Milano’s Odd Job Collection Review (Switch)

Hmmm, I’ll buy that…and that…oooo definitely that.

There are a handful of Japanese games that I wish would someday get localized, some of them being more difficult than others. I didn’t know about Milano’s Odd Job Collection before the English release was announced, but hey I’m not complaining. This game looked really cute in its trailer and I was in the mood for a minigame compilation game. So, let’s dive right in to Milano’s Odd Job Collection and see if it still holds up today.

In Milano’s Odd Job Collection, we join a 11 year old girl named Milano whose summer break is just about to start. However, whatever plans she might have had gets thrown out the window as her parents tell her some news on the first day of summer break. Her mom needs to be at the hospital for the whole duration and her dad is going to be busy with work so they send her off to Zucchini Town to stay with her uncle. Except…when she gets to her uncle he’s also gone. Her uncle decided to take a trip (or still go on his trip depending on if he planned it before Milano’s parents called him) and so Milano is going to be home alone for the whole duration. Milano takes it like a champ though. Even though we see her panic a little bit when she first heard she won’t be spending summer break with her parents, she actually sees being home alone at her uncle’s as an opportunity. Milano, the cute kid that she is, sees this as her being the “grown-up” and a way to surprise her parents and show them how helpful she is.

So, during the 40 days that make up her summer break, Milano decides to take up various odd jobs (heh) to make some Pril (the currency here). Granted, she uses the Pril to buy cute furniture items for her uncle’s place, who must be a minimalist with how few furniture pieces he has, but hey she’s having fun and that’s all that matters. It may not have been the summer break Milano was envisioning, but it certainly will be a memorable one. Especially with the surprise that she gets when her summer break ends.

The story here is pretty cute and I don’t mind how it’s used more to frame the game. Although, I still can’t get over the adults here. The uncle knows his niece is coming, but still goes on a trip. If you pick the call action while home, Milano’s parents know that she was left alone. At that point her dad might as well take Milano back home since she’d be home alone either way (just instead of it being the whole time, it would be most of the time). I understand this is mostly just a culture difference, but it’s still pretty crazy that a 11 year old girl is home alone for 40 days straight. They’re lucky that Milano is a good, responsible kid where the only thing she did was buy more furniture for her uncle’s house as it could have easily gone in a different direction. Nonetheless, I’m happy that Milano had a fun time and it does seem like she’ll look back on this summer break more fondly rather than remembering how worried she was over her mom and suddenly being faced with being home alone.

Now going into the gameplay! Each day in Milano’s Odd Job Collection is split up into three parts, dictated by the three different parts of the day, which will have different actions you can have Milano do and all actually feed into one another.

First off is the daytime and this is when Milano will be working one of the various odd jobs that can be available for her. What jobs that will be available will depend on the day, weather, and her stats, but there will be at least two jobs to choose from. Also, don’t worry, the jobs are pretty easy to get the hang of. There are 8 total odd jobs for Milano to do all featuring a different minigame for you to do. Each odd job will have a quota for you to do before the shift is over. If you finish and have time left over, that will be added as a bonus on top of Milano’s base pay. However, if time runs out you won’t even get paid. So what odd jobs are available to Milano? I decided to group these odd jobs up so let’s get into them!

Wanna help with food production? Going to the Ranch will have you wrangling up some flying cows, or moogans, so you can milk them. However, moogans aren’t the only ones here as a green animal called a trampoli will be chasing a chicken-like animal, also known as a cocco. The presence of a trampoli caused all the cows to fly into the air so you have to jump, catch their udders, and bring them down to milk them. Of course, you also have to dodge the trampoli yourself. The orchard will task Milano with gathering fruit from their trees. Of course, it’s not that easy as instead of picking them, you’ll be waiting until they ripen and fall down which will hopefully be into Milano’s basket. Each different fruit has its open falling pattern and all you have to worry about is making sure the fruit will land inside the basket and not hit the rim. Well, okay, I lied there is one thing to worry about. Bombos, which basically are like bees, will occasionally fly down and you have to duck to dodge their stings.

