Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is Meanest of All Nintendo Games
Dec. 6
MTV's Multiplayer blog is excellent, and so I'm quite happy to have a chance to link to it. In this one Stephen Totilo takes on the fiendishly money-obsessed Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland.
It's not the first Nintendo spin-off to make a none-too-heroic character obsessed with gaining cold, hard cash. The earlier Wario Land titles were exactly the same in many respects, right down to coins doubling as Wario's health.
In the blog Totilo mentions putting the game down due to being disheartened, but it seems a lot of other gamers got fed up with disappointing gameplay (to the tune of 67% on Metacritic). Granted, Tingle is primarily being reviewed by European mags... and those guys are harsh.
Check out excerpts from a few reviews behind the cut, along with some videos. If you're interested in purchasing a copy of Freshly Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, you can easily order it online from retailers like Amazon UK.
From Eurogamer:
The entire purpose of this quirky little adventure is to make as much filthy lucre as possible, paying as little as possible for the things you need and extracting the maximum amounts for items other people need. It's the most shamelessly capitalist videogame you'll ever play....and strangely compelling for reasons not apparent after countless hours in its company.
From Nintendo World Report:
The tasks you can complete on each island for the rupee haul vary greatly. Most islands have the set format of a dungeon that you have to pay to enter, then a maze-like setting to work through, followed by a boss. However, sometimes you have to solve puzzles or fetch items or simply gather new ingredients. Dungeons are always worth the price of admission, and the bosses yield large numbers of rupees in battles that are never the same in format. This part of the game contains much of the original gameplay, since your quests have so much variety, but there is little to do before a new area reverts to an ingredient source.
From PALGN:
Much of the game is spent haggling and negotiating prices, but the system used by the game is a little too simplistic. Players have to guess the number of rupees that someone will want now thats fair enough, but in negotiation, rupees are not cumulative you have to find the exact amount of rupees that the other character wants. It becomes pretty irritating, and starts to overshadow the better points of the game, often leaving players in a position where they must restart the game because it becomes impossible to progress. There are minor visual cues that indicate that negotiation is going in your favour, but for the most part, players are going to be stumped, and will have to take a brute force approach.
And now for the videos! Note that the third video depicts the final boss fight and an ending, so don't watch it if you don't want to be spoiled.
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