Sometimes, I wonder if people would have better lives if we just let nostalgia remain nostalgia. We, as a species, love to wax poetic on the good old days, on how things used to feel and taste and smell. Some of it is fairly relevant: I haven’t seen an actual night sky since The OC was on the air, and The Pirates of Dark Water remains a top tier Western animation. But going back to some of the shows, movies and games of my childhood remind me they aren’t actually that spectacular, just a cornerstone in my memories that I should probably leave where they are to help maintain stability. Milano’s Odd Job Collection was, more than likely, no one’s fundamental game for their developmental days, but the clamoring of fans has gotten this cute but confusing simulation released for the first time in the West.

Nowadays, sim games tend to be so detail-oriented and fine tuned that you can get lost in the minutiae for hours at a time doing the simplest task. That is not the case for Milano Italy, who is left home alone for forty days and nights, and she’s a child, so it thankfully has nothing to do with the extremely problematic movie from 2012. Instead, Milano wants to take this opportunity to show how responsible she is and to prove to her parents what she can do. Over the course of a month and a half, Milano is given a variety of choices for what she wants to do in the daytime, in the evening and right before bed. There are stats to mind, money to be accumulated, and an unknown barrier of excellence that you’ll be judged on without any prior indication to how you’re doing. Fun!

Overlooking the fact that our main protagonist is actually called Milano Italy and I didn’t just imagine the most racist strike against Italians possible, Milano’s Odd Job Collection is a passably interesting concept that does have roots in some old school Japanese ideas. A child does get saddled with more responsibility earlier on, usually under the guise of preparing them for adulthood or at least relieving some of the burden on the parents. The advent of smartphones has made it even easier to just let your younglings go run wild out in the streets with at least less fear of them being abducted, but that’s not really a concern for Milano. Due to the parameters of the game, we don’t even see Milano attempt to go to school during this time period. It’s just wake up, go to some kind of work, return home and do nothing in between.

The work that Milano undertakes is subject to weather and skill influence, so you can’t immediately jump into being a nurse or a delivery driver. Instead, you develop experience through doing certain mini game feats of labor, like washing dishes in a restaurant or milking flying cows on a ranch. These moments, by the way, give us a glimpse into Milano’s world and some of the oddities that never really get mentioned. Why are there anthropomorphic animals and various beasts running around? How did we domesticate flying cows? Why can you hire a stray child to work in a hospital with only “I decorated a lot of cakes” as her credentials? It’s incidental, but it still speaks to an overall design choice that doesn’t ever get resolved or even addressed, which is further perplexing.

Also, the jobs of Milano’s Odd Job Collection, which you can imagine are integral to the game, have a bizarre difficulty curve. On the one hand, most of your experience with the main game will be a pretty basic one, as each job is a straightforward mini game. Delivering pizzas is Excitebike with a higher speed ratio, washing dishes is a QTE with some joystick movement, and even the most challenging job, pop idol, is an overly simplified rhythm game. Over the course of the main game, I couldn’t figure out how to amp the difficulty level, forcing you to always do the easiest mode. While this makes the gameplay easy, it also results in the lowest rewards from your efforts, so being able to buy goods and fun stuff for the home is a massive grind, especially with the limited timeframe.

 

The games themselves are also a mixed bag. Serving food at the fast food restaurant and washing dishes are just mindless repetitive motion, so they can be done quickly but are far from interesting. The hospital gig, where you have to cure diseases in a short amount of time, has some good ideas but poor execution: seeing how many times you can mash the A and B buttons without overlap isn’t what I’d consider optimal health care. I probably mixed the cows the most because I could do it fast and skillfully, but I did the idol singing as many times as I could because it paid well. The idol job is considered a “secret” path, so you can’t find it until certain conditions are met, which we’ll get to in just a moment.

If you want to showcase your mini game skills, though, you can do the different activities individually after you beat the game once, and here you can adjust the challenge level. Everything after the lowest level is substantially more difficult, with the highest setting being outright impossible for every single chore. Milking a single flying cow while dodging miscreant farm beasts? No problem. Actively dodging several groups of critters running in opposite directions with a crazy high target for your score? Why, that’s a nightmare come to life! I really enjoyed the mini games within the main story mode, so the arcade aspect felt both unfulfilling and like a misguided attempt at making the game replayable from a different angle.

The design of Milano’s Odd Job Collection hits that older anime aesthetic that I love so well, and fans of the characters you’d see in Oh! My Goddess! or the original rendition of Ranma ½ may be delighted by how Milano and her world are drawn and colored. Since this is a PlayStation 1 era title, there’s a fair amount of animation for all of the tasks, be it working at her arubaito or doing chores within her home. Milano looks and sounds delightful as she washes the laundry, feeds the cat, calls her parents or makes a wish on a shooting star. It’s a truly charming display of character and her own livelihood, and it calls to attention why this title was a cult classic among the Japanese audience, and why there was such a call for a Western localization.

