Having been told over and over that this was a game worth paying attention to, I finally went out and bought it.
No regrets; while things start out a bit slow, the true depth of the family mess you're involved in quickly begins to become apparent. Your activities are incredibly mundane; but the world you're in is bizarre and surreal. It's a strange counterpoint, and your attempts to try to both improve the life of the family and clean up the mess of a family life they're in is more than endearing, it's addictive.
Part of this game is sims-like; you inevitably spend a lot of time picking up after these people. Part of it is the best that the sandbox world has to offer; another part is the adventuring, climbing, and locating of bits of stuff. Finally, we have a storyline unparalleled, I think - in that the personal family tragedy being portrayed is top-notch dysfunctional family stuff, with mom having you deliver a letter to the husband asking for a divorce, and a little girl in a frog hat who believes she has been transformed into a frog by some evil witch, and so cannot speak to her parents.
It sounds odd, and it is odd - but it's got the best elements from all of the game genres it borrows from, and as such, ends up being a masterpiece in and of its own right. The GameCube platform is known for its unusual, exclusive titles that garner huge followings and get must-play reviews. This game is worthy of the hype it's been given, and I can't recommend it enough.
While the sandbox-style gameplay can wear thin, the storyline is good enough to keep it all well-glued-together; the only problems can sometimes crop up because it isn't always easy to find what you're looking for, or to figure out how you're meant to get to various places, and that can lead to a lot of wasted time between story elements; a tighter story, with a more helping-hand approach to general direction, would have made some of these better; instead, I had to rely on the walkthrough, on occasion, to figure out where I was meant to have gone next.
For that flaw, and that flaw alone, it gets a four instead of five stars, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect gem.
