Bright. Warm. Delicious. Lazy. When it comes to capturing the best collective memories of summer vacation, nobody does it like Japan. There always existed a penchant for slower, simpler, routine-based games in the east, be that farming sims or visual novels, but I think their recent resurgence into public consciousness in the west can be attributed to the new wave of appreciation for PlayStation’s classic Boku no Natsuyasumi, sparked by Tim Rogers’ excellent video. Nowadays, with some delays, we can get games like Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid or this game’s prequel with full English localization.
Compared to Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation – The Endless Seven-Day Journey, Shiro and the Coal Town is a tad less crazy. You still get some magic here and there, but if you did not know, the last game featured dinosaurs. This one does not, opting instead for a mysterious coal town operating on a mineral formed through the sweat of its inhabitants. I think I can speak for everyone here when I say this is a bit of a downgrade. Dinosaurs are really cool.
I will admit that the town is pretty cool too. After a few days of cozy exploration, farming, catching bugs, and fishing in a countryside village in Akita, the five-year-old Shinnosuke will follow his dog Shiro to a hidden tram leading to the titular Coal Town. There he will help Sumi, a young girl who predicts that some disaster is going to hit the town soon, as well as other residents through various means. Some might need a few things delivered, others are trying to spice up the local menu and need some inspiration. Finally, someone may require a champion to rise up the ranks of trolley racers.
This is the one big minigame among the more relaxed everyday grind. Everything you gain will eventually lead to investing into upgrading your trolley: parts scattered randomly around Coal Town and money gathered from serving clients at the diner, assisting in sub-missions, exchanging items at the village’s trading spot, or delivering fireflies to a local flora and fauna enthusiast Kazuko.
The races themselves are quite involved, featuring modifiable parts that benefit different tracks and several interactions between the two participants. You must control your speed so as not to lose points going too fast when hitting a corner, sabotage the other racer with missiles or by ramming into them, and time your speed bursts to clear jumps for points or shortcuts. This can be quite exciting early on, but with a few upgrades, they quickly become cakewalks. Enemies cannot match the tempo of faster trolleys or a barrage of missiles flying their way. For a fun challenge, try to reach all the clear goals with as little as possible.
Overall, the races themselves took me probably less than an hour altogether. The rest of my seventeen hours completing the game was just wandering and wondering. Wandering around the village trying to spot a new bug to catch. Wondering about whether I will catch the one fish that eluded my collection the past few hours. Wandering between two screens to pass the time so that I could get another client at the diner and earn more money. Wondering whether or not the village and the town feel too small to justify the amount of things I have to find.
A surprisingly unpleasant sense of lethargy creeps in when you feel like you have to work towards a goal even though you have been diligently doing everything you could have. These games are technically all about feeling laid-back, but when you feel like you have to start abusing mechanics, the magic goes poof. The game could use one or two more ways of earning pocket change, and fishing could use the same visual indicator as catching bugs, highlighting when a species you do not yet have in your collection is around.
Thinking about how to game the system is the last thing I want to be doing while playing Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town, yet all it takes to reach that point is a few strokes of bad luck. Perhaps not everything should be tied to some questline or reward, or maybe this title in particular has skewed the balance a bit too much. These sort of things were not evepresent but also something I would want to avoid altogether if possible.
At any time you can choose to play with Shin-chan’s dog Shiro—more of these small interactions would do wonders here. While that particular action does not pass the time, more opportunities to feel more involved without feeling like you are gaming the system, perhaps with some passive income on top, would do the trick. Anything to break through the monotony during the lowest points.
Shin-chan is an energetic, silly kid who sprints by doing his butt-alien dance, but the story he finds himself in is rather melancholic. His ingenuity and absent-mindedness sometimes clash with the serious situations he finds himself in: you are playing a sort of comedic relief in a story of grander proportions. It works more often than it does not, especially if you are a fan of Shin-chan. Yet you make things happen, you were asked to save this town. It requires a good, childish heart dedicated to healing, even if Shinnosuke can be a bit of a weird kid at times.
I wanted to always be entranced by this scenario, lost in the beautiful backgrounds and cheerful sounds, yet I was taken aback for days on end, waiting for my pepper to grow or hunting for a specific eel. It often happened even when looking at the character models, as with very limited graphics options they had moments where from up close they looked off compared to the beautiful world around them, be that the calm village or the more erratic shapes of Coal Town.
The ending was a tad underwhelming as well, as instead of a culmination of the player’s efforts and bonds Shin-chan has created during his trip, it decides to provide a moment of fan service for those familiar with the source material. It felt particularly forced and contrived considering the context and other possible solutions for the final problem. It is, of course, important to reward fans of a property who purchase a licensed game, but I believe this was not the way to do it.
It was nevertheless undoubtedly easy to get lost in Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town. Even though some of my sessions ended in a bit of uncertainty about whether or not the next time would feel boring, even with a few missteps I would always find myself determined to complete it the next time I launched it. I wanted to find that last bug or to buy that final trolley, I think I would even without any sort of reward for it. It has so much of the right DNA that all my complaining would disappear in an instant when it hit just right.
Sometimes it was just difficult for it to keep my attention. It was not exactly the follow-up I wanted, in many ways serving more as a sidegrade than an upgrade over the last game. Yet when I said nobody does it like Japan, I meant it. There is magic to be found in this everfresh genre which is slowly but surely becoming more prominent. I would be happy to accept Shin-chan’s vacation adventure games as a freshly formed series, with its ups and its downs. I can see myself becoming a fan and would be open even to returning to Coal Town one day to reevaluate my feelings. As it stands, I like it. Maybe one day I will love it.
Mateusz played Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town on PC with a review code.
