Growing Friends in Ooblets

It feels like I have been waiting the better part of a decade on this game, but in truth it seems I first wrote about it back during E3 of 2017. Ooblets entered early access yesterday and after spending some time being a post apocalyptic delivery man, I decided to hop into a delightful cartoon world before bed time. Ooblets can best be described as what would happen if you got Stardew Valley and a Card Battling game in your Pokemon. You could also potentially relate some of the things to Animal Crossing, but instead of Animals there are delightfully weird human beings taking their place.

The character creation screen is very limited, and is doesn’t involve gender selection. You choose a hair style, a skin tone and the sort of outfit you want to wear. This is going to be a game where I don’t likely get a beard but I am largely okay with this as I think a lot more options open up once you start exploring. I found a barber shop and there are already hair options that were showing up that did not appear during the initial character creation system. Additionally there is a clothing shop that reminds me a lot of the Able Sisters from Animal Crossing. You collect a currency called Gummies and that seems to be what is spent on everything cosmetic. I just don’t really have many of those yet nor do I have any clue how to get a large quantify more so I am rolling with this basic look for now.

The game starts with you arriving by boat from an island to this seaside town. You come from a place where Ooblets did not exist, and you are immediately thrust into a situation where you are given a horrible farm house that you will need to fix up, and a job acting as the assistant of the mayor. Since you arrive without an Ooblet of your own you are presented with the choice between four clubs that dominate the town. This feels very much like a Hogwarts House sort of mechanic, but it truth I just went with the house that had the Ooblet that I wanted to use the most. Your choices are:

  • Frunbuns – They like cute stuff
  • Peaksnubs – They like success and competition
  • Mimpins – The science kids and the socially awkward
  • Mossprouts – Outdoorsy club that loves a good adventure

By the natures I probably should have chosen Mimpins, but I mostly just wanted to start with Shrumbo which is an adorable mushroom ooblet, rather than Sidekey a robot ooblet.

Combat in the game plays out in the form of dance battles, where instead of just choosing abilities and spending power on them, you are given a deck of move cards. You start with 3 beats you can spend per round, which are effectively the equivalent of “mana” in a Magic the Gathering style system. Certain cards can be played that give you addition beats per round that seem to last for the entire battle. There are also cards that give you Hype, which effectively buff all of your dance moves, again seemingly permanent until the end of the current dance. The goal is to hit some number before the other team, in the case of a group battle it seems to be 30, in single dances it seems to be 20.

As your Ooblet levels up it will learn new special move cards that go in your deck. I have no clue if this pushes normal moves out or not, but in my experience the special moves are seemingly the ones you want to be playing whenever given the chance. Sashy for example above only costs 1 beat to play it and gives you 4 points, whereas a similar base move Gavotte Trot shown in the image before that is 2 beats to play for the same 4 points return. Where you run into problems is when you are in a dance and one of your Ooblets is disabled for some reason… you still keep getting their cards which ultimately sit rotting in your hand since you can’t play them without that given Ooblet active.

One simple touch that I like, is that when you do defeat an Ooblet, your character tells them that they did a really good job and you have the option of collecting a seed from them. This seed literally can be planted in your farm to grow your very own new friend from that Ooblet family. This seems to take a few days to grow a new Ooblet, pending you water it every morning when you first get up. There is a day/night cycle like Animal Crossing but the days move much faster so it doesn’t feel anywhere near as real world gated.

The tasks you are given by the Mayor all seem to involve collecting various resources. However the big challenge right now is I don’t exactly know how to make those resources appear. For example I am really close to finishing repairs on my farm house, but I seem to still be missing some cloth… which occasionally appears as a random flower that I can pick. Your actions take energy, which is restored by sleeping for the night or eating food. I feel like right now I only have the most vague of understandings how all of these pieces fit together. There doesn’t appear to be anything similar to the tall grass where you can just randomly encounter Ooblets, but instead they show up in town and want you to give them resources in order to have them dance with you.

It is a super cute game in early access, and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of how it actually works. So for now I am going to close things up as I have only played a few hours. I did however walk to talk about it a bit, because I have a feeling it is going to be right down the alley of several of my readers. I like the whole Pokemon but a card Battler aspect of it, because I never really did like combat in Pokemon that much. I also like the Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley aspect of the game, but I feel like there is a mountain of knowledge I am missing much like when I first tried playing Animal Crossing New Horizon. Right now it is somewhat hard to decide of things are intentionally obtuse at times, or if this is just an artifact of it being early access.