Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town Review (Switch eShop)

Trolley dash

Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is based on the long-running manga and anime series, Crayon Shin-chan (Kureshin in Japanese), about a peculiar five-year-old named Shinnosuke (Shin-chan) and his family. The game follows up on the successful 2022 Western release of Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation - The Endless Seven-Day Journey, which puts this in the lineage of Kaz Ayabe's Bokunatsu series. This time around, we’re working with a mercifully shorter title.

At the beginning of the game, Shin-chan’s family moves to a village because his dad gets a work assignment close to where he grew up in Akita. Playing as Shin-chan himself, you’re tasked with exploring the village and helping out the other people who live there via fetch quests, fishing, and bug catching.

It’s not long, however, before the titular Coal Town is introduced. Shin-chan follows his dog Shiro to a train platform in a grassy field. A singular train car pulls up to the station and whisks him and Shiro away to a mining town quite unlike the rural environment that Shin-chan calls home—in fact, it seems to be a place that exists entirely within Shin-chan’s active imagination, hinted at by the way that he wakes up in his house whenever he leaves Coal Town.

Imaginary or otherwise, Coal Town has a lot of problems that Shin-chan can help out with, usually with the assistance of the town’s self-proclaimed genius inventor. The remainder of the game is spent splitting time between Akita and Coal Town. Each area has its own characters and activities, and completing quests often requires going back and forth between the towns to gather the right supplies.

There’s nothing too mindblowing about the basic gathering mechanics at the centre of the game. Catching bugs is accomplished with a single button press and the swoosh of a net. The camera perspective does sometimes make it difficult to tell where insects are in relation to Shin-chan, but it’s not too distracting. Fishing is made a little more interesting in that there are two different rods: one for catching standard fish and another for shallow-water crawfish types. Still, fishing itself is just a matter of waiting for fish to approach and then holding down the button when the fish is on the hook.

Herbs generate on the ground in Akita, versus ore and other small items in Coal town. Shin-chan can also grow his own vegetables in the gardens at the front of his house—again, just a simple loop of planting, watering, and waiting a few days to harvest.

Nearly every quest that propels the game forward requires gathering the right items. While not terrifically exciting, needing to collect and purchase items from different locations encourages regular gathering and exploration. The good thing is that the Shiro and the Coal Town’s hand-painted backgrounds are so beautiful that we didn’t mind running around all day and night to find what we were looking for. Verdant countryside spilling over with flowers and foliage, secret passages amongst rice paddy fields and sparkling waterways, and warmly-lit home scenes can all be found in Akita.

Coal Town brings a more worn and dusty beauty in its ramshackle stairways, comically crowded marketplaces, and metal-plated cityscapes. Multiple portions of both Akita and Coal Town are blocked off at the start of the game. Completing the quests to unveil new areas is almost more exciting for what new artwork you get to see than for the plot-related elements.

The art comes through really well in handheld mode, but it’s admittedly even more gorgeous while playing docked. The sound design compliments the art style well—the atmospheric music shifts tone seamlessly as we move between areas, and the voice acting offsets Shin chan’s plethora of silly sounds with the more mellow conversational feel of other characters.

Shiro and the Coal Town’s rich cast of characters are delightful to interact with and showcase Shin-chan’s weirder side. For a boy of just five, he’s bizarrely obsessed with dating and tends to take a shine to adult women. There’s a fair amount of fart jokes within the family scenes that play when Shin-chan goes home each night, but also some touching moments of the parents commenting on their two young children as they sleep. Shin-chan’s grandfather seems to share in his silly child-like humour and introduces a key item near the beginning of the game: the Cheeky Stone of Camaraderie. It’s described as “a stone that looks like a pair of cheeks. It glows with a mysterious light.” Our personal favourite touch of goofiness is called “Butt-Only Alien,” which allows Shin-chan to run faster when his butt is in the air.

The true shining star of Shiro and the Coal Town is trolley racing. Tragically, trolley racing does not become available until multiple hours into the game, after the elevator in Coal Town has been fixed and Shin-chan has acquired a device to help him reach the pedals. Multiple race tracks can be unlocked, each with their own rewards and challenges. In a fun twist on the classic, the races are not won by crossing the finish line first but by collecting and keeping the most points within the time limit. We loved unlocking new upgrades to build the wacky custom trolley cart of our dreams

Conclusion

Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is a stunningly beautiful game balanced by its fair share of weird humour. While not mechanically complex, it’s a charming slice-of-life game that will likely delight any fans of the Crayon Shin-Chan series.