Japan's My Summer Vacation series is now in English, thanks to Crayon Shin-chan

The release of a charming adventure game Shin chan: Me and the professor on summer vacation on Nintendo Switch, this week may not seem like a momentous occasion in the annals of gaming – low-budget licensed titles rarely are. But like the recent western debuts of live alive, Kowloon High School Chronicleor Moon, Shin-chano‘s new release fills an important void in video game history.

Shin chan: Me and the professor on summer vacation is the first full game in the My Summer Vacation series to be released outside of Japan, where it is known as Boku no Natsuyasumi. The cult hit series about a 9-year-old running through the Japanese countryside to make friends and catch insects has never been released in English, and the series has been inactive since its fourth entry on PSP came out in 2009. shin chan isn’t nicknamed My Summer Vacation, but shares the same developer, director, setting, plot, gameplay loop, fishing minigame, hand-drawn backgrounds, and shaky time progression mechanic of the series. This is My summer vacation 5 in all but name and with a Shin-chan coat of paint.

The Summer Vacation games aren’t just some made-in-Japan obscurity; they were some of the most moving examples of the turn of the late ’90s into everyday life in Japanese game development. worldwide, Shenmue, Animal Crossingand harvest moon are the more famous examples of this trend in console gaming, but in Japan, the Summer Vacation series stood next to them. With the release of the spiritual sequel to Shin-chan, we get a better sense of that creative moment.

Image: Millennium Kitchen/Sony Computer Entertainment

Image: Millennium Kitchen/Sony Computer Entertainment

Image: Millennium Kitchen/Sony Computer Entertainment

Image: Millennium Kitchen/Sony Computer Entertainment

Millennium Kitchen boss Kaz Ayabe based the Summer Vacation series on his own childhood romp in the countryside, the same source of inspiration that prompted Yasuhiro Wada. harvest moon, and, most famously, Satoshi Tajiri to create Pokémon. The plot of every summer vacation is the same: A boy named Boku (“I” in Japanese) visits his family in the boonies, and he fills the long days swimming, hiking, and chatting with the locals amid quaint, dusty buildings. and picturesque rolling fields.

Ayabe goes to great lengths to capture the geography of rural Japan. “When I start making a game, I start drawing a map,” Ayabe said in an interview with Scroll. Each city in a Summer Vacation game consists of non-scrolling screens, like a LucasArts-era adventure game, stitched together to form walking paths. Time only moves in game when Boku moves from one screen to another, and since time is limited, this traversal gives a risk-reward dynamic unique to the series.

Boku has 31 days to live his life to the fullest before he has to return home, which means collecting all the bugs, fish, trading cards, and other junk that kids love before time runs out. The game does not impose any progress on the player; In theory, Boku could sit inside all month if he wanted to. If the game does force you to do things, it acts like a parent: You can’t skip morning exercises, you must attend both breakfast and dinner, and you can’t stay up too long or your uncle will come for you. Basically, the goal is to relive the ideal 1970s Japanese childhood, playing without responsibilities in the warm embrace of a loving family, cool friends and untouched nature.

Image: Millennium Kitchen / Neos

Ayabe has mentioned his love for influential filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu in the past, and there’s something Ozu-esque that permeates the entire series. First, Boku’s family and friends are closely watched and not quite cuddly, especially in the more adult-oriented first game. In that first title, Boku visits his aunt’s home in the mountainous prefecture of Yamanashi, just outside of Tokyo. The tone of the game is warm, but there is darkness at the edges: your younger cousin Shirabe acts cold to you, you occupy the room of your aunt’s dead son, and you hear rumors of a Wolf Spirit wanders through the forest. In a truly moving conclusion reminiscent of My neighbor TotoroShirabe runs away from home the day before Boku leaves, and you reunite after a long search in a field of sunflowers.

Ozu was touted for his “pillow photos,” periods when his camera broke away from the plot and settled on a landscape just to admire it. My Summer Vacation has different backgrounds like that sunflower field which has no gameplay related purpose but allows the player to slow down and enjoy the view. While Boku itself and all other characters are 3D models, the rest of the game consists of pre-rendered, hand-painted 2D backgrounds brimming with atmosphere, made for you to admire in its own right.

After that first foray on the original Playstation, the series would move to different scenic locations with each game: the tropical Izu Peninsula in My summer vacation 2the wide open plains of Hokkaido in 3and the Setonai Sea Islands in 4. The gameplay would remain the same, give or take a few minigames, although each release would expand the scope with more characters, more locations, or more collectibles. In Japan, the series would sell more than a million copies.

Attack of the Friday Monsters! A story in Tokyo

Image: Millennium Kitchen/Level 5

Since the release of that fourth game, the series has been defunct. While Ayabe got some acclaim from his Nintendo 3DS game Attack of the Friday Monsters! A story in Tokyothose gameplay elements from the Summer vacation series with a fantastic tokusatsu-inspired plot, a three-hour short game wasn’t enough to bring the series back to prominence.

Shin chan: Me and the professor on summer vacation could turn things around. The game sees Shinnosuke “Shin” Nohara, the star of the Colored Pencil Shin-Chano manga and anime, vacationing at his mother’s friend’s house in a rural region of Kyushu Island, filling his days hunting butterflies, growing vegetables, and fishing. The charms of the Summer vacation series – the aimless wandering, the evocative backgrounds, the personal characters – have been preserved in this ersatz sequel.

Other aspects have changed, perhaps to court a wider audience. There’s a central plot now, involving a mad scientist and time travel jokes, though you can still ignore it if you want. And to add a touch of magical realism, the time-travelling hairdresser summons dinosaurs to roam the village, following in the footsteps of Attack of the Friday Monsters‘s design philosophy of giant monsters that are really cool.

There is less emphasis on naturalism, but Shin-chano is remarkably accurate for its cartoon and manga source material. Unlike the serious Boku, Shinnosuke is a smart ass, and the game has all the usual jokes of Shin spewing punny dialogue or awkward flirting with older women. Appropriately, there’s a special button that allows Shin to swing his behind at the camera.

Image: Millennium Kitchen / Neos

Demonstrating his trademark concern for aesthetics, Millennium Kitchen has traded the Studio Ghibli-esque style of his previous work for the flat, cel-shaded look of the Shin-chano animation. It’s remarkably accurate: the developers have even made sure that Shin’s signature cheek bulge is always pointed to the left, regardless of whether it’s seen from the front or the back, just like in the source material. At its core, though, this is still a familiar game where you try to romp like an unsupervised child in the wilderness.

Since Sony, which released the series in Japan, has shown little interest in further promoting the property, and there are currently no active fan translations of the games, Shin chan: Me and the professor on summer vacation is the best, maybe only chance on the horizon for English speaking players to get My Summer Vacation experience.

Shin chan: Me and the professor on summer vacation is now available on Nintendo Switch and coming to Play station 4 and Windows pc via Steam.