Robot Girl's Dream

Click here to view a collection of my micro-posts about Robot Girl's Dream, from my playthrough.

A longer, post-completion summary of thoughts follows below. (There's no spoilers!)

I think many of us have come across games with morality compasses that feel sort of perfunctory.

You know, the games with good/evil meters where you get presented with choices that simplify to 'be reasonably pleasant to people' and 'kick the dog', where picking the latter only feels necessary for discovering The Evil Route Content or if you want to roleplay a real villain.

Robot Girl's Dream, in all its silly charm, presents its own solution: What if it was a lovely morning in robot town (containing both humans and robots), and you were a horrible goose.

Robot Girl's Dream is a character-raising-type RPG with a first-run length of about 6 hours (shortening to 2 with experience and fast-forward), which puts you in the metallic shoes of Thin (name changeable), an amnesiac robot with one memory - a vague antagonism towards Scarlet, the reigning Robot Battle Championship powerhouse.

As you (the player) will quickly find out, Thin's motivation to beat Scarlet is presented in the sort of matter-of-fact way that a child would proclaim to adults their ambition to be president of the world, with Thin walking up to everyone and innocuously, constantly making the topic about her, firing off whatever thoughts come to the top of her one brain cell.

This characterization of Thin immediately puts you in the shoes of A Complete Gremlin who is constantly just Saying Shit, which - at least for me - increases the saliency of non-Neutral-Good dialogue options by a thouand percent.

This means that suddenly instead of automatically being nice and helping out a kindly grandma, you might be inclined to answer 'Will you pay me?'. I mean, you're a robot that just learned that people work jobs in exchange for money! Doesn't that mean if you work you should get money?

The writing in Robot Girl's Dream understands this well, leaving you plenty of openings for Gremlin-Based Chaotic Neutrality. In early game a sister robot (unbeknownst to Thin) is making a getaway from the cops via Skyscraper Leap - you're given the option to catch her or let her pratfall, then immediately after you're given the same choice for her pursuer.

If you drop your sister but catch the police, she immediately jumps into a manzai act where she's like 'Why did you only catch her!' and Thin hits the 'Well, I wasn't ready the first time!'. There's so many bits of comedic writing in this game that left me laughing in a really earnest way (compare to Honkai Star Rail's resident trash raccoon Stelle, who is also a funny gremlin but often done a disservice by Mihoyo's meme dialog options that turn to the camera and drone 'Are we in a Role Playing Game or what').

The game mechanics also subtly back up the writing, with Thin's 'Wise' stat incrementing basically whenever she learns something or acts in a Responsible (Citation Needed) way. Every time you drop an out-of-pocket 'What's in it for me', for example, bumps your Wise stat, and that mechanical condoning of your Gremlin action really adds to the comedy.

I wanted to call out just one of the many bits in Robot Girl's Dream I found really funny and illuminating of Thin's character.

In one character's arc, you end up investigating the school at night because of rumors spreading about a ghost. Obviously ghosts aren't real, so Thin is super excited to find out whatever baddie is doing sketchy stuff so that she can beat them up and get stronger.

Naturally, it turns out to be a bona-fide ghost, and Thin immediately about-faces like 'Welp it's not someone I can fight alright bye', which devolves into an extended loop where the ghost and Thin iterate on the back-and-forth of 'WAIT DON'T GO, aren't you like ScArEd' and 'Nah not really. Ok see ya'.

The two eventually return back to a human involved in the arc, who, as you'd expect, immediately shouts 'OH MY GOD IT'S A GHOST', earning a 'Yeah but they're not scary though' from Thin, a 'Oh yeah you're right' realization, and a prompt 'Hey don't ruin my moment!!!' backhand from the ghost.

That's the kind of comedy Robot Girl's Dream has.

Robot Girl's Dream is, broadly, a very earnest and low-stakes game (even when you think it'd be otherwise), in a way that feels really charming to read through.

In the typical nature of character-raising games, the game is quite short (3 months of in-game time, a.k.a. About 90 Actions) and much wider than it is long, with more mini-arcs than you can dig through in a single run, each compact yet still resonant and mechanically rewarding.

The stories in this mixed humans-and-robots world tend to hit a sort of 'morning TV' vibe that you'd expect from a game with this artstyle and level of silliness - you'll see robots be jealous of humans' capacity for growth, kids causing fights they don't mean to and learning how to make up after them, romantic comedies, an alien whose entire personality is 'pink is the best', robots struggling with a loss of purpose, humans whose ambitions clash with their profession, one-sided jealousy, an idol subplot is there - it's a lot of things which I'd describe as 'the hits, but the hits are hits for a reason, especially when they're written with heart'.

