Review - Tamagotchi (Digital pet)

Introduction
The big craze 1997-1998 in the west, but something that most people forgot about really quick, like so much other fads such as “Pogs” “GoGo's Crazy Bones” and “Furbies” to mention a few. So let’s refresh your memories with a very 90s song.

Wasn’t that informative?
Maybe not but at least it gives you idea how big the fad was and that song wasn’t alone. It exist another song (with the same name) from the same time period from the band “Daze”.
Tamagotchi is a handheld virtual pet that could function as a keychain, created by a lady called Aki Maita. She loved pet and wanted to have one that could be with her all the time and started to fiddle with the idea. And the idea was then produced by Bandai in Japan, 1996 and shipped to the west 1997.

The goal of the game is basically to raise and take care of an alien pet, which can grow up differently depending on how you treat it.
And for some inexplicable reason the toy was a big hit when it reached the west and everyone wanted one but Bandai didn’t expect the popularity of the toy, so they demand was higher than the quantity available.
But when Bandai lived up to the demand the fad was already gone, which hurt Bandai financially.

But Bandai soon revived the franchise during the early 2000s and the franchise seems to have a steady sales record nowadays, even if it doesn’t come near the sales during the heydays.
So nowadays there exist many variations on the toy, an anime series, a few movies and various merchandises, but for now I’m going to write about the original, I’m going to talk about some of the modern ones later on.

GamePlay
The game starts with an egg, which hatches five minutes after you have set the time.
And the creature that comes out of the eggshell is very demanding, always in need of your attention. But when it grows older the more independent it becomes and need you overlook less and less (but it refuses to become housebroken).

To interact with the creature you need to choose different options in the menu bar, something that can be kind of bothersome with the limited set of buttons for example one of the most important option, “Status” were you check up how your tama is feeling, is located on the lower screen so it requires several button presses to reach it.

The Tama’s have a good apatite, so you need to feed them regularly. The available goods consist of a healthy meal that fills its stomach and a yummy treat that makes the little Tama happy (but not without side effects, it’s not exactly good for ones weight to chew down upon cakes all day long)

Food accumulates waste, waste that usually ends up on the floor since your little darling can’t be housebroken. And it’s up to you to take care of the waste, since you probably don’t want you’re Tama to live in a pigsty (hopefully).
If you have good timing you can catch the Tamagotchi looking constipated and see it reliving itself on the floor. But that is a very rare sight, so try to cherish that awkward moment as much as you can if you are so lucky to see it.

You can play with it to raise it happiness and burn fat, in Gen.1 you guess in which direction the tama is going to look in. In Gen.2 you get a number and you have to guess of the Tama is thinking on a number lower or higher than the number given
Sometimes the Tama acts up and don’t want to eat your yummy cooking or play some games with you even though it’s clearly is hungry and playful. Then you need to give it a stern look and give it a scolding (you better eat your vegetables young man, or no television for you, go to your room and stay there).

Like most “living” being it can get sick and the Tama don’t like to take its medicine so it can be a little hard to give the tama its treatment.

That is everything, you can try to treat the Tama differently to see the various evolutions but it’s not worth it since the game isn’t very entertaining.

And when we are on the subject on characters, let us smoothly switch the subject to the differences between the releases, since the biggest difference is the characters.

Differences between Gen.1 – Gen.2
The original Tamagotchi exist in multiply variation, in West we got Gen.1 and Gen.2 but the Japanese’s are at little different. Gen.1 is basically the same in Japan, the only difference are the secret characters.


But gen.2 is a lot more confusing in Japan since the released two different series but Im not going to bother to try to explain it, hopefully my chart can give you an idea.


Conclusion
The original Tamagotchi isn’t very fun, since it’s so demanding I could live with the simplistic game play if I only needed to pock at it occasionally but that not the case. I can only recommend it to parents that want to try out the children’s caretaking skills before buying a real life pet.
But I still like the concept, which is why I decided to try one of the later versions, and they are a lot more going for them. And as cheery on the top have a comic