When I started playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure’s closed beta for Gamexta’s guide, long before it was released on Apple Arcade in 2023, I had a great time. It was enjoyable and soothing to be able to make my own miniature Sanrio figure and to run around a tropical island gathering trinkets to give to my new animal companions. But as time went on, my desire to finish all of my missions, locate companions I had lost, and open up new areas began to wane. After a while, it seemed like a nuisance to log in, keep sending gifts to friends until I reached annoying daily restrictions, and then hope that I would be granted permission to advance my friendships a bit.
Unfortunately, a year and a change later, the issue is the same on Switch and PC: this island is still as big, vibrant, and geographically varied as it was on my iPad, but it is also just as annoyingly gated, monotonous, and stale.
Please understand that there are many positive aspects of Hello Kitty. For example, the crafting is straightforward to use. You may create a wide range of products, from adorable plush animals to different types of food. Ultimately, though, the primary goal of making is to provide your island buddies with nicer presents. You will gain friends more quickly if you give excellent gifts. This implies that there is not much motivation to create anything besides presents or to go to the next stage of the light “narrative.”
In Hello Kitty Island Adventure, giving is the driving force behind everything. Giving gifts to the people of your island and getting resources in return—which you may use to produce better gifts—is the main focus. Unless you are giving your residents two- or three-heart items, progress in the story is mostly locked behind various Friendship levels, which can be a pain to get through. The catch is that you will not even be able to craft those higher-level items until you have reached certain Friendship levels. It resembles a thoughtfully placed labyrinth of obstacles designed to prevent you from moving too quickly or too far.
While figuring out each of your residents’ favorite three-star gifts and figuring out the ideal order to level them might be a fun endeavor, gifting eventually becomes more of a hassle. You can not even expedite the procedure by delivering several identical gifts at once. Additionally, there is nothing innovative or fulfilling about it—it is just a thinly veiled spreadsheet colored in bright, bubblegum pink—because the only acceptable option is to present whatever earns you the most Friendship points. Depending only on the “tier” of the thing you present, the conversation that is sparked by gifting is essentially the same from friend to friend.
Even if the characters are adorable, it seems pointless to converse with them every day.
Longtime Sanrio lovers will experience a wave of nostalgia due to the adorable characters. They are somewhat feisty, and they occasionally crack jokes that inject some fun into otherwise tedious conversations. But other than that, it seems pointless to speak with the islanders every day. As time passes, you do not have any new encounters with them. If you want to see anything new or unusual, you simply need to keep working hard and giving them gifts to unlock their objectives.
If friendship and giving are just the keys, then the questing door they open must be the hiding place for additional fascinating or captivating encounters, right? Regretfully, all you have ahead of you is more busy work. From quests unlocked by reaching new levels of Friendship to the story quests that reveal the “mystery” of the island, these objectives are another never-ending list of to-dos, with very little variety in the simple puzzles, object fetching, crafting, and more they ask of you.
The alternatives are ok once you have unlocked some diversity. Although you could mix and match, the decor is not very adaptable, so you will not have much opportunity to be creative and create your look outside of the “themes” that each piece of furniture comes in because they do not work well together. What should I do with a pirate chair, a Spooky Candelabra, and a Hello Kitty bookcase? With so few options, I can not transform my property into a bookstore, or cafe, or even renovate it for an impending holiday. Heck, you can not even arrange items on tables or rotate furniture at quarter turns! In general, you are out of luck unless you enjoy decorating your home in overtly Kawaii ways.
The character creator in Hello Kitty Island Adventure is one of the locations where personalization works best. Instead of being the only human on an island full of sentient, talking creatures like in Animal Crossing, I adore that you get to create your own tiny Sanrio character. There is a good range of animals to pick from, such as birds, bunnies, and even sheep (although I find it strange that frogs are not an option). As you play more and level up your Friendship, you unlock even more “avatar” color options to choose from.
My drive began to decline due to a dearth of captivating hooks.
At his island store, Tuxedosam sells some adorable clothing, and you can find the odd garment in a chest or quest. Like the décor, there is not enough variation, though, to stimulate my imagination or make me want to dress up every day—or even frequently—like I normally like to do in games like this. I decided to make one particular piece of clothing my “uniform” since I kind of liked it.
One of the main reasons why I lost interest in playing after a while was because there were not any captivating hooks. Although Hello Kitty Island Adventure offers a plethora of items to acquire, such as clothing, furniture, fish, and other creatures, there is not much of a need to do so beyond keeping you occupied.
Someone like myself who likes “catching ’em all” and reaching collection goals would typically be satisfied with the Nature Preserve, which can be filled with animals, and the Fishing Well, which can be filled with fish. Again, though, the benefits of including these locations are so small that they might as well not exist. You are saying that I get ten mushrooms in exchange for giving away every creature that lives in the island’s bog? Those I could collect myself in a day!
Verdict
Hello Kitty Island Adventure may satisfy a void left by Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the widest sense for lovers of Sanrio’s endearing roster of characters. Its vast and vibrant world, adorable animals, and endless to-do list appear fresh and energizing at first glance. Unfortunately, though, that surface is all that exists. To divert your attention from the reality that you are never getting anywhere quickly, a shallow pool of monotonous activities and limitless gifts is secured behind daily progression barriers.
