finally actually playing 3ds stuff for real with focus and I just beat the main quest in attack of the Friday monsters and am playing around in the epilogue now. wtf this is such a good game !!! it‘s so cute and I love the like, playing around with the perspective of the magical realism of youth while at the same time like you kind of peek behind the curtain into the so-called reality of the adult world. somehow a lot the adult stuff is presented as totally straightforward but it stills reads as mysterious because like the theme song says, Boku Wa Kodomo, and so I kind of get to live as both a kid and adult at the same time, and it’s a really well-executed narrative trick. and also it takes that kid vs adult view of reality and is mixing it up with…what if the kid view is actually ALSO real and the completely unrealistic alien monster stuff is…maybe true??? I love this game! I‘m not usually the new game plus/post-credits type but there are still a bunch of loose ends and the game itself is short and breezy enough that it is far from wearing out its welcome. love that this got an official English translation at all, and I really like that they left the original japanese narration intact, both for my own ambient Japanese absorption for me kinda learning the language, but also the voice acting on her part is like, super super well done. between her and the theme song and all the rest, it really ties together for me this like, nostalgia I feel but don’t have the real experience of, for a specific kind of bygone children‘s media (to be fair I did grow up in the 80s and thru my life there have been some small trickles of japanese culture in my life for most of it, partly due to me growing up in a bit of the pnw where japanese/asian people and culture were definitely around, I had all kinds of friends growing up, I was able to take japanese language classes all 4 years in high school and visited Japan in the 90s, and I’ve kind of off and on always been digging into old japanese cultural artifacts here and there, etc etc but still, it‘s not like I grew up on tokusatsu stuff or old japanese kids shows, so this game is doing a kind of unique thing of conjuring up feelings that I don’t like, actually have, but I'm still having em, and am able to catch a reference or two)