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There are no reasons to consider picking up a copy of Tamagotchi Plaza, especially if you just got your hands on a Nintendo Switch 2.
Review info
Platform reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
Available on: Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch
Release date: June 27, 2025
It’s a basic collection of boring, uninspired minigames that all ultimately just boil down to hitting the same few buttons for minutes at a time. This is paired with a laughably tiny hub world, that’s conspicuously devoid of activities and an absolute nightmare to customize or upgrade.
It all feels like something that you would find in a free mobile phone game, not a $49.99 / £44.99 release for a brand new console.
Sure, the serviceable graphics and abundance of Tamagotchi characters might prove enough to entertain a very small child for an hour or two, but with games like Mario Kart World and recent Donkey Kong Bananza on the scene there’s no real reason not to spend your time and money more wisely and go for one of them instead.
Again and again
A spiritual successor to the Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop series on Nintendo DS, Tamagotchi Plaza is ostensibly about helping out in the various shops of a cute Tamagotchi town. This is accomplished through the completion of short minigames, of which there are 12 – one for each shop.
The first thing that you’ll notice is that none of them feature tutorials. You’re just expected to work out what you’re meant to do from the get-go, though this omission isn’t much of an impediment given just how simple the minigames are.
The first I tried involves cooking galettes (the flat, French pastry) by looking at an image of a customer’s desired order and mindlessly hitting buttons to bake the crust and fill it with the desired ingredients.
Accompanied by annoying sound effects which I later found can, mercifully, be turned off in the settings menu and protracted, overly slow animations, it becomes stale almost instantly.
The others are all a similar story: helping out in the personal gym, for example, involves spamming the shoulder buttons at a set pace, while the afternoon tea shop is simply dragging and dropping a few items on a table.
The only one that I find remotely entertaining was the dentist minigame, which has you drilling Tamagotchi teeth to weed out creepy little critters causing decay and even this just involved selecting options from a menu and hitting a button.
On the other end of the spectrum is the manga shop minigame, which is just nonsensical. You’re meant to design manga panels by dragging and dropping a few pre-made assets into position, but the scoring, measured on a scale of zero to three stars, doesn’t seem to correlate to anything other than how many characters you manage to cram on the screen.
If you keep grinding a particular minigame enough, you’re eventually offered the chance to upgrade it. This introduces some new options, which does break up the monotony somewhat, but takes quite a long time to appear and isn’t substantial enough to justify the effort.
Switch it up
There are three additional minigames exclusive to the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game too. They’re unlocked after you’ve spent some time in the initial 12 and utilize the Joy-Con 2 mouse control features. These are the strongest of the bunch, with the likes of the shuriken shop which has you using the Joy-Con 2 to aim ninja stars providing a few minutes of fun.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to redeem the overall package and is nowhere near as interesting as some of the neat hardware tricks found in software like Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour.
Best bit
There are more than 100 Tamagotchi characters here, with unique models and even the odd bit of dialogue.
Outside of minigames, there’s a small hub area to explore. Aside from the occasional conversation with another Tamagotchi, it’s empty and bland. You can upgrade it using currency earned from minigames, but progress is painfully slow and adding a few trees or the odd square here and there just isn’t worth the effort.
There’s also some light story content, centred around the protagonist being recruited to help improve the town so that it’s selected as the site of the Tamagotchi festival, but it’s basic and spread incredibly thin.
At the very least, I can say that Tamagotchi Plaza has no shortage of characters. There are more than a hundred Tamagotchis to discover, all with unique models that look quite nice. I just wish that this same amount of effort was put into literally every other facet of the game too.
Should I play Tamagotchi Plaza?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility
There are no accessibility features in Tamagotchi Plaza. In fact, there’s barely a settings menu at all. You can adjust the game’s volume (with separate settings for music, sound, and voices) and change the direction of the camera controls, but that’s it.
How I reviewed Tamagotchi Plaza
I subjected myself to more than four hours of Tamagotchi Plaza on Nintendo Switch 2, which is roughly four hours more than any reasonable person would play it for.
I tried every minigame in the package, and spent some time exploring the tiny world. I carefully evaluated the amount of fun that I was having at every juncture and compared my experience to my testing of other Nintendo Switch 2 games like Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World.
First reviewed July 2025
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dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
