Like I'm sure you all remember from the time I reviewed the arcade game Attack Plarail in 2018, that Plarail is Tomy's line of Plastic Railway toys, which, from an outsider's perspective, seem geared more towards easy, fun creativity and play value, as opposed to the more realistic trains of western companies like Hornby, which are made for hobbyists to gradually create and permanently install miniature villages and counties in their houses. That was all one sentence! Sorry about that. Anyway, here's a home console game based on the same toyline, and apparently made by just Tomy, without the assistance of a more established videogame name like how Namco worked on Attack Plarail.
Being a home game, it also has a much wider scope and more ambition than its arcade predecessor. Attack Plarail had you just driving a train along a few premade courses. Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is essentially a whole plarail ownership simulator, and while it does have some pre-made courses, the real meat of this game is that you get to build your own! The way in which this is implemented has some positive and negative aspects, though. And to be fair, some of the negative aspects might be under exacerbation from my Japanese illiteracy.
There's two modes to choose from when you load up the game: on the left is train driving. It's actually a lot simpler than most arcade train driving games like Attack Plarail or Densha de Go, as you only really have to control the speed of the train and there's no fail condition as far as I can tell. There's lots of buttons to do things, like sound your horn or flick switches on the train dashboard, but it's not clear what, if anything, any of these things do. on the right is construction mode, where you'll be spending most of your time with this game.
First, you'll pick a map. I don't really see much reason not to pick the biggest one, as you start with the same amount of stuff no matter which you pick, and more space to play in is better, right? Once you're on the map, the first thing you should do is pick up all the stuff that's placed there by default. It'll go into your inventory, so again you'll have more to play with, and for some reason, I just could never get the prebuilt stuff to link up with the stuff that I'd built, which was frustrating. Anyway, you've got various things to place around the map as you see fit: tracks, stations, trains, etc. There's straight and curved tracks, as well as bits of track that are higher at one end than the other, to reach higher or lower altitudes (there's nine levels of elevation in the game). You've also got buildings and trees to place around to make the world look less abandoned, and you can even build a whole road network to go alongside your rail network, and put cars on it too!
One thing you'll quickly notice in this mode is that you don't start with a lot of the scenery stuff to put about, and it also feels like you don't have as many of certain kinds of track as you might like. But luckily, there's a bit of extra customisation available, as there's an ingame catalogue full of stuff in every category to persue and order from. More tracks, more varieties of track, new trains and cars, lots more different types of buildings and trees, and so on. This is where I found one of the points where the language barrier might be getting in my way, though: you start with a hundred coins, and to be fair, this can actually get you a lot of stuff from the catalogue.
But I have not yet found any way to get more coins, so the stuff you buy on a particular save file is, as far as I can tell, all you get, and if you want to build something different or use a different train or whatever once it's gone, you'll have to start a new file from scratch. Once you've built and saved your track, you can, most excitingly, go back to the main menu, select the driving mode, select the map on which you've been building, and drive around the little world you've created! I assume this must have been the game's big selling point when it was released.
If, as I suspect, I am just being a wrong idiot, and someone reading this knows better, please let me know. Or alternatively, if you know better and I actually am right and this game has an oddly stringent limit on the amount of stuff you can have in a single save file, also let me know. Either way, as it appears to be in my eyes right now, Plarail Yume ga Ippai! is okay. It's a decently distracting way to spend a couple of hours, even with those limitations. A quick look at prices seems to suggest that they fluctuate wildly, but it emulates perfectly well, even on my aged preowned laptop (and you never know with PS2 games: I can play some pretty busy 3D games at full speed, but the 2D Street Fighter Alpha collection is a slideshow. Which is very annoying, I hear you can play Alpha 3 with SF3-style parrying, which sounds great).
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