15 clothing items with 300+ variants means they're DYABLE! My favorite thing! I love dyable clothes.
2 new food stations? I bet one's a tea pot and I'm so DOWN FOR TEA!
50 decor items? Great!
A new questline? Great! I hope I don't need Wish me mell maxed, because I'm still pretty far behind on that.
All this for ten bucks? Sign me up! I guess I better get back to gifting Wish me mell rare fish...
Could they potentially turn around and introduce gambling mechanics and predatory microtransactions? Of course, we're in the worst possible timeline. Everything horrible that can happen, is happening. But I don't feel that Sunblink has reached that point yet. Yes, they said they were going to introduce smaller content packs this summer, but I'm not going to judge them until they're out. I only have a few months to wait. In the meantime, I'll check out City Town, and judge it on it's own merits.
Welp, news came out today. The City Town DLC is gonna be 25$. That's more than I'm willing to pay, but the base game has gone on sale a few times, so I'm sure the DLC will go on sale too. I would have bought it in an instant if it was 15$ like Wheatflour Wonderland was, but this price hike is a little to much for me.
Also, they're gonna start adding paid cosmetic packs this summer. This isn't surprising, but I'm still disappointed. When getting cosmetics and furniture is the core gameplay loop, having some for sale is definitely pay to win. I don't know if I will quit the game entirely, but I will be very reluctant to pay for future content from here on out.
I'm not mad, just disappointed.
Anyways, they finally announced the release date for their next DLC, City Town. Surprisingly, it's the same day as the Tomodachi Life release. This seems on purpose, since there will be a good bit of overlap between each game's player base. There both kinda cozy games, targeting Switch players. I'm prolly gonna get both, to be honest, but I might wait a while to get City Town, since I still haven't finished base game or Wheatflour Wonderland. Yeah, I have a lot to get through, so we'll see. City Town DLC drops on April 16.
There's been sad times in the Hello Kitty Island community, which sucks. Everything was super happy and hype last month. People were having a good time with Wheatflour Wonderland. Sure, there were some bugs, but fixes are on the way already.
Then, last week happened, and everyone collectively lost their minds. Sunblink announced City Town would be delayed until next year, and would be paid DLC, and everyone lost their shit. People expected City Town at the end of the year, and they expected it to be included in the base price.
Personally, I will be honest, I thought it was going to be included with the base game too, however, I'm not upset if they make it as good as Wheatflour Wonderland and stick it behind a 15$ price tag.
I appear to be in the minority, however, because the Hello Kitty Island Discord and subreddit have been exploding with a ridiculous amount of rage and entitlement. It really takes me back to the trauma I experienced working in customer support for a major video game company many years back. It really sucks that both the HKIA community and the Sims community are going through problems at the same time.
Since I'm having so much fun, I'm going to give this first DLC a thumbs up. I was a hardcore Sailor Moon fan back in the 90s, and this DLC is giving huge magical girl vibes, with transformations, costumes, wands, castles, the whole bit. Even the music takes me back to my Sailor Moon childhood.
Major bonus points for it not being a genderlocked magical girl thing, but there's masculine costumes, and male characters are given magical powers too, which I think is excellent.
Welp, it was the launch day of Hello Kitty Island's first expansion, Wheatflour Wonderland, and well, it was a day. For PC players, it was also the drop of Content Update 3, so even though I bought WW, I couldn't start WW yet because I had a ton of other quests to do first. Like a huge stack of quests when I logged in. I spent 2 hours clearing quests this morning with no start to WW, then had a doctor's appointment, so I had to leave, then come back in the afternoon.
I've been playing HKIA since it's PC launch in March, and I'm still having fun. I'm not as up to date on all the quests as some people, but I have most of the login rewards, and I'm getting the hang of things.
I still need to figure out how gardening works, because my Merry Meadow is an overgrown mess. It was desolate for the first month, then I gave a Nul a water sprinkler hat, now it's completely full of random flowers I don't know what to do with.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure for Steam got their first content update today! More items, more stuff in the mountain zone, more endgame quests, but I'm not on endgame quests yet, so I won't know how those go.
What I'm really digging are the quality of life updates they added to the game. Like how if you miss a day or two, your spawned resources stack up to 3, and if you go in on day 3, you get a ton of resources! Everything is everywhere, and it's nice, because you can't always go on a gathering run every single day.
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.
When I first heard of Hello Kitty Island Adventure, I assumed since it was a mobile game first that it would be absolute trash riddled with microtransactions, which killed me because I've been a Hello Kitty connossiour for decades. Much to my surprise, there are no microtransactions whatsoever as of the launch weekend for PC and Switch. I chose to play on my PC, because that's what I'm most comfortable with.
