Game Zone: Let's Talk Jellyfish
- Jellyfish: The Healing Friend (2000)
The PS1 always provides, and today's venture brings us a full-fledged jellyfish breeding simulator. Unsurprisingly, it's a Japanese exclusive yet the core of the game is rather simple to understand. It's one of those games that is much more helpful with the manual included, so if you can find it online or score a physical copy, I would recommend it.
How the game works is you pick from three different routes with their own characters and stories and through circumstance, the respective characters buy a jellyfish aquarium. Your goal then is to feed and raise the jellyfish these characters picked in the ideal tank environment. In practice, they grow big enough to start breeding and create more jellyfish. The game is graceful enough to keep it low-stakes, enough so that you could almost treat it as a screensaver. Provided you take the time to read the manual, you keep your jellyfish pets spinning around the screen at a steady speed, feed them at your discretion, and micro-adjust the temperature to a sweet spot. Once you're done, you can manually advance the timer to the next day or keep it as a nice background while you do chores. If you're a fan of virtual pets like Tamagotchi, this is a PS1 version of that.
One of the various cool features is the ability to swap the disc for a music CD to play over the screensaver experience. It's one of the few non-music games that allow you to do this, which was a big surprise for me. You can also change the color and background of the tank, customizing your screen to flash like a rave or bathe you in simple blue bliss. If you thought no story was involved, think again! There is some story thrown in as your little guys grow, but it amounts to getting a new jellyfish for the tank. There are three story paths involving different people who start caring for jellyfish out of circumstance. The cutscenes involve trivia related to jellyfish, and this is where the Japanese language barrier is most visible. While I won't say you can completely ignore this seciton, these storylines feel like a side-dish to the main game.
I've written a lot of what the game is and how it works, but not much about my personal thoughts and experience. For a game like this, I think knowing what you're doing is essential to getting the full experience. Yet, I've never played a PS1 that was so hands-off to the point that I could step away and do other activities like read a book or write a blog about this (I'm watching it on the screen of my modded PSone). It seems intentional that they expected this and added a music CD swap option so that the console wasn't a sitting duck. Even so, the in-game soundtrack is a wonderful mix of MIDI and dated new age sounds that perfectly matches the quirkiness of watching jellies glow on the screen.
I'm glad a game like this exists, even if it's only a curiosity that won't ever merit a fan translation. As an enthusiast of weird and experimental game oddities, Jellyfish: The Healing Friend presents a unique concept in the virtual pet sim space you won't see anywhere else. While it's not winning any favors with the low bar of content and play, it's creative and very pleasant as a background piece.