Second pass with the 2024 Tamagotchi Connection
I've been keeping my 2024 Tamagotchi Connection alive again for a few weeks now.
The first time I was keeping it alive, last year, it was still novel to me and I didn't much mind that I kept getting bad Tamagotchis. I am not particularly diligent or good about keeping these guys alive. They got to adulthood every time, but they're often "low quality guys" - "Tier 4" tamas.
Tamagotchis are games about avoiding making mistakes. The device keeps track of the number of times you miss an alarm, or let your Tama's meters deplete. These mistakes gradually direct your creature's evolutionary progress down to lower "tiers" in the growth chart, which I recommend checking out. Fans have figured out the exact rules which determine what happens to a Tamagotchi as it ages. For the 2024 Connection, the rules are fairly complex and involve a series of health categories which Tamagotchis can move between as they age.
But the Connection is not just about raising one baby at a time - it's about raising a lineage of babies. Not only do you have to succeed at nearly every point during a Tamagotchi's development in order to get the best Tamagotchis, but that Tamagotchi also needs a blessed bloodline. It cannot achieve the highest tier adult state (called "serious," for some reason - as in, the Tamagotchi's personality is serious?) unless its parents were also at least fairly high tier.
This means that the fate of a Tamagotchi is definitely controlled by the circumstances of its birth, and that every time I raise a bad Tamagotchi, I am dooming its children as well.
Tamagotchis are, in the end, a game with wins, losses, and even points. And they are mostly about hitting timer challenges to avoid a bad outcome, not about actively engaging with a minigame or other activity to to push the Tamagotchi toward a good outcome.
I have been glad to play this old toy again - it's giving me a lot of ideas about what I'd like in a virtual pet, and I've kind of always intended to someday make one of those games myself. I am having fun, but I actually tend to prefer the old school Digimon virtual pets, and this experience has just confirmed that for me.
Digimon do, actually, allow you to play towards strong Digimon, not only pass alarm tests to avoid a bad outcome. I have two modern Digimon rerelease toys at home right now, which I can't access due to the construction in my unit. Both of them have a training minigame that the player can perform to increase the strength of the Digimon and improve it toward a "best Digimon" outcome. One of them is the Digimon 20th anniversary edition, which has a growth chart of its own you can access here - it tracks "care mistakes," like Tamagotchis do, but it also tracks how many training minigames you need to complete in order to evolve each one. It's also got a whole bunch of weird critters you can get by connecting to other players or getting weird achievements.
This is just an idle thought, but I think my ideal virtual pet toy would involve not only something passed down from parent to child, like with Tamagotchi Connection toys, and not only qualities that the player can push toward with active play, like with Digimon, but also something that the critters build or make on their own across generations. Something independent of them, which exists in the background or as a persistent state. I've been told that something adjacent to this exists in the most recent Tamagotchis, which I haven't played yet - nor looked up much, to avoid spoiling myself. But in my imaginary perfect virtual pet, even the cursed, poorly-bred, "low-tier" animals are contributing to something.
Not only because something that would make me feel better about my mistakes... but because it seems to me like a better realization of the fantasy that "a lineage of critters" promises in the first place!