GAME CLEAR No. 211 -- Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale

Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (2013, 3DS)

Developer: Millennium Kitchen, Aquria
Publisher: Level-5
Clear Platform: new 3DS XL
Clear Date: 2/13/25

---

Why should I care?
If you need to kill 2 hours without exerting much effort or brainpower, Friday Monsters! ain’t a bad choice.

---

Mr. Clean

For a day of air travel back home from Vermont, I needed a game to pass the time and preferably one I could finish in transit. I busted out my 3DS and picked from the games I purchased before the eShop closed last year. Attack of the Friday Monsters! seemed like just the ticket based on its HLTB-estimated runtime of roughly 3 hours. Before my connecting flight had even taken off, I had knocked this game out, and it had left a big smile on my face.

It’s not uncommon for me to describe a game as “a cute little game,” but this one is certainly one of the cuter and littler ones. It’s an adventure game set in 1971 in which you play as a young boy named Sohta who has just moved to a fictional Tokyo suburb. A TV studio is located in his new town, and every Friday, they film new episodes of their monster shows.

The game serves as a tribute to tokusatsu shows, and you can probably imagine how a child’s imagination combined with the special effects and elaborate monsters of the shows filmed in his town could create some very charming drama. It’s never totally clear which elements of the action are the product of childlike misunderstanding and what’s actually real. Surely those aren’t real monsters and aliens? Right?

As a largely narrative game, I won’t spoil the twists and turns, but I enjoyed the way it all played out and thought it was the perfect length. Tight little story.

Aside from walking around and talking to people, the only other gameplay to speak of is the game’s card game, Monster Cards, which is basically just a series of rock-paper-scissors matches played in parallel. All of Sohta’s classmates are into it, and per their schoolyard rules, the winner of a given round becomes the “boss” of the loser, who must obey their every command. This eventually matters over the course of the game, so you’ll have to at least get good enough at its simple rules to win a couple rounds.

Collecting cards is a matter of picking up “glims” off the ground until you have enough to magically generate a card (???). Okay. This bit is pretty boring and probably my only real criticism of the game. It’s hard to see it as anything but a length-padding mechanic.

It does at least incentivize you to walk all throughout the little town that serves as the game’s setting, which is quite beautifully rendered. With the 3DS’s 3D feature enabled, some of the foreground elements really pop too.

Hack this guy onto your 3DS if you want to pass a couple hours with some intrepid children and some cool monsters.

Cute little game.