Tamagotchi Plaza - Slop Shop (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 5 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Tamagotchi Plaza
Released: June 27th, 2025
Developer: Hyde Inc.
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Systems: Switch, Switch 2 (both reviewed)
Tamagotchi Plaza is a crowning achievement in the field of taking the fucking piss.
I love virtual pets, even if their track record as toys and games is spotty. Tamagotchi’s the leading example, the most famous of the bunch, and a source of pure nostalgia for many. I have several Tamagotchis, and if I’m perfectly honest… they’re not all that great.
Cheaper toys offering more activities are on the market, such as the quirky Punirunes. It's rather shameful and a little tragic that Tamagotchi has coasted for so long off the back of brand appeal, and Tamagotchi Plaza broadcasts just how little of a shit the franchise gives about itself. I simply refuse to believe you can make a game like this if you care about what you're making and who it's being made for.
Tamagotchi deserves better than this. Kids deserve better than this.
Plaza infuriates me in a particular way - it’s a game that thinks it can get away with being crap just because it’s for younger players. I’ve always hated that attitude, because children deserve good games as much as anyone. Aiming for kids isn’t an excuse for not trying, especially when the result of your lazy attitude is so inexcusable.
Tamagotchi Plaza continues the lackluster legacy of Tamagotchi Corner Shop on DS. You run various shops, each having a single job each, and you perform that one task a huge number of times, following directions from customers. Every job is a tiresome chore, an unintentional reflection of what it’s like to serve the retail consumerism this game loves.
I hesitate to call the tasks you perform “minigames” because doing so runs the risk of grossly overstating what they are.
The clothes shop is literally just dragging and dropping components to make an outfit that looks like a picture you’ve been given. The glasses shop has you selecting the correct frames and rotating lenses on a grinder. There’s so much dragging and dropping, and you don’t have to do a job well, you just do exactly as you're told.
Even in the rare instance something might surprise you, it's quickly pummeled into the ground and made mundane through exhausting repetition. Encountering tooth demons while playing dentist was a genuine surprise at first, but they're in every single mouth you examine. Plaza could have put all sorts of funny things in those tooth cavities, and a decent game would have, but that would require a modicum of imagination instead of repeating one gag dozens of times over.
The manga shop is probably the best demonstration of this game's laziness. Customers ask for a manga with specific characters and items, and you drop the requisite pictures into two blank comic panels. That’s really all you need to do, the end result can be as messy or empty as you like and you'll get a perfect rating if the right components are shoved into at least one panel.
Similarly, the tea room is made to look like a game about setting tables and arranging foods nicely, but it’s not. All Plaza cares about is if you dragged a few two-dimensional pictures of food and drink somewhere on the table. Shops like this reveal a sham of a fifty quid game that considers even the paper-thin illusion of gameplay too much effort to maintain.
In a way, it allows the player to inhabit the role of Tamagotchi Plaza’s developers, slapping together the bare assets required to have a minimum viable product. You do so little but you have to do it so much - it’s such an abysmal show of contempt on the part of Bandai Namco.
Again, being a game for children doesn’t make this okay. My partner has young children, and they get bored of shit like this in moments. They’ve got the Lego games, they’ve got Slime Rancher, they’ve got Astro Bot. Why in the bollocking hell would they put up with this flimsy void of fun?
There are a handful of shops that offer something other than pulling pictures around. The rap battle outlet is such a rudimentary rhythm game that labeling it such sticks in my throat. The gym asks you to alternate tapping buttons like Track & Field, and that’s it. If you buy the Switch 2 version for ten dollars more, you get extra jobs involving mouse controls. I don’t care.
Each shop expects you to perform their single associated task a painful number of times before you can level the store up and slightly expand the scope of the job - if it’s a shop that has any scope to expand. Tamagotchi Plaza’s a game based entirely on grinding. That’s the entire point of the thing, it’s Grinding: The Videogame.
Most of these jobs should be mere side corn, tiny activities in larger games that offer actual gameplay. The rest are the laziest incarnations of existing concepts that I’ve ever seen. None of this shit is enough to sustain a halfway decent videogame, yet here’s Tamagotchi Plaza passing it off as valid.
The rapidity with which Plaza begins regurgitating its own content is downright staggering. It takes almost no time at all for customers to request identical outfits and recipes because they have so few item combinations to pick from. Rap battles repeat the same lyrics constantly to the point where characters will “rap” the same lines multiple times before the shop’s leveled up even once.
Raps are shown via text because the Tamagotchi speak in gibberish. How is a reasonable diversity of text too much to fucking ask?
Maybe the only halfway decent thing I could say about this entire farce is that it looks nice in its own basic way. Plaza’s little world is depicted with vibrant colors and the Tamagotchi themselves look lovely. It’s far from high end, but it makes the most of its simplicity. I wish there was more to do because I love seeing all those little freaks running around in three dimensions.
The state of Tamagotchi videogames is an incredible shame. There have been so few of them, and those that do exist tend to be insultingly low effort. You really could do loads of things with the weird world and characters of Tamagotchi, but the people in charge of the franchise are the people least interested in all that potential.
I smiled when I first started playing this thing. I was directly controlling Unimarutchi, exploring the world with literally my favorite character, but my smile faded within seconds of realizing what Namco had dared to shovel in front of people and charge for. There’s nothing to explore, nothing to enjoy, just the grinding menial filth of a game that doesn’t give a fuck.
2/10
