Chibi Robo

The last time I played Chibi-Robo I infiltrated an all-egg army called the Free Rangers, I met a water swilling pirate, some kind of weird duck based fortune teller (or possibly a sheister, the verdict is still out) and met a fat, lazy bird who won’t get out of the way. Because of all these interactions, I’ve concluded that Chibi-Robo! is a game influenced by Twin Peaks and learned the most important lesson from the success of that show; fiction is best when it’s full of cool, weird little guys! All we want to do is hang out with weird little guys that are being true and authentic to themselves and not weird guys for the sake of being weird. Lynch understood this, Kojima basically made a career out of this and I’m wondering who over there on the Chibi-Robo dev team had that same gift. Was it Miyamoto? Or possibly Kensuke Tanabe, who also had worked on Link’s Awakening which famously cites Twin Peaks as a major inspiration.

This game is super weird! And I love it, so far. The platforming challenges are very good, and the level design is amazing. There are lots of little secrets on display, very much the same way you’d be walking around the overworld in Link to the Past and see a heart container on a cliff that you were hours away from being able to grab. The progression is made through “Happy Points” and these are unlocking battery upgrades - the batteries let you explore for longer without needing to find the nearest outlet and plug yourself in. The plugging in mechanic is one of the most charming aspects of the game because with all the futuristic tech on display, the fact that this little 10cm tall robot has autonomy and can damn near store whatever objects infinitely inside of him, he still has to drag around his little power chord and plug it into the wall to charge.

I think I’m about half-way through, maybe a little more or less, I’m almost able to get up to the second floor of the house, my way being blocked by the lack of a ladder to get me there. I’ve built the first moveable ladder, possibly the clunkiest mechanic in the entire game. These machine ladders are styled like Chibi Robo (I’ll talk more about the iconography on display later) and you can push them around wherever you would like to reach NEW heights. Then you plug your little cord into one of the four sides to deploy a ladder that erects itself into the sky at a lumbering pace. Pushing these around is clunky (I often end up picking up my cord instead of grabbing onto the machine) it’s slow to move the ladder up, even slower to make it come back down, but it’s very charming in its approach. They said “how could we over-engineer the idea of a ladder” like it was some kind of shitty desing challenge and by god they nailed it so much that I actually kind of love it. Using the ladder also consumes your own power so it plays right into the health and time structure of the game. It’s incredible.

One last thing of note - my god if the Giga-Robo plotline didn’t turn out to inspire at the very least the Forest King storyline from NieR: Automata than i don’t know NieR from Adam (or Eve).

I haven’t been keeping up with writing about Chibi-Robo but my god have I continued to chip away at it. It’s such a great fucking game it breaks my heart I hadn’t played it sooner. In the game you play as this tiny little robot that is gifted to the the daughter of a young family but in reality Chibi Robo is essentially the new house butler. You have lots of little tasks that you can do (or choose not to do), stories to uncover, secrets to find, things to collect - you need to be a real self starter to get the most out of this game. Imagine it like you have a work-from-home job with no real schedule and what your actual job description is keeps evolving because you find more people at your place of work that need help - this is the Chibi Robo experience.

So far I’ve grown flowers for a mummy, completed the training of a hard-boiled egg drill sargent, dug up a pirate ship from the back yard, reunited two dried out frogs and cleaned up a hell of a lot of crayon, dirt, grime, snot and funky sweat. There are so many small stories at play here it’s actually pretty difficult to keep track of them all. The big one seems to be the Free Rangers, a group of eggs that are sworn enemies of the dog, Tao. One of their soldiers was taken by the dog and I’ve recovered their dog tags, invigorating everyone to keep their training up… that is until a large group of soldiers went AWOL and defected to other areas of the house.

Four of them are now sailing aboard the Pirate’s ship, as I’ve spent some time just today running around recruiting them to be a scallywag. In exchange for hooking them up with personnel, I’ve been granted three treasure maps which I’m not exactly sure what to do with.

I really enjoy the day/night cycle of this game, it helps keep your tasks organized and doesn’t keeps it all from being too overwhelming. Somethings are available at night, people change positions, locales become more or less accessible, and it gives you an edge of time management that you need to be aware of outside of how much battery you have. Currently my day is set at 15 minutes but if you want to move the cycle along you can grab a 5/10 minute timer from the shop and shorten your time.

I remember when I said I thought I was half-way through many many days ago, turns out that was very much a lie and now I have no idea how far along I am. The next time I go back, my main priority is going to be exploring the mom’s room fully. I keep finding new ways to climb and explore in there and I know there are a bunch of nooks and crannies in there I haven’t even set foot on. I did, however, watch a performance of the funkiest flower you’ve ever met and danced with a geriatric dinosaur. Oh one thing I was thinking about, this T-Rex acts old, basically calls up whippersnappers and I think the commentary there is “building blocks are old toys, lego’s are the old way to play”. It’s charming and cute!

Today I did another rain dance with the frogs, dug a dog bone out of the soft ground, reunited a deadbeat flower with his illegitimate children and had tea with Mom. I figured something out, about this game - it’s as must of a Lucas Arts adventure game as anything else and by looking at it through that lens I’ve been enjoying it even more.

There will be times where I’m essentially stuck - not being able to move the story along because I’m not exactly sure what the next beat is. The only difference is in this game you have to do some upgrades and when you are really stuck, there are things to occupy your time, like finding all the Chibi-Doors. This the most platformer thing about the game, there are tons of weird, blinking doors that transport you into some sort of inverted, Chibi Robo hellscape dimension, and they range from easy-to-find to downright invisible and need to be sussed out based on environmental clues. So as I’m running around the house trying to figure out who needs a dog bone or where to get a super nutritious vegetable, I’m able to turn my attention and alleviate my story stagnation fatigue by essentially participating in a collect-a-thon. It’s a pretty brilliant little game-play loop, not that I’m one to get bogged down by that kind of thing.

After a few days of not knowing where to go I finally hit upon a vein of untapped progress. The mom has been locking herself in her room at night and the first time I went in during the day the camera did that classic “zoom in on the important thing” which i promptly ignored. Turns out if you go up there during the day you can flip a switch and open the “peephole” of her door and then cruise in during the evening to get a little one-on-one time with mom.

I know she’s depressed, I know her relationship is on the rocks, I understand that she lives in a house full of insane people… but it’s even worse than I thought. Sneaking in, we caught her pawing at a pile of bills, and she is sure there are receipts missing. Chibi Robo decides to be a narc and heads into the living room and digs an unknown receipt out of the couch cushions - this is a receipt for another Drake Redcrest figurine and my god she loses it. She literally calls out her husband, daughter and dog for being nuts, then screams to the heavens that she demands a divorce! I think the funniest part of all this is we received happiness points for it lol.

After this the dad has moved! He’s no longer a lump on the couch. During the day he’s outside watering the lawn and at night he’s wrapped up in a sleeping bag, snoozing outside of the mom’s bedroom. This was the thing that I’ve been missing to move the story along. Next time I go in I’m hoping I’ll start to mop up some stickers and push the narative along even further. I did unlock the last piece of equipment - Chibi Radar! Which also led me to a confrontation with Mr. Prongs. This was frustrating because I whacked the ground with my shovel and he popped out of the ground, but the camera angle completely obscured whomever Mr. Prongs is.