Chulip, the Kissing RPG

I admit, I bought this used game for $10 thinking it would be relaxing and sweet like Harvest Moon. Instead, I was surprised to find a very frustrating game!

“Kissing RPG” pretty much sums up this game. In the game, your lifelong goal is to kiss the girl of your dreams. After you and your dad move into a new town, you will meet her early on, however, your heart is too fragile due to your lack of kissing experience. So what can you do? You must kiss others to build your reputation and strengthen your heart first, which is basically your lifebar.

In order to pucker up to the townspeople, you must complete a series of tasks specific per person (much like quests),and they will happily reward you with a smooch for your troubles. Talk to these people for hints on how to smooze your way to their lips.

Underground residents are a peculiar group of people that live *gasp!* underground. You can spy on them through cracks in the ground. They emerge during specific times of the day (hence the need for the clock in your display). They are reclusive and most don’t like noise, so if you walk towards them normally your feet will make annoying PAT-PAT sounds, which cause them to slap you (and break your heart!)

Sneak up to them by gently pushing the left joystick - they won’t mind you close by as long as you don’t make a sound. Keep an eye of them, while they are unkissable, they will be steaming like so (pictured above).

As soon as they are ready for a peck (have happy notes around them), you may lay one on their smacker using if you are close enough. If you are too far away, that constitutes as making noise “SMOOCH!”, and they will slap you.

Success! Many of these underground residents will thank you for drawing them out of their anti-social shell and reward you with items or money. One resident will grant you the ‘run’ ability, which helps because the game progresses very slowly otherwise. At the end of the day, your father tallies up the kisses you’ve acquired. If you’ve hit the required minimum number of kisses, you will level up your heart’s strength.

You start off the game as a poor boy, and in order to find food and goods to sell and earn money, you scrounge through trash cans and garbage bins. Unfortunately, you’ll sometimes find poop, which will break your heart, so be careful!

Chulip is available on the PS2, and was released in Japan in 2002 and later in America in 2007, so the graphics are a bit dated. The characters are uniquely designed, the music is fun to listen to at first but gets repetitive over the long run.

How’s the game? Well, reviewing my post on annoying things in video games, it is pretty annoying:

• text cannot be sped up or skipped
• this difficult game requires FAQ (they have one included with the game manual for gosh sakes!!)
• sparse save points - you save at the toilet, and there aren’t a lot of toilets in each town

I was curious and explored the environment and found that many things would randomly kill me….which is bad because I didn’t save at the toilet! *grooooan* A lot of time spent, down the flusher, so to speak!

Me? Well, I’m a masochist for weird games like this. I’ll beat it one day, but for now I will put it on the back burner. One day I’ll complete it and blog about it then. =)