash thrown away and stains cleaned up. There are lots of weird things happening including a love-lorned dog toy and a hypermasculine Kamen Ryder replica.

This game reminds me of other “on the floor” games of the era, and I wonder how intentional that is. It’s impossible to not want to compare it to Katamari Damacy, Pikmin or even Mr. Mosquito, but from what I’ve seen so far they are all very different but carry some similarities. I’ve played through the first few days and have uncovered a lot of funny little things including a side-scrolling section that is inside the kitchen sink’s drain! This is where I died (for the first time) and it caused me to put it down for the night. I’m excited to continue on and see what other kind of quirks are in store for me.