my opinion on wheatflour wonderland (hkia dlc)
I have almost 200 hours in Hello Kitty: Island Adventure now, and my wife gifted me the first DLC for it: Wheatflour Wonderland in December.
I’ve already written some tips about HKIA in general, but also wanted to put down my thoughts about the DLC.
My verdict is: Save your money. Don’t buy it, buy it on a steep sale, let someone else buy it for you, or pirate it. Not worth it.
the good stuff
- The new area looks pretty and is exciting at first.
- I like the way they wrote Cogimyun and the way she interacts with the other characters. You can tell she is somewhat alien and doesn’t think like the rest, even in the small details; it feels genuine, not forced, and I like that the characters had conflicts over this, particularly Chococat.
- The concept of the wands and the magical girl stuff is funny.
- The Bell Garden is beautiful and a cool concept.
- The outfits, gems and furniture are cool.
the bad
- The map looks huge at first. Then you realize there isn’t actually much to do and it’s mostly empty space. You unlock a lot via wands and platforms, but the areas you unlock provide nothing. The third and final tier you unlock is particularly sad and barren; the land is falling apart and purposefully looking unfinished and empty. It’s no area that has any quests, cool stuff to do or see… just a one-time parkour getting some collectibles and activating a mailbox and that’s it.
- The few things you can do while exploring the map are mostly unexplained or not given an intro to. They’re also not very rewarding, and mostly grindy. Searching for all wheathearts, repairing lampposts, turning them on, taking pictures of the stone wheathearts and going through the arches all feels repetitive and like you need a list to track which ones you already did and which ones are missing. The hints can be extremely hard to find or understand. This basically means using the wiki just to get stuff done.
- Cogimyun’s friendship progression slows down intensely past Level 20. It feels like they had to do that because there weren’t many quests or story elements at all, so unlocking them slower feels like more content.
- The minigames are extremely repetitive, not fun and not rewarding. I was already sick of Finding Ebi Fry by the 4th round, and I felt the same about Cogimyon’s game.
- Other characters like the birds and Ebi Fry are underutilized.
- Cogimyon’s character is wasted. He has no personality, no use aside from hosting another forgettable minigame. We don’t even see Cogimyun interact much with him. She just created her brother for him to wander the land and do nothing. Like a child who wants a pet and then abandons it.
- The story is non-sensical. It also ends in a huge let-down. The Citadel gets played up as harboring a huge treasure, then you spend so much time grinding to open it and it’s a useless, underwhelming bag of flour. They thought they were funny with that.
- They make you run courses way too many times to get a new resource you can only get through them. Had me running the same boring race path 25 times already.
- Some of the gems and critters are so rare that it’s completely unfun. I’ve had to be lucky with the minigames and my search to even get the basic amount of diamonds and opals you need for the wands/story. Since then I have never found any ever again. I’m also starting to think the stars will never align for me to even see a Floopy Ballooper, let alone catch enough for a wand and to access two platforms I haven’t been on yet. To be there at the right time with the right weather seems impossible, even with the Twin Stars.
- You get cabins, but only to decorate, no one can move in. Wasted area.
- Installing the DLC has harmed the overall performance significantly, and being in the DLC area and walking at certain spots causes massive 1+ second freezes and lagging because the other area is loaded. The optimization is really bad. This isn’t even on the Switch, this is on Steam Deck.
I still have some stuff left to check off the list, but there’s no incentive to even do so, and it would be soul-sucking wiki work just to say that it is done. I don’t know if I’ll ever put in the effort of finding all wheathearts; nothing in the DLC is worth the effort. I have 3 levels left before Cogimyun is max level, and then I will likely never visit the DLC area again.
I’ve seen people say that all the DLC is good for is
- the wheat being easy material for the fertilizer machine
- the extra flower spots
- Cogimyun’s powers
- the short laugh you get when you get to transform into a funny item
- cabins to decorate
That’s it.
It especially pales in comparison to the recent free content upgrade that included Moppu. Moppu is an even more interesting character, adds more life to an already existing area, and has cool new foods and minigames that don’t feel like a chore. The quests feel a lot better.
I hope the next DLC (City Town) will not be nearly as bad. It will feature Usahana, plushies and running a cafe, and Apple Arcade users were already able to play some of it.
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