Oh!Edo Towns

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 56 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement.

When Oh!Edo Towns was released on mobile devices in the US in 2012, with ports to Nintendo Switch in 2019, PlayStation 4 in 2020, PC in 2022, and Xbox One in 2024, it chose the third style, and in fact, Oh!Edo Towns is even closer to a traditional city builder than Epic Astro Stroy was… and that’s kinda’ a problem, though I’ll get to this in a moment.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the forgettable music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, though by this point it’s nothing we haven’t seen in countless other games from this developer.

As noted above, this game has you managing the building and expansion of your town, taking place during the Edo period, the first time period where Japan left its Feudal era and stepped into its early modern era. Not being a Japanese historian, I cannot attest to how accurate this is, but for my uninitiated point of view it just seems to be a city-builder set in a time period in Japan before you’d see cars, guns, and any other Western influences (during this time period, Japan traded with China, Korea, and the Dutch, but only in a limited fashion).

As city builders go, this seems to have all the basic building blocks in place. You need to build residences for the citizenry, give them fields to work in and shops to trade in, and must connect everything via roads. Unfortunately, Kairosoft’s biggest major problem rears its ugly head here once again – there is far too much information the game doesn’t give to the player.

It’s not clear what each facility does or what other buildings it helps (save for a few combinations that you’re told will boost productivity). You’re not told what sort of range each building’s effect has. You’re not told how to attract new villagers to your city. At one point, I was given a castle to place and told that I only get one chance to choose its placement, but I wasn’t given any information on what criteria would make for better placement!

There’s another issue on top of this – as mentioned before, this is a straightforward city building game, and as such it doesn’t have any of the fun extra elements that were in Epic Astro Story – no adventuring to uncover new parts of the map, no sending your citizens out to other planets to bring back more settlers, none of that. In fact, that game did tell players the range that buildings affected, so in virtually every way this game feels like a step backwards from that.

As a result, I feel like the only ones who will enjoy Oh!Edo Towns are those who absolutely love this era of Japanese history and don’t mind getting a worse game just to enjoy a city builder set in that era. If that’s you, I suspect you’ll still wrangle some enjoyment out of this game, but everyone else has numerous better options to choose from.

tl;dr – Oh!Edo Towns is a Management Simulation where players manage an Edo-era Japanese town, building residences, fields to work in, and shops to trade in. It’s pretty basic as city builders go, and it’s made worse by mechanics that are poorly explained to the player, and an overall lack of information. If you absolutely must have a city builder set in a historic Japanese era, this will suffice, but there are numerous other better Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C

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