Bokura no Kazoku: My Family Growing Up in the 21th Century

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5 /5

Following up on the charming and well-received Bokura no Natsuyasumi, in which you experienced summer vacation as a boy, SCE's latest has you experience life over a 35-year period, from marriage to retirement. One of the main points of the game is how your raise your children -- going with them to play, giving them advice for progressing through school and making career choices. When choosing places to take your kids, their personality parameters change. When your kids at last go job hunting, the options available to them will depend on what they learned in school. The game is filled with event scenes such as sports meets and the start of school.

Bokura no Kazoku: My Family Growing Up in the 21th Century gives us what is, at first glance, a Japanese console take on The Sims, although in reality it’s devoid of most of the micromanagement and instead bears a focus on raising children. The game puts you in the shoes of a newlywed couple in their 30s, living on their own in Koenji, the residential district of Tokyo that’s a hop, skip and a jump away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. It’s there where the couple settles in together and soon enough begets their first child.

From there on, the game follows the next 35 years of the family’s life. Reams of photographs were taken of the area and turned into beautiful digital paintings to become the game’s backgrounds; now a staple of the series. This "slightly less than real" look helps give Mineko Ueda’s simplistic character designs a somewhat more familiar environment to live in.

Multiple playthroughs are expected in Bokura, yielding three different scenarios where the number of kids that come into the family grows in each one, resulting in eight total - four boys, four girls. Not to mention there’s also a handful of supporting characters that come in contact with the family, including a future love that each child will meet at certain points in the story, and towards the end get married and have a family of their own.