My review of the Cute Pet Paradise virtual pet (also commonly called the “Tamagezi” by fans)
This toy is commonly known as the “Tamagezi” by fans, but did you know that it has an official Chinese name, which is 萌宠乐园 (or “Cute Pet Paradise”)? In fact, I would like to promote calling this the “Cute Pet Paradise”, because “Tamagezi” (拓麻歌子) is just the Chinese transliteration of “Tamagotchi”. I think the reason many fans call this the “Tamagezi” is because the Chinese sites that sell this call it the “Local-made Tamagotchi” (国产拓麻歌子). However, you won’t be able to specifically find this on AliExpress/Taobao if you search for 拓麻歌子, and will end up with plenty of results of goods related to Bandai’s Tamagotchi instead. You can find it, however, if you use the keyword “方糖萌宠乐园” (with 方糖 being the name of the developer) on AliExpress.
Anyway, on to my review. Overall, I think the Cute Pet Paradise’s programming is really awful for a couple of reasons that I’ll cover below.
So, starting with some basic functions: you get to pick from 3 eggs at the start (but I don’t think the colour matters), and you can get either a boy or a girl. There’s only one evolution path for each gender, but you can dress them up in different costumes once they become a teen or adult. The evolution period is really long, taking about a week for each stage (there are 4 in total, which are baby, kid, teen and adult). You can feed your pet, bring your pet to a restaurant to eat, plant crops in the garden which are ready for harvest after an hour and you can sell off for money (which will be one of your main sources of income), play games in the arcade, take your pet to the amusement park to increase their Heart stat when it’s low, take your pet to the toilet, vacuum the house or clean the bathroom, unclog the toilet when it’s clogged (but would need to buy the respective equipment), buy food and toys from the shop, buy clothes when your pet is a teen or adult, buy property when your pet is minimally a kid, buy vehicles anytime (even if your pet is still a baby), go to school, go to work when your pet is minimally a kid, visit a park, and use items in your treasure chest.
The eating animation cannot be skipped, which I thought was one of the worst parts of the toy. Each food item affects your pet’s stats differently, and according to the mini guidebook that comes with the toy, the rice bowl fills up your pet’s hunger stat the most, so I usually spam the rice bowl one by one, having to sit through the animation each time. Sometimes, you get a little envelope icon to the left of your pet informing you that everything at the Western restaurant will be free for a set number of minutes. I usually send my pet to the restaurant when that event happens.
The minigames’ payout rates are absolutely awful, and you can’t count on them as a good source of income. There are like 2 gambling games and I guess one of them can pay out well if you make big bets, but is also risky. The best way to make money in this game is by growing and selling crops, buying property and sending your pet to work. By the way, the crops all give the same amount of profit. I planted only the most expensive crop at first because I thought that the more expensive the crop was, the more you would earn, but actually the profit is the same regardless of what you grow if you deduct the expenditure amount of each crop from the revenue. Thus I started to just plant the cheapest apples every single time. Also, I recommend buying property as soon as your pet is old enough and as soon as you have enough money, because you will start to earn money every day just by owning the property.
You can visit a park, where you either get to talk to a random character, clean up the park, obtain a random puzzle piece, or play with either a cat or dog (well, at least, they vaguely look like a cat or dog). There are 4 puzzles that you can complete in total, and completing each puzzle gets you some money (I think it was 10,000 GP if I remember correctly). But here’s where the awful programming comes in: it’s possible to get a puzzle piece that you already have, even if the puzzle is already completed. And as for the cat and dog, your pet will invite the cat or dog back to its house if you meet it for the third time, but they didn’t even program any checks on whether or not you already have a pet, so you can still meet the same cat or dog in the park even after you already have the cat or dog at home. If you already have a cat and you meet the dog 3 times, the dog replaces the cat (the game doesn’t even ask if you want to bring the pet home, the pet just goes home with you).
