Hello Kitty Island Adventure's City Town DLC makes the Wheatflour Wonderland expansion seem like a dress rehearsal
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is one of my go-to cozy games, but even I log in occasionally and struggle to know what to do. Besides waiting outside of Pompompurin's ice cream boat like a crazed fan, I've exhausted all the friendship quests and challenges that Friendship Island has to offer. The Wheatflour Wonderland DLC from last year certainly helped to reignite my love for my Sanrio pals, but eventually I found myself with few quests to complete there too. Which is where the game's newest DLC, City Town, comes in.
City Town, much like Wheatflower Wonderland, is an extension of Friendship Island that brings an entirely new setting for you to explore and a new character to befriend. This time around, we're going with another one of Sanrio's most underrated yet most adorable designs: Usahana. This cheery, colourful bunny is the only character who lives in City Town when you arrive, which becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly when you realise that nothing really happens there.
All of the shops are locked and practically boarded up, and the streets are only inhabited by the occasional critter like rainbow caterpillars and what is essentially the Hello Kitty equivalent of pigeons. But it doesn't take long at all for the ball to get rolling and for you, alongside Hello Kitty and her friends, to start breathing a new life into the city. This involves completing a number of quests for different characters, which in turn slowly restores the shops which are manned by a variety of friends you've already made.
The quests to restore these shops aren't just one and done either. You slowly make your way through them across days at a time, meaning you can't just sit and rinse through all the content at once, which is usually what I find myself doing—especially with a game I already love so much. The pacing feels frustrating at first, since I just wanted to get my hands dirty and start rebuilding City Town, but after a few days I definitely appreciated that I had reasons to check in with the game each day.
Usahana's friendship quests act similarly, giving you one main story quest every couple of days (depending on how many friendship blossoms you've got stocked up) which helps the pacing of the DLC. It's definitely reminiscent of the start of Animal Crossing New Horizons where you just want to get stuck in but have to wait a few days for things like the Museum to be built, or the Town Hall, or even for your villagers to move in. But just like how I felt with Animal Crossing, those restrictions never put me off playing. If anything, it gave me more of a drive to play.
Unlike Wheatflour Wonderland though, City Town feels more like a tack on Friendship Island rather than its own standalone unit—but that's certainly not a bad thing. It expands the experience and gives you more to do and see each day, rather than being a location you mostly visit in the DLC and then again if you need to farm materials, like I found Wheatflour Wonderland becomes. City Town's setting really makes it feel like the world of Hello Kitty Island Adventure can become so much bigger than just the island itself.
Having really enjoyed the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC, City Town had some pretty big boots to fill, and it's safe to say that it achieves the goal. After playing through Wheatflour Wonderland, I felt like it would be a waste of potential for DLC's like this to not be the way forward for Hello Kitty Island Adventure, so it's nice to see that Sunblink clearly feels the same way. If anything, each time one of these DLCs rolls around it makes me feel more excited for what they might do next. After thoroughly enjoying the experience at hand, of course.