Drip, drip, drip. No, that's not the sound of the slow drip of GameCube games on Nintendo Classics, but rather a pesky sink problem I've been dealing with. Thankfully, I know the perfect guy for the job – a tiny helper robot named Chibi-Robo. That's right, Switch 2 owners with an Expansion Pack subscription finally have access to the quirky 2006 adventure game, Chibi-Robo. That's cool news, but is this game actually worth playing? To answer that question, I flipped through the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, Nintendo Power and more classic magazines that reviewed this game back when it first came out. I sure hope you charged your battery, because this is going to be a very clean episode of Nintendo Classics Review Crew!


When you think of Nintendo games, you likely picture exploring the fantasy world of Hyrule, the far-reaches of space in Metroid or the Mario's bustling kingdom full of mushrooms. But instead of sending players to new and exciting lands, Chibi-Robo did the exact opposite – it made you do chores at home. If Super Mario Sunshine sent players on a tropical getaway, this game was more of a stay-cation. In a lot of ways, Chibi-Robo is a lot like Nintendo's other games; introducing us to an adorable (and put upon) character that will use his unique abilities to overcome a variety of obstacles. In this case, he's a tiny robot that aides the Sanderson family through a serious of increasingly wacky scenarios. While not a huge hit, Chibi-Robo has its following and managed to spawn a series of sequels and spin-offs. Let's see where the critics landed on this GameCube original.

As always, we're going to start with Electronic Gaming Monthly, who found themselves right in the middle of the pack with an average score of 6.7 out of 10. Kathleen gave it one of the lower scores, explaining that she digs cute games: “I give major points just for being cute, and Chibi-Robo is cute. But the game's cycle of cleaning, collecting, charging and more cleaning would be a lot more fun if it would just HURRY UP ALREADY! As you manage your way through obstacles made of everyday objects, you're constantly interrupted by cut-scenes (which you can't skip or speed up), repetitive explanations from your helper Tele Vision, or the need to recharge.” Jennifer liked it a bit more than that, but still had a few reservations: “While I understand that Katamari Damacy made being a tiny creature roaming around a big ol' human-sized house cool, I'm not sure that scrubbing floors and picking up after sloppy, creepy white trash is the way to gaming Shangri-la. That said, I've developed a soft spot for Chibi-Robo. The story's sorta contrived, but it's not bad, and I suspect this one is supposed to be played by little kids who dig that kind of stuff. Give Chibi a chance.”

When I say that EGM is right in the middle, I mean it; because there are a couple of magazines that gave eights and a couple of magazines that gave it fives. Let's start with the lower scores. GamePro was not impressed, giving Chibi-Robo a sad 2.5 out of 5. That's one of the lowest scores they've given any Nintendo-published game. Game Informer was also underwhelmed, with Jeremy giving it a 5 out of 10. “Sure, the Chibi-Robo character is cute and the premise is quirky, but being cute and quirky isn't the same as being fun, and let's be absolutely clear about one thing – this game is not a damn bit fun. It becomes mildly bearable later in the game, when the focus shifts slightly from cleaning to helping Chibi's family with their problems, but you have to suffer through many hours of tedious busywork to get to that point.” He concluded that “I'm fully aware that my thoughts on this game are going to earn me a ton of angry hate mail from people who claim I just don't get this title's true appeal. Well, I have a message for them: Look beyond the ‘cute and quirky' façade of this game to see it for what it truly is – a dreary, joyless piece of junk that shamelessly tries to get kids to believe that cleaning is fun.”

On the other side of the EGM divide is Nintendo Power who gave this GameCube release a straight 8 out of 10. That's the same score we saw from Edge, who found a unique angle when recommending the game: “True to its original point and click design, Chibi-Robo is a classic adventure with the added bonus of nearly a second game's worth of third-person exploration. The many months of the game's delay and near death seem to have given it ample opportunity to push itself further and provide layer upon layer, and thread after ancillary thread, of polish and content which strike the perfect balance between gameplay and storytelling, a story which is unexpectedly a good deal darker and more dense than its primary-colored, Toy Story appearance would have you believe. Its value and achievement lay not in how it brings revolutionary and innovative mechanics to an old genre, but in how it uses simplicity and economy as well as seamlessly blending outside constructs, to achieve a higher form of the genre.”

Wow, that is ... uh ... I don't even have words for that. It's such a big swing going from Game Informer arguing that it's awful propaganda to convince kids to do their chores and Edge talking about how it blends the constructs to elevate the genre. This really is one of those games that you either like or don't, there's not a lot of middle ground here. I say give it a play and see if the repetition annoys you, or if you agree that this truly is a higher form of the point and click genre.