Want to help with making or handling the food off? You can work at the pizzeria to deliver a hot pizza to a waiting customer using their scooter. You just have to be speedy while also being careful of nearby cars and traffic cones. Luckily, you just need to worry about the time and not the state the pizza must be in cause, oh boy, do I hit a lot of things whenever I play this one. You can go to the burger joint and serve some fast food to the customers. Milano here gets put in charge of the front as she’ll take the customer’s order at the cash register and just grab what they wanted behind the counter. This is a minigame where you put your memorization skills to the test, which you can look at the order for as long as you want before going to get their food, while also dealing with the timer (or patience) that each customer has. Then there’s the bakery, which is one of my favorite odd jobs. At the bakery, Milano will actually be making the various baked goods here which is pretty cool! The minigame here is a simple block matching one as you need to match two or more of the same ingredient to make the baked item tied to it, like strawberries to make a strawberry cake. You can shift the blocks in each row to line up the ingredients to match them, which can either be ones in the same row or spanning multiple columns, and more blocks will fall down every couple seconds. However, you can’t keep a row full as a new block can and will crush the block on the bottom and spawn in a germ, which you can’t get rid of unless you match it with an ingredient with the same color block as it.

These next ones are the ones that are helpful to others. You can actually work at the hospital where Milano will help cure patients. This one is a collection of four different button matching minigames that the game will randomly throw at you. There’s one where you just need to press the buttons on screen from left to right, there’s one that’s right to left that also doubles as a memory game which gives you the buttons at random before hiding them, one where you get a whole bunch of buttons and you have to be precise with how much you press each button for (don’t worry, they get eliminated randomly in the virus’ mouth), and finally one where the buttons will quickly fly across and you have to press it before it makes it to the other side. You do have to be quick and precise on these as the virus will regenerate if you’re too slow or not precise enough. You can go to the restaurant where you can help wash the dishes. You just have to scrub the dishes until they’re cleaned, but there are of course hazards. Sometimes a ladle will be flying your way and you have to either quickly duck or shield Milano’s head. And on top of the timer that is that shift length, but a background timer as the pile of dishes on the trolley are slowly inching to the edge and will fall down if you don’t finish the stack you have in time. Which will add 10 more dishes to your quota. Not to mention that if you’re too fast and try to put up a dirty dish as a clean dish, it’ll break and add another dish to your quota. Despite all that though, this one is also another favorite odd job of mine.

Lastly, is the one odd job that is the odd one out and is actually one that is a bit of a secret to unlock. The unlock condition for this one was spoiled for me and I didn’t mind, but I’ll put this one under spoilers for those that do.

Feeling like Milano needs a break? Well, Milano can also take a day off and chill at the park. Got some items that you ordered in? Well, you have to take a day off of work so you can use that time to decorate! You can also visit Town Hall to see your total earnings, overall and in each odd job, without wasting a day if you want to as well.

After Milano gets off of work, she’ll have the whole evening to relax and do whatever she wants to do. Though, for us, this means we can do two actions before it’s Milano’s bedtime. There are a total of 13 actions you can have Milano do while home during the evening, but you only start with 7 being available. The actions here are a mix of chores, academia, and just time passers. You can have Milano cook herself some food, which she starts out with two recipes but you can buy four more; brew herself up some tea to drink; have her wash her clothes, which you can actually see her clothes pile up in the laundry basket as days pass; and even clean up the place by doing some vacuuming. You can also feed your uncle’s cat, Pepelosa, and even have someone call so Milano can talk to her mom or dad. As you earn Pril and buy more items, the other 6 actions will unlock if you buy the item that’s tied to that activity. Buy a radio and you can have Milano listen and dance to some music (which also changes the background music of the house until the next day). Get a flower pot or two and Milano can water the plants that’s out on the patio. Craving some TV or video game time? Save up to buy a TV so you can watch one of the random shows that have a chance at being on and maybe a console so she can play a game. Want Milano to get a headstart on school? Buy a desk so she can study. And lastly, there are some instruments that you can buy and have her play (which she starts out as a beginner, but quickly becomes pretty good at).

You can have Milano head to bed early, but once you do your allotted two actions all you’ll be able to do is go to sleep.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to keep up with Milano’s health or anything. This is a chill game after all. You just have to keep up with feeding Pepelosa whenever she meows (or every four days) unless you want her running away. All you have to worry about Milano-wise is raising her stats, which this is a better time than any to mention them and how they play into the game as a whole. Milano has three stats that you can raise throughout your playthrough: Mood, Energy, and Skill. These are mainly raised in the evening and night as most actions you’ll have her do will grant her a stat point in the one that they correspond with. Like having Milano cook herself some food will raise her Energy. Mood and Energy are the two stats that are easy to raise, but Skill is the hardest one out of the three to figure out what action will let you raise it during the early-game. You can check out Milano’s stats during the daytime or evening without worrying about wasting time.

