The Tamagotchi Meet and On have been discontinued, and the Tamgotchi Smart is only in Japanese. The only options left are getting a classic re-release or the full color, backlit Tamagotchi Pix Party! It’s been nearly a decade since I got a new Tamagotchi so it was in order!
Well, I went ahead and got one, used but in perfect condition from Amazon. Most reviews of the Pix Party have already covered the basics, and my Amazon review of the Pix Party is actually favorable, but I want to rant about the cons.
The Pix Party is over $60-- maybe consider these cons before you buy a fresh new one.
1. Store items never change. There is no reason to be able to accrue more than 20,000 gotchi points but for some reason you can keep earning money and have absolutely nothing to buy.
2. No marriage! Your tamas can’t meet other tamas and befriend them, get married and have babies. After about 7 or 8 days, your adult tama will get a random career (it seems independent of the training games you play beforehand) and return to the Tamagotchi planet. They choose a new egg for you and send it back.
3. Your tama will leave without warning and you have to make a photo album. You must have 3 photos in it minimum or it won’t let you move forward.
4. The camera is terrible, utter trash. It has trouble picking up all colors except for red and defaults to grey for most other colors.
5. I had to get most of the items and accessories from forums online. The QR codes make it easy to obtain items but it would make more sense if items could be collected from the Store.
6. Speaking of the store--- all of the Outside locations have these unnecessarily long sequences of your tama, over and over again, walking there, stopping in front of the building, and having to endure a dialogue with an npc just to get to the menus. The NPC dialogues are not worth the time wasting because the store never updates.
7. The arcade is lackluster. Each day, 2 of 6 games from 3 categories (Leisure, Nature, Sport) will be available to play for the whole day. The max amount of gotchi points you can earn is 230. Some of the games require a swiping motion which is unreliable with the Pix touch buttons. The games hardly fit the aesthetics of the Tamagotchi Pix Party and look really basic; dull colors, bland backgrounds for the most part (in comparison to other full color Tamagotchis, not originals)
8. Backgrounds are great but the Store doesn’t offer matching furniture for any of the collectable room themes except for a select few, and those items had to be obtained from winning challenges on the Tamagotchi website, or snagging them from forums.
9. Back in the day, during the Tamagotchi Connection era, the official website was colorful, exciting and interactive. These days it’s in unimpressive blog format. Every now and again there will be a seasonal or occasional challenge (matching game or tedious, unwinnable slide puzzle) to obtain a new item (usually a food item). Te new site feels almost fake, like Bandai gave up on making the world and community of Tamagotchi immersive.
10. The explore feature allows you to meet random new tamas but you can’t play any games with them or do much besides the rare dialogue. New tamas will appear in the character database and then you can invite them to Parties and take pictures with them.
11. Once you create your user profile at the startup of the device, you never see those stats again. Neither your favorite color, food, item nor selfie. It’s 100% pointless but supposedly affects the types of tamas you can get. The only user stats you can see are your name and birthday and a useless text bubble that you can customize at any time.
12. You can’t name any of your tamas. This removes so much of the connection and immersion that the less advanced Tamagotchi Connection had. If you get identical tamas in a row, it feels really hollow and mechanical. Naming was 25% of the fun of having a Tamagotchi. What’s the point of having your username (permanent unless you reset the device) when it serves no purpose outside of connecting with other Pix devices, which will be rare because Tamagotchi users are rare, especially among adults?
13. The price of the device is worth it for the novelty factor but that dries up quickly after a while. By generation 5 you’ll have seen it all. The same ugly items in the Store. The same boring games. The price should be bumped down to $39, especially considering how much battery life the device absolutely devours if you dare to leave the sound on or use the almost essential camera.
