Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid Review (Switch eShop)

In a world where problems and frustrations seem to be everywhere, you might find yourself wanting to get away from it all. Maybe you dream of exploring the Japanese countryside, wandering around sunflower fields, catching some bugs, fishing, all without a single worry. Well, if that’s what you’re looking for, and you don’t mind muddy textures, a bit of a weird translation, and blocky 3D models, then this is the game for you.

Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Boy takes place in Japan right around the turn of the millennium. August 1999, to be exact. You play as 10-year-old Satoru, who is traveling with his circus-owning parents, and since you’re just a kid, you don’t perform and instead have all the free time in the world for the 31 days the circus is in town. Each day follows a roughly similar structure. You wake up, eat breakfast, do morning exercises, and then you’re free to do whatever you want until 5pm, when dinner starts, and then you also have some nighttime hours before you enter dreamland.

However, the most fun time is during the day, when you can climb mountains, help the locals, take the bus to a nearby town, become Mr. Bug Catcher or simply do Nothing. Look, while the game has quests—and we’ll get to that in a bit—there’s no obligation to complete any of them. The 31-day countdown will still continue, and the game will end in about 20 hours.

This is a philosophy that creator Kaz Ayabe has had for nearly 25 years, starting in 2000 with ‘My Hero Academia Shouto‘ (My summer vacation) on the PlayStation. Four games have been released in that series, but none have been released in the West—a shame, because the premise of being a kid with no worries in the world, doing exactly what you want in rural Japan, sounds absolutely fantastic. Not all is lost, though, as in 2013, a small spin-off Attack of the Sixth Monster was released in English on the 3DS. And in 2021, we basically got a real My Summer Vacation game, just with a new coat of Shin Chan paint, resulting in Shin Chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation. Which brings us to this game, which while keeping the formula the same tried some new things for the series, some of which worked, some of which didn’t.

The quest structure is pretty efficient. You have Small, Large, and Detective quests, the latter two of which have more interesting rewards (stickers). These act as your stamina and you only start with a few, meaning you’re pretty limited in how far you can run or how high you can climb. The only way to increase this bar is to complete the aforementioned quests.

Major quests might include catching 50 bugs, playing a mini-game with a spirit, or donating items to a museum, while detective quests are all based on what the Trumpet Forest Detective Agency assigns you. It sounds like a prestigious organization, but it’s actually just a small group of three local kids. Small quests, for the most part, reward you with a small amount of money, which you can use to buy items at the ‘Funny’ toy store, bus tickets — the game’s fast travel system — or help the financially struggling circus.

While doing small quests is nice, if you really want to make a lot of money, mining shiny rocks or hunting mushrooms in the nearby forests is probably a better investment of your time, as they can sell for surprisingly high prices. And you’ll need a lot of money on August 16, so foraging isn’t a bad use of your time, trust us.

The translation, while perfectly readable and logical, is a little oddly structured at times. You can definitely feel like this was written in Japanese first, especially when choosing the different prompts for the journal entries. Speaking of which, one of our favorite things about the game is that, throughout the day, you’ll write and draw in your little journal whenever you encounter something noteworthy. For example, this might happen when you encounter one of the 200 bugs in the game, or when something interesting happens, like seeing a full moon over a hill. Each entry is accompanied by a sketch that looks like it was actually drawn by a 10-year-old, and the execution is perfect in our book.

What’s not perfect, however, is the shift from the fixed camera perspective of previous games to a 3D world. While there are some positives in terms of exploration, it’s unfortunately a huge downgrade. One of the things we loved most about Shin Chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation was how creative some of these fixed camera perspectives could be. Not only that, but there were also some gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds, and all of that is unfortunately largely lost in Natsu-Mon. When we say largely, it’s because when you’re indoors, it’s the same old formula—fixed angles and hand-drawn environments—and that’s how we’d like the game to look throughout the entire experience.

It’s a shame, to be honest, because one of the most important elements of these games is the feel and vibe you get when you’re wandering around the lands. A lot of that magic is simply lost when you move from hand-drawn artwork to blocky, muddy textures and 3D models that lack appeal, especially when viewed from a distance. In our opinion, it’s a little better when played handheld, simply because the large blocky models aren’t as clear.

Unfortunately, switching to full 3D mode also has a pretty negative impact on performance. The game runs at 30fps, or at least tries to, as there are a lot of dropped frames. Not necessarily deep drops, but steadily every time you move the camera, and that instability, to us, is simply annoying to the eyes.

Somehow, though, the game’s healthy strengths in theme, friendship, and exploration helped us overlook the unsightly visuals and performance, and the more we played, the less of an issue this became for us. Still, it’s below the standard we’d expect, and it detracts from an otherwise great experience. Fortunately (and not ending on such a low note), the soundtrack and sound design are very well done. The cicadas, the wind in the trees, and the little theme that plays when you explore a new area are all top-notch, and we hope they don’t spoil them in future entries.