Livly Island, Japanese creature care sim! First impressions

Hello friends and Hive Gamers! Today I'm going to tell you about a new Android game that just appeared in Japan today, available outside of Japan through QooApp. This one is called Livly Island.

Livly Island is a creature-raising sim where you are given the task of taking care of a "Livly" on an island through an avatar called Hom. The gameplay is pretty simple -- you tap on your creature to see its needs (which are hunger and cleanliness) and then can take care of it one of three ways: feeding it, washing it, or making it poop.

And it poops gems that are the currency of the game called "doodoo." No joke.

At the beginning of the game, you're told to read a "terms and conditions" that includes silly things like "If you mispronounce it as Libly, you must immediately correct yourself." Then you're able to choose one of three different Livlies to adopt onto your island: an orange monkey, a grey-brown rabbit, and a blue mammoth-like thing.

You're also given a Hom, an avatar that can be dressed up and customized to live on the island with you. My Hom has a ladybug on their head.

In addition to customizing your Hom avatar, you also get to customize your island. There's a gacha system where you spend GP (which are earned very slowly though gameplay or purchased with real money) to draw avatar goodies or island goodies from set themes. There's quite a bit and you can really clutter up your island and make it stand out.

You even can customize your Livlies to an extent! Livlies eat bugs, and each bug you feed them alters their RGB values (you can see how much each bug changes each value) so you can custom color your Livly! It's a slow process, though -- you can only feed your Livly when it is hungry, and you have to find bugs by watering other players' trees with elixir and hoping they drop, or buying them with your doodoo. Since elixirs and poops are on a cooldown, you can't just spam them until you get the bugs you want.

Right now, I'm going for a yellow bunny and a black monkey. The black ants you need to drain RGB all by a little are quite rare/expensive so I'm probably going to be starving my monkey quite a bit so it can only eat ants. But the ladybugs and grasshoppers that raise R and G (while lowering the others) are the most common, so my rabbit is now a more bold brown color and hopefully will be more yellow soon.

You can have three Livlies to start, and can buy space for more with the premium GP. There's more than just the three starters, too -- there are others like a creepy black dog, a fuzzy alien thing, and a pink ram in a dress (???) that you can get by picking fruit from your tree and friends' trees. To get the rarer monsters, though, you'll have to find special trees from the gacha which give special fruit.

The game gives you a free 10-pull on the Island of Knowledge island theme, and enough GP to do another 10 pull on any theme you want. You also get a handful of normal-rarity gacha tickets to spend where you want, too. So you could reroll until you got the tree or whatever you wanted, theoretically. It wouldn't be too hard to tap through the tutorial to get to the point of freedom. Personally, I just went with whatever it gave me. I'm going to save up my GP until something really awesome comes along (like maybe a cool bird or bug Livly) and then try for that. I do like the black dog theme -- potions and electricity and glowing mushrooms and stuff, all on dark backdrops. And the black dog is cool. But I don't want to use all my GP and end up with nothing.

In the end, Livly Island is a neat and absolutely adorable little time waster, though since everything is on cooldown timers, you can't just play it whenever you want. You'll basically be checking in now and then, caring for your Livlies, and visiting friends to dump elixirs on their trees and hopefully harvest some fruits. But if you like cute stuff, it's definitely worth checking out. I've enjoyed my first day with it so far, and have racked up a dozen or so friends in the game, whom I can chat with using the personal message board system.

I don't think it would be too hard to play without knowing Japanese since all the menus have icons to show you what they do, and you'd just have to get used to those. The tutorial walks you through most of them and shows you what they do as well.

So if you like cute things and need something to tap on on your phone now and then when you're bored, check out Livly Island. If you wanna friend me, my in-game name is テオ and my island name is 髭. Have fun caring for your Livlies and let me know what you think!