BlooMoon's review of Attack of the Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale.

Dylan's Games Finished 2025 6. Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (3DS) Play Time: 18 hours (it's 5 hours long but I spent an entire Saturday playing the card minigame because I thought it was required for 100%). Start Date: 2/26/2025 Finish Date: 2/27/2025 When the 3DS eShop was shutting down, I spent a lot of time reading various reviews and lists of what were the best exclusive games that would be disappearing with the service. Every list and recommendation included at least one game by the developer Level-5, who appear to have made a wide variety of small, quality eShop titles. Among them is this short, charming game. Ok, I know how this sounds. But this game feels like a Studio Ghibli movie was shrunk down into the 3DS. The entire thing takes place in one afternoon, in one small Japanese town. You run around as a young boy who just moved in, meeting your neighbors, running errands, exploring the town and playing with the other kids. You are all obsessed with space rangers and monsters and aliens, and you all play a rock-paper-scissors card game against your friends with different monster cards. All of this leads up to the titular attack of the Friday monsters, which seems to be just that: kaiju monsters that appear on the outskirts of town every Friday to fight. Gameplay is simple. Each location being shown from a different, static camera angle gives it an old school vibe, like a point and click. Gameplay is mostly exploring the town, talking to different folks, collecting monster cards, and slowly completing a series of 26 “episodes” or missions that can be tackled out of order. Sometimes it’s unclear when exactly you can progress a particular mission, but it all sort of falls into place, so it's best not to sweat anything and just ride it out. This game’s script does an excellent job of portraying the erratic thought processes of children, bouncing wildly from one thing to another, obfuscating what is reality and what is make believe, teasing the player with uncertainty on if everything fantastical about this game is real or perhaps just imagination. In towing this line, it tells a short, charming story about childhood fun that concludes in just a few short hours. It’s a shame that this is no longer available with the eShop’s closure. However at the same time, I never would have heard about it if the shop wasn’t closing. If you can find the means to obtain and try this game, I would highly recommend it.