0 to Z of Playstation 1 - Boku no Natsuyasumi

      

 

Boku no Natsuyasumi also known as Boku no Natsuyasumi Summer Holiday 20th Century and Boku no Natsuyasumi Summer Holiday 20th Century when the game was re released as a part of the Playstation Best of range of budget titles.

Boku no Natsuyasumi is a third person adventure game developed by Millennium Kitchen and Atelier Double, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. The game released exclusively in Japan on the 22^nd of June 2000, with the game receiving a PSP release in June of 2006 as well, the game would also spawn three sequels.

The year is 1975 and a nine year old city boy named Boku has been sent by his father to his aunt and uncle’s house in the countryside of Hokkaido for a vacation. Boku is at his Aunt and Uncle’s for the whole of August, it is up to the player what he does each day, with possible activities such as fishing, catching bugs, flying a kite as well as meeting new people, trying new activities will open up new events as the days go by.

Basic controls for Boku no Natsuyasumi, the D-Pad is used to navigate Boku around the game world, with Up on the D-Pad to move him forward, down makes Boku do a swift 180 degree turn and left and right to turn Boku. When on the menu the D-Pad controls the hand cursor.

Boku can run in the game by pressing the X button, this button will also skip movies and text conversions in the game. the action button in the game which is used to talk, use, jump over or to look at specific person or object the Circle button Is used. This button is also used to confirm when selecting something.

 

The Triangle button will bring up your status menu, this appears as a cluttered desktop, here you will have the option of equipping a butterfly net, look over your various collections as well as look as the game map and callender, pressing the picture frame at the bottom right of the screen will exit you from the screen and back to the game. The square button also functions the same as the Triangle button, the L1 shoulder button works the same as the Circle button and the L2 shoulder button works the same as the X button.

The game only allows for saving in one location and in one way, this is done in Boku’s room and by getting Boku to illustrate his day in his picture diary. In Boku’s room there is a desk by his bed go up to this and press the Circle button.

 

There are several activities that Boku can take part in, the first is insect collecting and provides and extensive amount of insects to collect with a total of 60 species for Boku to collect. These insects and beetles can be found on almost every screen of the game world, in order to catch these insects and beetles you must equip the butterfly net on the status menu.

When equipped you press the Circle button to swing the net around and the insects and beetles and storing them in your bag, when you have successfully caught a bug the controller will vibrate slightly. You can view the insects you have caught by accessing the status menu.

If you bug box is full you will have two options, the first is to let the insect you have just caught go, or keep the latest bug and release your most recent captured bug. You can also mount your collected insects, to do this you return to Boku’s room, heading to the desk and pressing the Circle button and picking the first option available.

You can take out any of the specimens you have collected by pressing the Circle button to select one of them, here you have a few options you can do. The first is set the insect free, you can mount them, this is done by moving the insect over to the picture frame, you then select the needle icon and press Circle on the pink liquid.

 

When on the mounting page you can also look at the various bugs you have caught, selecting the magnifying glass icon will allow you to view the specimens in full 3D. Mounting the insects is the only way to record your finds, once an insect has been mounted it will be logged, you can view the log of collected specimens by clicking on the small bundle of blue tags icon at the top left of the screen. Do not use the eraser icon at the bottom of the screen as this will erase everything from your log.

The various insects and beetles that you can collected through the course of the game have a rarity scale ranging from common to rare. With  Agehachou a type of butterfly and Aburazemia type of cicada being the most commonly found bugs. Up to the more rare and hard to find insects such as the Ruumisu shijimi a type of butterfly and the Oo-kuwagata a type of beetle.

In addition to the extensive bug collecting, the player will also be able to do activities such as Beetle Sumo, Fly Fishing and Kite collecting and Kite Flying. The game is divided into days, during the course of the day there will be certain events that Boku must complete during the day, for example Breakfast at 7am in the morning and Dinner at 5pm in the evening, Boku also has a strict bedtime of 10pm.

For the remaining time of the day, which is from 8am until 5pm and 7pm until 10pm Boku is free to explore and engage in the various activities available. Events also happen, with hundreds that Boku can encounter while on his vacation. Much of the events that do occur are random and are initiated when Boku gets a certain item, talks to a certain person or walks to a certain areas.

This being a Japanese only release critic reviews for the game are none existent. So we head over to GameFAQs for their user stats, here we find a the game sitting at an average user rating of an impressive 4.03/5 from a total of 16 user ratings.

Taking a closer look the user ratings we find the game for the most part did not rate below a 3.5/5, with the exception of one user rating that rated the game at a 2/5. We find three users rated the game at the previously mentioned 3.5/5, while another four users rated the game at a 4/5. A large chunk if the users rated the game at an very good 4.5/5, with eight users rating it at this.

Moving on to the games difficulty we again find 13 users rating this category, with a significant swing in favour of the game having just the right difficulty level with 9 users rating the games difficulty. Two users rated the game as having an easy difficulty, while the remaining user rated the game as being tough

Lastly we have the games lifespan, here we find a total of 11 users rating this category, we find one user spent around 8 hours with the game. We find a significant number of users with 7 in total spending around 12 hours with the game, while three more users spent 20 hours with the game. Averaging out this comes to an average lifespan of 13.8 hours.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

 

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, where unsurprisingly this Japanese only releases is not available from Gamedude. The same goes for Retrogames.co.uk. So we will quickly head over to eStarland.com where we don’t find the game listed, we do however find the PSP re release, with a complete copy of the game available for $17.95.

 

Moving on to Amazon.com we find a decent supply of the game listed, with two very good condition used copy available for just $11.01, these two copies however don’t state their completeness. A good condition and complete copy is available for just 11 cents more at $11.12.

Several more copies are available in good or very good condition are available for between $12 and $15, most of these don’t state the completeness of the copy. We do find a good condition copy for $13.70 and a very good condition copy that does state that it is complete for $15.80.

Used copy prices continue to steadily rise from here up to around the $34 mark, with the usual overpriced copy on offer as well for $72. There are also some new copies of the game on offer as well, these new copies are incredibly pricey, if you are in the market for a new copy of the game you will be looking at a minimum spend on Amazon of $229.00, with several copies available at this price point. An additional new copy is available for even more with an asking price of $531.32

  

Written by

P J Gibbon