Hello Kitty Island Adventure after 3 weeks and 2 holidays...

Well, this is a long term game, and I've had it for 3 weeks, and I'm having a great time.  I haven't unlocked all the zones yet, or all the features, but I'm having fun!  I haven't pushed too hard, I'm about 20 hours in, and it's all been good so far.  the map is friggin huge, and I'm not done finding it all.  It seems like a slog if you run everywhere, but if you unlock all the teleportation mailboxes, it's pretty easy to get around.

 

My first character design was a purple kitty, then I quickly realized you can't really see purple clothes on a purple cat, so I'm going with a black, white, and gray look for now.  There is a dying system, so I can make more clothing purple, but I haven't completed enough quests to try it out yet, so my amount of outfits in black and purple are still kinda limited.

As you can see, I've unlocked the deluxe edition costume bits, there's tons!  Something for every occasion! Mostly tops and full sized stuff, but there's bits in every other category too.

This is what the character color palettes look like after you've unlocked a few from the first set of characters.  As far as I know, the best way to unlock character color palettes is leveling up friendship with the Sanrio NPCs.

There's a lot of leveling up friendship.  That unlocks colors, unlocks quests, everything is around leveling up friendship, which is all done by gifting the Sanrio characters things they like.  I've got some characters up to friendship 11 on the first island, but the farther away ones I don't remember every day are still pretty low.  I have a ton of flowers used to give more presents than the 3 per day limit, but I haven't used them all yet.

 

The first festival I got to participate in started when I got the game, and it's called the Luck and Lanterns celebration.  It's made to coincide with the real life Chinese Lunar New Year, so the rewards are Chinese clothing, Chinese furniture, and a snake costume, because this year is the year of the snake.  Last year was the year of the dragon, and I was able to craft the dragon costume with some gatherables.  I got to set off a firecracker each day, which was cute, but not a big commitment.  I bought up all the new furniture with luck tokens.  I'm not sure where the luck tokens came from, but  I always had just enough of them, so yay!  The Luck and Lanterns Celebration lasted most of February.  I would have liked a fireworks display, but that hasn't happened yet.

 

In the middle of February, around Valentine's Day, was a shorter festival called the Hugs & Hearts event.  The critter catching skill is necessary to participate in this event, because you could catch a love bug each day and put it in a special habitat, where it would turn into a chrysalis and towards the end of the event, they all hatched and flew away.  This event also had clothing rewards and furniture that were red and pink and heart themed.  Participation really only took a minute each day, but I got all the rewards and caught a screenshot of the love bugs as they became "heartwings" and they flew around the first island for the last few days.  They looked more like jellyfish than butterflies, but on the last day, I was awarded with one as an item to keep.  I'm not sure what to do with it, but I have it.