Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams

My aunt bought this for me for Christmas, but I had seen it on Amazon and thought it was so cute (I am an adult). I love Hello Kitty and all of the familiar characters are in this game: Pekkle, Chococat, My Melody, My Little Twin Stars. The game is based on a Friendship Point system. You start off with one room in an apartment, and your goal is to buy more rooms and eventually move to the penthouse apartment. You can change the themes of your rooms and Kitty's (little tidbit: Kitty's last name is White) clothes by purchasing them. All items to be purchased are done with Friendship Points, which are earned by helping out your friends.

At the beginning, there are three parts of the city you can access via a train (and later, a bus). There are some buildings/places you can't go into until you achieve certain things, so there are goals set for the player, which helps maintain interest. You can talk to various characters; some will ask you to help them with something, and you earn points. Others just want to play with you (and you earn no points).

I've only played the game for a few hours, and I've played a few of the minigames at least once. The games can be VERY frustrating. Most, if not all of them, require exactitude. For the Tuxedo Sam game (something that mimics the Diner Dash game), in which you help serve customers, you have to stand right in front of a dish or at a certain spot next to a customer in order for the game to register the touch of the stylus. I got really frustrated because I was practically stabbing the screen and customers were leaving the restaurant! The My Melody game was also aggravating for me. For that game, you need to retrieve items for My Melody from around her store. However, not every thing she asks for looks like the items in her store, so I basically brought her things till she told me that something I brought her was what she wanted. The game doesn't necessarily make instructions of the minigames clear. You need to rely on figuring stuff out.

The game play also seems a bit sluggish to me. Kitty moves quickly throughout the cities, but she can move rather slowly when doing tasks (again, the Tuxedo Sam game comes to mind; you move fast to put orders into the ticket but move slowly when you're actually delivering food to the customers). Whenever you take the train/bus from one part of the city to another, there is a cut scene that shows you chugging along. It's cute the first time, but it gets a little long (and tiresome) after a while. You have to take the train to other parts of the city to earn FPs, so you can't avoid them. It would have been nice to have a skip button for these scenes, as they do with other games.

Overall, it's a really cute game for young girls; probably between the ages of 8-11. Here's the breakdown:

PROS
* Supercute! Great for HK fans.
* A lot of minigames
* There is a factor of leveling up (an objective)
* You can save from wherever you are in the game by pressing the Start button. No having to go back to your apartment!
* Great theme of friendship and of helping others, and how by helping others, you reap rewards.

CONS
* Minigames require exactness with where you have to touch or where HK has to stand, which may prove frustrating for young players
* Sluggish game play/slow cut scenes
* A little vagueness with the directions of the game
* Although you can save wherever you are, you do not return to the same place when you restart the game. You will always have to restart from Kitty's apartment.

I would definitely recommend you buy this game if you're a big Sanrio fan or for a young girl, however, I wouldn't necessarily say pay full retail for it. Used or on sale would be absolutely acceptable (and heartily encouraged) for this particular game.

Our girls are having great fun playing this game.It is a great game for girls 4 and above. More game companies than ever are jumping on the girl gamer bandwagon and this is one good game for the 4-12 year olds. this is a Kitty's adventure from Sanrio Town into the Big City, as she makes her way from a standard, low-level apartment up to a top-floor penthouse.It progresses through the game is achieved via a series of mini-games that have her helping friends both old and new. Mini-games include washing cars, making sushi, and assisting in fashion design. After each mini-game, Kitty will receive Friendship Points, which can then be used to not only purchase upgrades to Kitty's appearance in terms of clothing, etc., but also to decorate your apartment with various themed items and to ride the game's public transportation, which moves you from one area of the big city to the next.Progression through the different mini-games also unlocks new items, which can then be used in any way you see fit. For instance, after winning an item from a toy crane machine, you can either keep it for yourself and place it in your apartment, or give it to a bystander who expresses a desire to have it.This game also teachs important lessons as well (which is understandable considering that the game is targeted primarily at the 4-12 year old age bracket). Ideas like "sharing and helping friends is important" and "helping others brings a bigger return than being selfish" show that the game is perfect for youngsters, who will also benefit from certain mini-games which will help heighten their memorization and fine motor skills.All in all, the title offers eight complete mini-games; that is, complete experiences which can be played on their own, but also includes various other, smaller tasks, like helping people you randomly meet on the street by coloring in their notebooks, or by taking pictures of animals on a boat when the captain is too busy to do so. Other smaller tasks include both baseball and fishing missions, as well as a jump roping session.

I got this game yesterday! I wanted this game ever since I saw it on TV a few weeks ago, me and my b/f have been searching stores to find it but surprisingly no one has heard of it. On black friday I found on Amazon as a feature item at a good discount. I totally scooped it up. btw I'm a super big my melody fan.

I spent about 2 hours last night playing it.

The object of playing the game is to get FP (Friendship Points), just think of it as the currency in this game. To get FP you have to talk to all the sanrio characters just hanging around, and they will have various tasks and games for you to do and when you do them right or at all you will get some FP for it.

*note* Most of the games are pretty fun and very cute BUT some of them are hard to play because you have to touch the screen and sometimes it doesn't register correctly - like there is a waiter game you can play and I found it very hard to get orders because I had to move Hello Kitty right next to the costumer a certian way so I can tap on him, that was a bit annoying.

You use FP to buy new cloths and room themes and also to buy your way up to being in a small apartment to the penthouse one.

It's a very simple game, you can probably beat the game (meaning getting enough FP to buy everything and be in the penthouse) in a few hours (especially if you get really good at the high FP payout games).

I still enjoy it a lot and it was totally worth the money I paid for it. If the touch screen thing wasn't so annoying I would give it a prefect score. ^_^