The beloved, bucolic My Summer Vacation series breaks free from Japan
The release of charming adventure game Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation on Nintendo Switch this week may not seem like a momentous occasion in the annals of gaming — low-budget licensed titles rarely are. But like the recent Western debuts of Live A Live, Kowloon High-School Chronicle, or Moon, Shin-chan’s new release fills an important gap in the history of video games.
Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation is the first full-length game in the My Summer Vacation series to make it outside of Japan, where it’s known as Boku no Natsuyasumi. The cult-hit series about a 9-year-old running around the Japanese countryside making friends and catching bugs has never been released in English, and the series has lain dormant since the fourth entry came out on PSP in 2009. While Shin chan doesn’t bear the My Summer Vacation moniker, it shares the series’ same developer, director, setting, plot, gameplay loop, fishing minigame, hand-drawn backgrounds, and wonky time-progression mechanic. This is My Summer Vacation 5 in all but name and with a Shin-chan coat of paint.
The Summer Vacation games aren’t just another made-in-Japan obscurity; they were some of the most touching examples of the late-’90s turn toward daily life in Japanese game development. Globally, Shenmue, Animal Crossing, and Harvest Moonare the more well-known examples of this trend in console gaming, but in Japan the Summer Vacation series stood alongside them. With the release of the Shin-chan spiritual sequel, we’re getting a better picture of that creative moment.
Millennium Kitchen boss Kaz Ayabe based the Summer Vacation series on his own childhood romps in the rural countryside, the same font of inspiration that caused Yasuhiro
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