Well, last week I finally finished Gurumin (after about 11 hours or so)... which I played during my lunch break, my main time for playing portable games. I enjoyed the game, but it wasn't without its faults.
Not really much to talk about with the story... it was cute and gave me a bit of a Miyazaki vibe (the different monsters you interact with, which all have pretty simplistic, solid-color designs). Favorite of the monsters being Poco, the one who can't stop dancing, of course. Speaking of the monsters, I really liked how you would help them furnish their house, in an attempt to reveal more of the world (and unlock new levels)... gave a slight nonlinearity to the levels, if you were sick of fighting in Pimento Mountain and the annoying lava levels, you could take down a few levels of Eggplant Caverns.
The levels were cool, each of the areas were split into 5 parts (with part 3 being a boss fight), and had enough variety between them (a temple, a forest, a mountain of fire and ice, a crystalline cavern). Each individual section took about 20 min to get through (perfect for a portable game), and had a decent mix of platforming, puzzle solving (mostly of the push block variety), and fighting. I like how you get graded on your runs - the number of pots you smash, the number of treasures you find, your time, the number of times you died, and the number of enemies you killed... good hook for the OCD-set.
The main problems I had with the game were the camera - sometimes it would be too zoomed in, and other times it would obscure the enemies you're fighting, leading to damage (especially with some of the 'phantoms' who spit huge bolts of lightning at you, that you can barely see until its too late). Speaking of fighting, your hits lacked any sort of "oomph", and most of the big boss fights were spent by spamming the special moves (dodge, rotate the D-pad, and then attack). Finally, my last problem with the game was that some of the jumping sections were made extremely annoying, since after jumping, you can't see your shadow... this made gauging your jumps a pain in the ass, and towards the end of the game, there were some platformer heavy sections.
The game is only $20 now at GS/EB, and definitely comes recommended to any PSP owner looking for something new to play, as long as you can get over the shitty camera
