Gardening Mama 2: Forest Friends

Genre: Arcade / Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Gardening Mama 2, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2014, is one of multiple spin-offs of the Cooking Mama franchise, and as the title indicates, the focus here is on gardening rather than cooking.

That’s not to say that Gardening Mama is just Cooking Mama with a gardening skin, though. In fact, the gardening-themed minigames play a surprisingly small role here. Instead, these games divide their time with some light Management Simulation elements as you plant crops, maintain them, and then deliver them to various NPCs to get currency needed to progress.

In theory, this is all a fantastic idea, adding structure to the overall game to turn this into more than just a series of minigames. In practice, just about every element of this game is underbaked (perhaps fitting, since Mama is no longer in the kitchen). The management elements are extremely shallow and allow for little meaningful creativity or worthwhile decision-making. Meanwhile, they slow down the pacing of the game overall and make it take longer between minigames, which are not only not as entertaining as the minigames from Cooking Mama, but they often only very loosely have anything to do with actual gardening.

In fact, you could be forgiven for not realizing this game’s connection to Cooking Mama at all, if it wasn’t for the cartoonish presence of Mama herself on menu screens and through the tutorial, complete with her usual heavily-accented voice clips. She’s joined here by some other cartoony characters with very stilted-sounding voice clips, and with the game’s visuals overall using the same sort of colorful cartoony cel-shaded style as Cooking Mama 4, which is to say, extremely unimpressive.

Look, if you want a farming game, just get a farming game – there’s plenty of good ones on both Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch. If you want a Cooking Mama game, get a Cooking Mama game. But Gardening Mama 2 offers none of the good qualities of either of those things. As a result, I can’t imagine this game appealing to just about anyone.

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tl;dr – Gardening Mama 2 is a spin-off of the Cooking Mama franchise, but it not only fails at delivering satisfying minigames, it also fails at its attempt to package them in a Management Simulation. The result is an unripe disappointment.

Grade: D+

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