I was really excited to get to play with this one, and it didn’t disappoint! The Giga Pet Pixie fixed my main "issue" with the Giga Pets AR and added a whole bunch of new features to make it really stand out as a unique virtual pet! The instruction manual can currently be found online here.
Your new pixie briefly starts out as a baby before growing into a slightly more grown-up form. In terms of basic care, it’s similar to the previously released Giga Pets. You’ve got food and snack options, games to play, and can give your pet baths or send it to a doctor.
Normally I don’t have much to say about games in virtual pets; they’re often either button-mashers, left-right, or high-low games. In this case, the games are actually really fun and unique, and they get more challenging as your pixie grows up. One game has you racing against a wave of what from a burst dam, dodging some obstacles and banishing others with your magic. The second is a fishing game, where you catch fish for your troll friend. The third is a ring game where your pixie jumps from a cliff and attempts to fly through rings on its way to the bottom. The last one has you navigating a maze where you have to find the exit before the time limit. I’d really love to see unique games and the increasing difficulty implemented in future releases. Since they’re an important part of the overall gameplay, it’s really nice to see how fun and different they are compared to a lot of other virtual pets.
The biggest new thing here are the transformations and portion brewing system. As your pixie gets older, it can eventually change into different forms. Rather than being impacted by the type of care it’s given, its growth is based on different potions you can make for it. There’s an in-game growth chart that lets you see what type of pixie your pet is trending towards based on the potions you’ve given it. There you can also see a meter that fills up as you give potions to your pixie. You can give potions across multiple days, or give them to your pixie all at once when it’s finally old enough to grow into a new form. This meter can empty out if you don’t take care of it.
To get the potions you need to help your pixie grow, you’ll be implementing the magic and potion brewing systems! Winning games will earn you a clover while performing magic will earn you items related to the spell. The spells work like a little slot machine where you want to match up the symbols that correspond with the spell you want to perform. Each one works a little bit differently, so it’s important to pay attention to the way each one functions.
Once you’ve gotten your ingredients together, it’s time to start making potions! Here you’ll combine two ingredients in order to create a potion for your pixie. Only certain combinations of items will work, and if you choose the wrong combination the mixture will explode and you’ll lose the ingredients. Recording results is important, especially since you’re limited in the amount of potions you can make in a day. Your pixie has a new luck stat that resets to a base level at the start of every day. This will lower when you make potions, but can be raised again by giving your pixie a luck potion. It’s a really fun system.
The animation is definitely a high point. Your pixie has different animations for eating different foods, taking baths, going to sleep… It’s just so adorable to look at. Different types of pixies also feature different idle animations like tossing wands or disappearing and reappearing. I really want to see this level of animation continue into future versions.
This was just so much fun to play with! The Giga Pet Pixie quickly became one of my favorite virtual pets. It’s a little bit more expensive than the other types of modern Giga Pets, but not by much, and I think the unique gameplay and different growth patterns make it more than worth it. This is one that I can easily recommend picking up.
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