Controls that suck and more woes...
But to be honest, though having a bodyguard does makes the fights faster and means you take less damage, once you’ve forked out for him you’ll be so low on Rupees that you’ll have to spend a while fighting lesser baddies, making stuff with their remains and selling them just to get your cash levels up. This a crushingly slow process as you trek from the battlegrounds to your house, cook up the goods and then trek into town to sell them… nope, no quick jump to previously visited locations here, you gotta trek all over the place.Sure, controlling Tingle is easy enough, just use the d-pad but anything involving the touchscreen makes you wonder if your DS isn’t on the blink… Honestly, Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland is so unresponsive to touchscreen inputs that I pulled the cart out several times and tried a different game just to see if my DS wasn’t failing… but no, it really is the game being crap and, as a running theme, you can pretty much expect it to be unfairly crap too… and you’d be right.
How is it unfair? Well let’s start with the bodyguard. He follows you around supposedly to do you fighting alongside you… except that he never, ever starts a fight… not even when an aggressive monster attacks you. Nope, your bodyguard will just stand there and watch you get nine bells kicked out of you. You can control the cartoon style ball of dust that is your fight and glide it into him but the majority of the time you’ll be fighting alone for the first few moments… and seeing as everyone is out to have your Rupees and these are your health, this can be critical.
Controlling your bodyguard is supposed to be a case of toughing him with the stylus and then touching where you want him to go… except that he doesn’t do anything. He’ll look at you as if you’d asked him to explain string theory, then he’ll stand idly by whilst the hard as nails rock monster you wanted him to attack gives you a thorough pasting...
But it’s not just controlling your bodyguard that’s a problem. It’s everything involving the touchscreen that’s a problem in Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. Using items, for example, requires you to select them from your backpack and then touch Tingle to get him to use that item… except no amount of frantic prodding at the screen makes Tingle do anything… But just to really annoy you, if the item isn’t used in a short pace of time, it disappears! So all that hard work to make a health restoring broth is blown away as the broth you desperately need disappears before you can do anything with it… great.
And that’s the major problem with Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland; it’s not that everything costs Rupees, but that the game is so unfairly weighted against you that you’ll struggle to achieve anything. But, just as you get yourself set and start to collect a few Rupees, Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland has one last nasty trick to play on you. Remember that pool that you have to throw Rupees into to get to Rupeeland? Well, if you don’t regularly lob at least 500 Rupees in, it shrinks back down again… so all that adventuring and Rupee collecting has been in vain. Now if you haven’t yet ripped the cart out of your DS and smashed it in frustration then this last one is sure to have you reaching for your hammer.