The game, in its most dramatic plots, builds up some JRPG Lite beats (which I won't spoil but you will recognize as The JRPG Lite Beats), but the mechanical and story threat to you is ultimately minimal in a way that I hope encourages you to really explore through the game and not fret the details.

It kind of reminds me of Disco Elysium in that sense? Disco Elysium has a lot of moments where you narratively feel like you're wedged into a 'I need to do this or else I can't proceed' corner, but actually you're granted a lot more freedom to succeed or fail-flail your way through the plot than you think, and so you can really carve your own specific brand of Failman Harry.

Likewise in Robot Girl's Dream, generally things will Sort Of Work Out in a way that really suits the freewheeling nature of Thin Funny Moments.

This is good, because Robot Girl's Dream has a decent amount of mechanical chewiness in the combat section of the game that can be quite enjoyably challenging!

Naturally, robot combat is a large part of Thin's adventure to be The Best That Ever Was (or at least, better than Scarlet), and it's represented by an positional ATB-type turn-based combat system, where Thin and her opponents move left and right on a line and use various attacks with their own cooldowns, ranges, damage scaling, etc.

Randomness in combat is minimal, meaning that it ends up feeling quite puzzle-solving in a satisfying way - managing both your position and cooldowns so that you're able to be just out of range of a meaty attack, or so that you can take two action to quickly finish off an enemy before they heal, always feels extremely satisfying.

Battles are quickly and infinitely repeatable if you fail, allowing you to experiment with strategies, and you have a finite number of 'go back to the start of the day' retries if you need to re-equip.

The character-raising adventure-y bits tie into the combat in the ways you'd expect - finishing subplots and talking to people in general will grant you unique equipment and stat buffs.

I found that even after I found what I thought was My Favorite Easy Game build on my third run through the game, the various equipments I'd unlock by chasing different sub-plots would encourage me to chase different builds (alcohol-chugging brawler? fire-based sword spammer? long-range gunner?) and give me different combat textures I found refreshing.

Unlike a 'true' character-raising game, Thin does not really trade Time for Stats in the traditional sense - she can work jobs for money, and money means equipment, which means power in combat, but you'll be spending most of your in-game time selecting where to visit and who to talk to, and your strength will come from familiarity with the game over repeated runs giving you a better sense of what levers you can pull and who you want to prioritize talking to.

Robot Girl's Dream's secret charm point is that it uses its characters quite efficiently - everyone you fight in the Core Path of the game ends up being an NPC you can talk to and learn about outside of combat on someone's subplot or another, which makes the world feel quite full, and moreover, quite responsive to your choices (as you find out whenever Thin, in a typically Thin way, will nonchalantly reply 'Oh hey [name]' when meeting someone she's seen before in literally any situation).

Robot Girl's Dream is also a single-dev game in the most single-dev of ways - the character art style is absolutely charming to me, and the backgrounds have a simplicity that does not convey 'talent in drawing backgrounds' so much as 'the drive to make recognizable as much of the world as possible with simple expressions'.

Even the game's music - the most contentious part of the game, single track MIDI-like tunes that feel like noodling on a keyboard in a music store, often described as 'an experience that is unlike any other' - ended up growing on me in an inexplicable, part-of-the-world's-expression kind of way.

While I do not think the music should be described as 'good' in any objective sense, it is, undoubtedly to me, better than other music the game could have had. It would have been Better, yes, if the game had music that was Good, but I think this music is far more memorable and suiting the feel of the game than a lot of generic stock BGM. (I do think that good picks from Dova-Syndrome would probably narrowly win over this OST, though.)

There's something about this music that really underscores the Silly Goose nature of Robot Girl's Dream. Even when you're in the most JRPG of dramatic plot beats, as you go into a climactic battle against a major threat, the music will hit the goofy ahhh doots, and you'll remember - even if you lose here, things will probably be okay. Thin'll make it through.

This is a very personal point of endearment, but I'd like to also give praise to Robot Girl's Dream for somehow having a character naming scheme that is reminiscent of the Choro Q HG series, perenially cult classic CaRPGs (as in an RPG where all the people happen to be toy cars).

Most games tend to have 'normal names' for characters, and then Road Trip hits you with like Norkia, Eskan, Ranolfka, and Sorvass. Opening Robot Girl's Dream and meeting like Bestra, Mirrel, Rub, and Rade... it feels like childhood to me.

Robot Girl's Dream!!!! It's fun!!!! It's charming!!!! It's weirdly the right length to do an entire run of in one evening!!!! I liked it!!!!

Thanks.

Click here to continue reading a collection of my micro-posts about Robot Girl's Dream, from my playthrough.

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