So what does her stats do exactly? Well, they feed into her daytime action! Mood will increase the length of her shift, allowing you more time to get to the quota and even give you a chance of netting a bigger bonus; Energy will increase the job variety; and finally Skill will allow you to select the higher difficulties for the odd jobs. There are five difficulty levels for each minigame and selecting a higher difficulty will make it harder through adding in another layer to it and a higher quota. This is a high risk, high reward type deal as while the minigame does get more difficult to do the higher in difficulty you go, Milano’s base pay will be higher and your bonus will have a higher multiplier. So if you find a minigame you’re really good at, you can make some bank.

Lastly, Milano can do one more action at night right before she goes to sleep. She can look at the item catalog and even order some items if she has enough Pril. There is a really good selection of items here and Milano sure does have some cute tastes. The catalog is separated by tabs for the different rooms and miscellaneous items and you’ll be able to buy various furniture to decorate your uncle’s house, smaller items that are purely decorational, and items that unlock an action for Milano’s evenings. If you don’t want to order anything, you can instead have Milano watch the night sky for a shooting star to wish upon and, if you’re lucky, one will happen. Depending on the wish you pick, it will raise Milano’s Energy stat, increase your luck to get an RNG based outcome on an action, or have good weather for the next day. Or, you can have Milano read a book until she falls asleep to raise Milano’s Skill stat. The book you choose is important as her stat will only raise if she doesn’t fall asleep while reading. I’ll just leave it to you to figure it out *wink*.

As Milano wakes up for the day, you’ll be able to save your game and this repeats until milano’s summer break is over. I didn’t mention this before, but the days here are also grouped up by fours. While you will always know what day you’re on, beside that you’ll see that each day of the week is also represented by a symbol. There’s four symbols that the game will loop through and it actually turns out to be a flower growing and blooming (I would say it’s the life cycle but it doesn’t visualize it dying or anything past it blooming). Which, honestly, is so cute. This is also important as there are some things that are only available on certain days, like how items are delivered to you on the bloomed flower days.

Milano’s Odd Job Collection does have some replayability. Each playthrough is about two and a half hours, it just depends on if you watch animations fully or speed them up, and at the end you do get graded by how well you did. I’m not sure what affects the grade, but I’m guessing it’s based on how much money you earned. You most likely will get a low grade on your first playthrough so you can use all you learned to make your next playthrough even better. And then maybe even figure out how to min max Milano so you can get the best grade. Plus, you can play more to buy different items than you did before or save up for that one big ticket item you really wanted but couldn’t get (like the grand piano).

Once you finish the game once, Arcade Mode will also unlock. Arcade Mode is basically where they tweaked all the minigames so they are effectively endless. Here, you’ll be challenged with getting the highest score you can before the time runs out. Each minigame still has a quota, but the quota is here to serve as a way to add time to the timer so you can keep going. The game does also have preset leaderboards so you can try to get to the number one spot even if you don’t have anyone around you to go up against.

Other than that, the Switch release does have built in achievements so you can aim to get all of them if you want to. They’re all pretty easy to get, especially once you know how to raise Milano’s Skill stat. There is also an art gallery where you can look at the various character sprites and even comics (both untranslated and translated).

I liked the gameplay here. It is repetitive by nature, with this being a minigame compilation and all, but I liked it. It’s honestly pretty charming and while I never played this game as a kid, it still does have that nostalgic feel to it. I liked all of the different minigames and how while they are pretty easy, it does take you one try to get the hang of it. I did also like how the difficulty was handled, even though there’s only one odd job I was able to complete at Level 5 difficulty. The odd jobs are really easy on Level 1, but they unexpectedly get difficult as you have more things to worry about and have to be faster. It is worth it if you’re able to complete the job on higher difficulties and man do I appreciate how the bonus multiplier is also raised alongside the base pay. All the odd jobs also have different base pay, but I honestly didn’t really pay attention to that haha. I also liked the other half of the gameplay where you’re choosing what Milano does at home which may raise her stats. It was a good idea to not have players worry about if Milano is starving or if she has cleaned clothes as it could have easily gotten overwhelming. Just needing to feel Pepelosa and worry about raising your stats was enough. That and having actions that you don’t get rewarded with a stat raise let this game have that cozy feel of being a kid during the summer. And it does have you figuring out what actions give you what and if something is random, a one time deal, or a couple times deal (which can be a bit hard to tell especially since you don’t get a notification once the stat is maxed). I also liked the item variety. I do wish there was more cute furniture, but granted you won’t be able to buy everything anyway and her uncle has limited space.

