Hello Kitty Tamagotchi

I love my Tamagotchi Sanrio Meets, and I was really excited when I saw Bandai announced yet another Sanrio collab: the Hello Kitty Tamagotchi. Like most modern Tamagotchi brand collaborations, the Hello Kitty Tama is a Tamagotchi Nano variant. It was released exclusively to English-speaking regions on December 1, 2020.

Appearance

The Hello Kitty Tamagotchi comes in 2 shell variants, a white design and a red. The red shell is called “Favorite Things” and has little pixels of Hello Kitty’s favorite things on it: some milk, an apple, a toy airplane, a rainbow, a bumblebee, and her pet goldfish. The white shell is more simplistic and has whiskers and a red bow, like Kitty herself. I personally slightly prefer the white shell design, so that is what I ordered.

Hello Kitty Tamagotchi size comparison with the Meets and Entama

This is my first Tamagotchi Nano, and I was surprised at how small it is. The buttons are approximately 1/3 the size of that of the Meets. The buttons are much more ‘raised’ than that of other Tamagotchis, which makes them a little easier to press. I do appreciate this design detail, but even with the extra height, I think the average adult will find the tiny buttons difficult to handle sometimes.

Despite the small size of the device, the pixel art is relatively large and clear. I found all of the pixels to be super cute. I especially like the character Close Ups.

Mametchi performing his Close Up

The sound on this device is probably my favorite of any Tamagotchi I have owned. The beeps sound more retro/8-bit compared to that of the Meets, but have a clearer, more satisfying quality compared to older Tamas. I especially like that when you clear a minigame, it plays a little 8-bit rendition of the Hello Kitty cartoon theme song.

Gameplay

Like me, you may have heard “Hello Kitty Tamagotchi” and assumed the device would center around raising Hello Kitty herself, but you would be mistaken. Actually, Hello Kitty acts more as a co-parent with you in adopting and raising a Tamagotchi. It’s kind of a weird concept, but very cute!

The gameplay for this device is very simplistic. The Tamagotchi only has 2 growth stages: baby and adult. The type of adult it evolves into depends on its gender as well as how well you take care of it. The Tamagotchi has 2 meters: Happiness and Hunger. Happiness is raised by feeding it milk or playing minigames, and Hunger is raised by feeding it apple pie. There are 2 different minigames:

1. Piano game: Similar to a rhythm game, you must press the buttons as hearts fall to the left, middle, or right side of the screen. I found the difficulty to be very good on this game, not too easy but not too difficult either. My favorite minigame of the two.
2. Balloon game: Help Hello Kitty fly through the sky by avoiding birds. The controls for this are pretty much identical to Balloon Kid for the Game Boy, which leads me to an interesting digression… Apparently, there was a Japan-only port of Balloon Kid called Hello Kitty World which used Hello Kitty sprites. That means that the Hello Kitty Tamagotchi, an English-only release, includes a reference to a Japan-only game (Hello Kitty World), which was in fact a remake of an English-only game (Balloon Kid). Weird, right?

After your Tama evolves into its adult form, it can receive a bow from Hello Kitty. The conditions to receive the bow are not clear, but it seems to be related to how many times you have cleared the minigames.

Overall, the gameplay for this device is extremely easy. In fact, one time I misplaced mine for a full 24 hours, and by the time I found it, it was still alive! I think if there is any difficulty to be found, it’s in getting the “average care” characters. On my first run I felt sure I had made a lot of care mistakes, but I still ended up with Mametchi (a “perfect care” character). You would need to be purposely neglectful to get some of the other characters.

Conclusion

Overall, I don’t think I will be running this Tamagotchi very often, as I find the gameplay a bit too simplistic. I will add that it is nice that it only takes 24 hours for each Tama to evolve, in case I ever feel like a quick playthrough. I also really like that it features some classic characters that we don’t see in other modern releases, like Mimitchi and Pochitchi.

Even though I don’t think I will be playing with it very often, I am glad that I bought the Hello Kitty Tamagotchi. I think if you are a Tamagotchi collector who also loves Hello Kitty, you will definitely enjoy it. I would not recommend this to somebody as their first Tamagotchi, as I feel the gameplay is a bit too simplistic and doesn’t offer the full Tama experience. The Tamagotchi P1 and P2 re-releases are the same price ($20 USD) but offer more features; I would recommend those to a beginner instead. If you aren’t interested in Hello Kitty at all, I would probably skip this release, unless you are a hardcore collector.

Let me know in the comments what you think about this Tamagotchi. If you enjoyed this review, please also check out my Tamagotchi Sanrio Meets review here.