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Flower, Sun, and Rain’s intriguing title isn’t for an ingenious Zen garden sim like it sounds, it’s the name of a hotel. Where presumably some crime has transpired. It was a mistake playing Flower, Sun, Rain right after GTA China Town Wars. I was expecting a quirky 3D mystery romp with blocky DS graphics. Instead this game was an even bigger disappointment. It lacked the readily accessible controls, and the clever button layout that GTA had. I wasn’t intending to write about comparisons of the two, but I couldn’t help thinking of it that way. The original Flower, Sun, and Rain game was made in 2001 for PlayStation 2. By developer Goichi Suda. Known for his unconventional game-play and offbeat characters, made expectations indeed high. It would have been a great game if the port had been done with half the attention that GTA: CW had. It wasn’t. When the controls aren’t there in a game and successive presses of every button and combination produce nothing, not even an error message, something is very wrong. There is a difference between quirky / fun and stupid / tedious. This game is the latter. Game-play if you can call it that, is annoying. No effort was made to customize level design to suit the DS. Everything you do basically has to go through the ugly laptop interface. The process is only entering numbers that you find randomly in the game. It’s the lamest, thinnest sort of hunt and fetch device in a game ever. The puzzles were terribly dull and the overall presentation was monotonous looking. The game graphics were texture-less and flat. It looked like a bad game on the Game Boy from twenty years ago.
You need to keep solving puzzles at the hotel to reach the airport. The plot is like Groundhog Day the movie, or on that episode of Xena Warrior Princess.
Over and over you are placed back at the beginning of the day and each day brings a new set of puzzles. Puzzles are done by entering a number into a suit-cased laptop named “Catherine”. Guys that name their computers after women are strange.
With the lame “Catherine” computer as the main interface, the frustrating camera, poor navigation, level design and controls this game is a mess. There isn’t any reason to try and play it. Don’t waste a rental on it. I give Flower, Sun, Rain 2 soggy petals out of 10.
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