As an aside, I fully recognize there may have been licensing rights or an inability to come to an agreement with the original voice actress, but it is a little disappointing that you only have English audio for fans playing this newly released port. Kayli Mills does an excellent job portraying the bubbly energy and positive thinking of this seemingly immortal child (more on that in a moment), and her performance is optimal for a modern English adaptation. However, the very situation that Milano is encountering is distinctly a Japanese trope, and I would have loved to continue to hear the different elements, particularly the musical number, done in Japanese. It doesn’t detract from the overall game, but it is a little bit of a letdown.

Having said all that, Milano’s Odd Job Collection can only truly be enjoyed as just that: a collection of weirdness to be played at any given time. The main story mode, frankly, is esoteric in its requirements and expectations. There are clear metrics about Milano’s energy and intelligence, but there’s some kind of underlying stat that I could not figure out and lead to the game disappointing me in a huge way. On my first playthrough, I made sure I did everything right, from my perspective. Milano ate and drank at regular intervals, the cat was fed, the house was tidy, I called my family to check in, bought some good upgrades to the house, and did almost every job. As the dystopian horror film Zootopia encouraged, I tried everything.

Trying everything also means hanging out in a park and then being approached by someone claiming to be an agent and wanting to sign me up to become the newest musical sensation. I don’t have to explain why this is both bizarre and deeply unsettling, right? We can all agree, even in a suspended world of disbelief, that you shouldn’t trust anyone who goes up to an unattended preteen in the park and announces they’re going to whisk you away to a brand new career where you’ll be adored and loved by everyone. Even if 90s Japan didn’t believe in stranger danger the way the West did, Perfect Blue already existed and should have told every developer in the world don’t recruit young girls off the streets with promises of stardom. Still, if you want that hidden achievement, better hang out in abduction zones!

So I did all of this, put in my hard work, expanded my cooking repertoire to all the recipes available, learned the frigging violin, and had the house ready for when my parents returned with my new baby brother. Which, great, not only did you abandon your girl child for over a month, you returned with the new mini patriarch of the family, because I know how life in Japan is. Fine, whatever. But there was a concerted effort to be the very best I could and not spend too much money and show that I did something over the 40 days, and my reward was a D. As in the letter grade D. As in “if we could have failed you, we would have, but the teachers think you actually tried so we’ll roll our eyes and barely let you pass onto the next grade.” 

I couldn’t believe it. If all that work was just scraping by, what would the opposite look like? So my next run of Milano’s Odd Job Collection was the antithesis of a good job. I didn’t clean, cook or do anything at home. Every day I went to the park, ate popcorn, and came home and went straight to bed. Once, for fun, I worked in the restaurant and smashed every dish that was handed to me. My target was to wash 20, and it added plus one every time a dish broke. My final total was 58 and I was given zero dollars. The laundry piled up. Nothing was ever vacuumed. I ignored my parents. The cat ran away after nine days. Somehow, I only ever ate a neverending bag of popcorn in the park and got fourteen hours of sleep a night. I was an absolute mess.

In the mind’s eye of the developers, if you aren’t able to perform exactly to the imagined specifications they have in mind for you, the elder daughter of the family, it’s the same as literally doing nothing and letting everyone down on purpose. It was better for me to fret away almost the entire summer, learning nothing, reading nothing, in no way advancing myself or the world around me, than to try and not succeed by the parameters that were unknown, because at least time passed more quickly when I wasn’t trying. I want to say it was devastating, but, at that point, I was so nauseous from eating popcorn and humming to myself for 39 out of the 40 days (can’t forget my day of plate smashing!) that I vomited all over the new baby. Not really, but that’s my headcanon for what occurred during the credits.

Simulation games nowadays may be incredibly granular and pithy, but the end results tend to be very satisfying for people locked into the builds of their characters, cities or vehicles. You develop something of which you can be proud. Milano’s Odd Job Collection is eight mini games slapped together with a deeply unhappy backstory that gives nothing to the players at the end of the day, and serves no purpose in helping you develop a connection with anyone in the story. The parents suck, the town sucks, and Milano herself is either deeply brainwashed by the world as a whole or just knows that she doesn’t actually matter in the trajectory of her world. It’s a cute game, sure, but the undertones paint an unhappy and tragic tale that can only get worse now that her time alone is over.

But hey, at least we finally got this nightmare released in the West, right?

Graphics: 7.5 While the sprites are rooted in PS1 era design, they still pop and look fresh on modern displays. The older anime aesthetic speaks to the cute, timeless nature of the world and intended vibe.	Gameplay: 4.5 Limited choices for daily activities lead to sacrifice and overly careful decisions of what to do. Mini games are far too easy in story mode. Success parameters feel obfuscated. You can do the whole 40 days in as little as fifteen minutes.
Sound: 8.0 Genuinely cute voice work that’s peppered in just enough. Solid performance on the musical number. AAAtmospheric soundtrack insists upon the lighthearted motif of Milano’s world. Lack of Japanese voice choices was a bummer.	Fun Factor: 3.0 Try your best, work your hardest, and if you fail our expectations, which we will not tell you, it’s like you didn’t try at all. Milano should have run away from home.
Final Verdict: 5.0

Milano’s Odd Job Collection is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5 and Xbox Series One X/S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Milano’s Odd Job Collection was provided by the publisher.