“White and Coal Town” review

When I started making Shin-chan: Shiro and Coal Town, I wanted it to be like My Summer Vacation with the Professor – spending the summer catching bugs and fish. The slice-of-life atmosphere is back in White and Coal Town, but best of all, there are new places to explore and a cast of lovable characters to take this entry higher than before.

If you’re not already familiar with Shin-chan, this lively five-year-old originally comes from the Japanese manga Crayon Shin-chan (somewhat annoyingly, the game and manga use different spellings). After first entering the world of video games in Summer Vacation with The Professor and I, he’s now back in the sequel Shin-chan: Shiro and Coal Town.

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The game begins in Unbent Village, where Xiaoxin, his family, and their dog Xiaobai are visiting Xiaoxin’s grandparents. The village is tranquil and picturesque, with rolling hills, rice fields and lush green forests that complement the artistic style of watercolor paintings. I mentioned this in the preview, but this is a step up from the look of Summer Vacation and Me – the backgrounds are so detailed and when the sun sets everything takes on a warm golden hue that’s stunning.

slow country life

You’ll soon learn to catch insects, fish, grow vegetables, and collect minerals. Every new thing you discover is recorded in a book, written alongside you by Kazuko, a local. While each item has an informative description (and helps you find future items), I missed the feature from the first game where Shin-chan wrote the titles himself and showed off a bit of his personality. Regardless, there’s still plenty to collect, and thanks to the introduction of side quests, there’s a purpose to collect more, something the first game lacked.

After spending a few days in Unbent Village learning how to fish and catch bugs, you were taken to Coal Town for the first time with Shiro. This is where the game opens up, giving you more room to explore.

After your first trip to Coal Town, you can choose whether to spend the day in Unbent Village, Coal Town, or both, but only when Xiaoxin is sleepy and must go home for dinner.

Coal Town is visually the polar opposite of Unbent Village—where Village is natural and bright, Coal Town is industrial and dark—but it has an equally strong sense of community. You immediately become passionate about helping locals, and one of your main tasks is to help a woman named Yosio bring more customers to her family’s restaurant.

Get to know the locals

Rather than a simple fetching task, each customer’s meal request reveals who they are. Two children argue over whose family recipe is better; an older NPC recalls a recipe he hasn’t tasted since he was a child. It’s always a treat to discover why each recipe is special to that NPC and learn more about each character.

In addition to this, the more recipes you add to your restaurant, the more characters you will dine with when you visit later. It makes me feel like I’m making a real difference to this town as it thrives with my help. Who knew a five-year-old could be so good at business?

Later, you unlock Coal Town’s trolley racing mini-game, which turns out to be much more than it initially seemed. Narratively speaking, it’s an important part of the town’s culture, but more importantly, it’s fun to play. It’s not a race but a race to get the most points, points are earned by collecting gems on the track, and you can also deduct points by crashing into your opponent or hitting them with a crossbar.

To get the highest score and win more prizes, you’ll need to plan the setup of your shopping cart and use equipment strategically throughout the course. For a mini-game, it’s surprisingly well developed (and even later tied into the main story), and my only complaint is that once I finished all the courses, there were no more courses to complete.

The narrative needs some fine-tuning

While the game focuses primarily on daily life, it also has an overarching narrative centered around Coal Town. As you try to improve the town with the help of local inventor Yuri, people in hazmat suits suddenly appear throughout the town on the orders of a stranger named Chuck Dickason, who has his sights set on It is to make the coal town completely free of waste. Unfortunately, he also thinks things like trolley racing and eating at restaurants are wasteful.

The story is a slow burn, gradually building up over the many days you spend visiting Coal Town, but it’s the weakest part of the game. The Dumpster’s motivations for ridding the town of waste are vague throughout much of the game, only really revealed at the climax. This could be due to his backstory leading to a plot twist, which is easy to guess if you have this little piece of information.

A game like Shin chan doesn’t need a huge plot twist, so Discardson’s story and attempt to take over Coal Town might have been more interesting if we’d learned more about him throughout the game rather than at the very end. Influence. However, since the game is more about smaller tasks that add up to something bigger and become part of a community, this doesn’t affect my enjoyment of it too much.

The community theme is the real highlight. Although Unbent Village and Coal Town are complete opposites on paper, their core characters are the driving force of the game. I’m more interested in seeing how Sora and Kazuko get along on a date than uncovering Dickason’s plan, but I think that’s part of the point.

Like the first game, White & Coal emphasizes the fun of mundane tasks like collecting bugs and getting to know your neighbors, but with a stronger cast of characters, a host of side missions to complete, and a well-designed trolley racing mini-game , which has a lot to offer and is a major step forward for me and my summer professors.