It was only a matter of time before we had some version of Nintendogs on the Switch. I have been patiently waiting for something to occupy my time when I don’t have my 3DS on me or busy playing World of Warcraft. I can hear it now….”But Lily, you have a real cat” Yes. But my need for a dog is fulfilled through this game haha.
Since the launch of the Switch, it was only a matter of time for a Nintendogs clone. When I saw the information about it, I was rather excited! I mean, how can this game be bad? I mean….it’s a clone, that’s for sure…
Little Friends, starts off the same way like the 3DS/DS games. You have a choice between a few dogs in a tiny little yard, and when you pick one, and name it you then make them comfortable in the house. The first time I noticed, it doesn’t matter what I name my dog, and even if I scream it’s name it doesn’t her me. The lack of mic is disturbing. One of the features I really miss honestly, besides some of the other lacking mini games.
There’s really only around 4 things you can do with your dog. Take care of it,walk it/train, dress it up, and disc competitions. I’ll go over the different things below. But I do have one question for you guys. You can get different flavors of food (and only food btw )….why would a dog want Fish flavored food? Or…better yet, Chicken Beef Fish flavored food? Personally I have never met a dog that enjoyed fish, but maybe I just met weird dogs. So I don’t know
Now, that you have this dog you have to take care of it. How do you do this? Well there’s quite a few ways you can do this. You can pet them, brush them and oh, and keep their toilet clean (wtf?) So there’s two ways you can do the petting and the brushing. The easiest one for me, want keeping the joycons on the console and using the buttons or the touch screen. There’s a little meter on the bottom of the screen that tells you how clean or happy they are. The other way to do so is use the joycons as motion controllers. I had a little bit of problems with this feature. I think it’s because the Switch doesn’t sit in front of me like the developers were hoping for. No matter how many times I “calibrated” the joy cons I was always off center and never could do anything right. It was frustrating and made it near impossible to keep Beuker clean.
Walking your dog is a strange mini game in itself. It’s an enclosed track where you have a set goal to achieve for a reward. Example, dig up two treasures, mark 5 locations and walk 200km. Pretty simple right? Not too hard. these are something you can easily do with little to no problems. The lack of different areas you can walks is a little boring. It’s one long track, and honestly by your 3rd or 4th walk, you have seen it all. You don’t encounter others, you can’t do anything besides dig at balloons, walk in a giant circle and pee on sign posts. Training your dog is super easy too. Since there’s only one event you can do with your dog, it takes no effort to train their secret catching stat to help you win the competitions. Once more, it was easy to do the motions with the Frisbee when the joy-cons were attached to the actual Switch, rather than me using the motion controls. Again, I’m not entirely sure if it’s just where my Switch is compared to me but calibrating never fixed my problem. Even so, this caused a few losses that I’m not going to get into right now.
So, like I said above, there’s only one event you can par take in and it’s disc throwing. I don’t know if Nintendogs just pampered me or something, but I like having multiple things I can do with my dog. I liked training new tricks with commands. Where as, tricks here and manually learned and you really don’t have any say in them. I mean, come on. Really? The disc throwing stuff is the same thing no matter what level you pick. From Armature to Master, the only thing that’s different is the AI have a high catching skill. You have to use tickets to participate in the events too. I was “lucky” to never have run out of tickets but I can’t imagine how screwed you’d be if you did. It’s strange that you have to pay to enter these games, but you do.
The did add a little bit of a dress up function to this game. They have hats, shirts, scarves, pants, ect ect ect. There’s a lot you can purchase, unlock or use tickets for. You can also spice up your house a little with set pieces of furniture, set layouts and that’s about it. Literally the most exciting thing was dressing up Beuker with nifty glasses and a weird onsies with spots.
Once you hit level 15, you can unlock the friend plaza, and all this place does is gives you the chance to unlock more breeds for you to own. I mean there’s not much more to this place then that.
Being honest. I think this game is lacking compared to Nintendogs, but I will admit to sitting down for several hours at a time to play this game. The one thing I want to note about this game is it is by a different company, but I think they were trying too hard to compare it to Nintendogs,l and ended up lacking in some of the features that made Nintendogs fun. Yes you can take care of a virtual pet, and you can do s few fun things with it. But that’s about it. The animal never feels any sort of real. I think the switch is a great system, but this is a game that deserves a mic.
I’m going to give this game a 4/10. I had fun with the parts that I played, but I didn’t feel fulfilled. I really needed more to keep my interest in the game more than a disc throwing event, and feeding the dog fish flavored food.