Also, I realised that based on the way the toy is programmed, the game’s time doesn’t actually proceed until you wake it up with a button. I figured it out based on the way the toy doesn’t call for attention. It seems like it’s programmed to reduce a set number of stat points depending on how much time had passed between the time the toy went into sleep mode and when it has been woken up. It then calculates whether or not to generate a poop or to show squiggly lines besides your pet depending on how much of the hunger stat has gone down. If it reaches a negative number in certain stats, your pet will be shown with an illness skull or with a dying icon above its head. I find that it will generally generate the dying icon if left unattended for about 8-10 hours, and if left longer than that, you will see your pet leaving you upon waking up the toy with a button. If your pet leaves you due to neglect, you have to reset the device and start all over again, meaning you lose all progress including money, items, and everything else. I thought this was the dumbest thing about the toy because you can get a new egg and keep your progress in the official Tamagotchi series. I had to restart like 5 times already just because I left the toy alone for more than 10 hours.
Another reason why I say that the programming is bad is because the A, B and C buttons will always make a sound when pressed, even if the sound shouldn’t be playing in that scenario (eg. they should disable button sounds from being made if they are not supposed to respond while in the middle of an eating animation etc, but they don’t).
The toy also determines certain events that will randomly happen each time you wake up the device based on how much time has passed, giving you the “You haven’t been to school in a long time” notice or the “The toilet is clogged” notice randomly. The funny thing is that it counts even sleeping time, so you could let you pet go to bed at night and then get a message the next morning saying that your pet hasn’t been to school in a long time. The guidebook that comes with the toy claims that the stats doesn’t go down when sleeping, but I’m not sure how true that is, because I usually have to fill up my pet’s stats every time I get up in the morning. Also, not unclogging the toilet doesn’t seem to affect usage of the toilet in any way, so I usually don’t bother unclogging it even when I get the notice that the toilet is clogged. You can clean the house with a vacuum cleaner and you can get your pet to take a bath, but unlike in the Tamagotchi series, neither your pet nor your room ever gets dirty, so you don’t really have a need to clean the house or give your pet a bath.
For the school feature, the guidebook says that each class lasts 3 mins, but your pet doesn’t go back automatically on the toy, and you have to manually leave the school, even when it’s your pet’s bedtime. The guidebook also says you need to attend school twice a day. However, if I remember correctly, your pet is able to go home automatically after work after a certain number of hours.
The toy animations are all very short and are simple animations that totally have zero effort put into making them. Most of the toys just show a short animation of the toy being animated in some way and your pet reacting to it, like how the toy cat’s animation just shows the cat scratching with its paw a little and your pet smiling at it. The toy rose also just shows a short glowing animation and have your pet smiling at it. Also, all the toys are one-use for some weird reason.
If you buy a vehicle, the vehicle will replace your pet’s walking animation when they go out, and you can swap out vehicles anytime from your treasure chest.
Overall, the toy was kind of entertaining at first for me, but it got kind of boring and tedious over time, considering that I have to feed the pet food one by one with an unskippable animation, and I need to fill up their Heart meter by bringing them to the amusement park and letting them play on the rides, again with unskippable animations. Furthermore, the fact that your pet can die so easily and the fact that all progress is erased if your pet dies/runs away, makes gameplay very frustrating. As of now, I still haven’t gotten a single pet to the adult stage yet, only to the teen stage at the most, just one time. Also, I thought that if they hadn’t stolen Bandai’s icons for their menu, this would actually make for a pretty decent original virtual pet device. Thought it was funny the way everything but the menu icons were original graphics. The poor programming is a negative aspect too, but I guess you can’t expect that much from such a cheap virtual pet toy, which wouldn’t have gone through as much playtesting and debugging as the official Tamagotchi toys. While a lot of fans treat the Cute Pet Paradise as a bootleg Tamagotchi, to me I see it more of as an original virtual pet toy (compared to toys like the QPet, which is an outright clone of the Plus Color) if not for the fact that they completely lifted Bandai’s menu icons and the GP symbol.