Oh and not to mention all the names for the big actions like the odd jobs or the evening were so cute. They really do give off the vibe that a little girl named them and how she must have been really excited. There are also some small details that I really liked here too.

So yeah, all in all I liked the gameplay here. It did well with balancing everything and keeping its grips in me until I finished my playthrough and even until I got graded an A for Milano’s summer break.

As for the negatives, I can see people not being happy with this being what I believe is an emulator based on the menu that pops up when you press the “-” button. This does allow the game to have achievements on the Switch, view artwork, have more settings, let you rewind, and do quick saves and loads, but I do wish this was told to us beforehand. The only way you’ll know is if you already know about the developers, Implicit Conversions, which I didn’t know about until I went looking to see if any press releases mentioned it being an emulated release. I probably still would have wanted to get this game, but it still would have been nice knowing that tidbit about this release.

This also means that the visuals here weren’t upgraded, which is a big shame that there’s some blurriness whenever you have the hand drawn artwork on screen. Which feels more out of place considering the side bars have crisp artwork and the art gallery does too. It is also a bit weird how the cutscene was updated with two English translations, the uncle’s note and the “I’m all on my own?!” text, but everything else was kept the same and you need to have subtitles on to know what the other untranslated text says.

To go on a more positive note, the visuals and sound here were great. Other than the blurriness, the artwork here is so good and cute. The art style here is super cute and makes me nostalgic for older anime that had similar art styles. The pixel artwork here still looks really good too, as well as the various animations. There’s two different pixel art styles here, one for when you’re doing the odd jobs and one for when you’re at home, and they both look great. I love how each job location looked, the map looked great, and I love how her uncle’s place was designed and the various furniture items you could buy. Milano is also super cute and I love all of the various outfits she can wear. The animations are also really great, smooth, and really charming. There’s also some really nice small details here, like how you can actually see what’s playing on the TV, the charm that Milano’s stat screen has, and how smoothly Milano’s blanket is animated when she goes to bed. Oh, and I did like how the side bar artwork changes based on where you’re at in the game.

The music here was lovely. It does really well with giving off the vibe of being a little kid during summer break while still having the tones of it being night time or a hectic shift on top. Which I feel also helps tell us that Milano is having a fun time despite the worry that she must feel about her mom. Not to mention that each job has music that fits it, making the minigames have another unique layer to them. I also appreciate that the song “Colors” was translated and sung in English. The sound effects were also good, they all were pleasant and fit with what they were attached to and weren’t annoying to listen to.

The voice acting here is honestly better than I thought it would be. The English voice actors did a great job here, especially Milano’s. They managed to find an English cast that sounded similar to the original Japanese cast, their lines were delivered wonderfully, and, more importantly, Milano’s casting was perfect. The cutesy voice that Milano has could have easily been on the annoying side, but it managed not to. She stayed the cute, endearing, and optimistic kid that she is. I think my favorite line delivery is when she says “Hi Mom/Dad” when you choose the “Call” activity in the evening. The way she says it is just so real to her situation and cute.

The performance here is, unsurprisingly, really good. I ran into no problems and everything did load up fast like promised.

Last, but not least, the translation. I honestly wasn’t too worried about the translation for Milano’s Odd Job Collection going in, but I’m happy to say that it’s really good here. I noticed no mistakes, everything was understandable, and it does feel like the charm was able to be carried over to English.

Verdict

Despite my reservations on this being an emulated port that wasn’t clearly disclosed, I did have fun with Milano’s Odd Job Collection. It’s a really cute and charming little game that I feel does still hold up both in the visual department and in the gameplay department. I do feel the price is fair, especially if you’re going to do multiple playthroughs and do Arcade Mode, but I definitely understand if you choose to wait for a discount. Nonetheless, if you want a cute and charming minigame compilation with a dash of light money/time management and stat raising, as well as a sprinkle of nostalgia, this would be a wonderful choice.