Go Vacation

A split screen view of four players having a water gun fight

Go Vacation is a party and sports video game.[1] Players explore four resorts located on the fictional Kawawii Island: Marine, City, Mountain, and Snow.[3] They start the game in the Marine Resort.[4][5] More than 50 activities, both competitive and co-operative, are available on the island.[6] These include bungee jumping, ice fishing, scuba diving, miniature golf, tennis, off-road racing, and snowman building.[3] Some minigames require or allow for the use of different controllers and accessories, such as MotionPlus controller or the Balance Board.[6] Winning some minigames unlocks more challenging modes.[5] The island can be navigated at the player's leisure by walking or riding on vehicles, the type of which depends on the resort,[4] and each resort also has certain places where players can fast travel to. In the Switch version, players are able to find and take photographs of animals that are scattered across the resorts, and find boxes with rewards in them.[1][7]

The Marine Resort, which contains coves and beaches, is themed around watersports, including beach volleyball, surfing, water gun battles, and Marine bike races.[8] The City Resort, which centers around extreme and leisure sports, is the second and smallest resort. It hosts games such as table hockey, pie-throwing, skating, and minigolf.[4][8][9] Players can use skateboards found throughout the resort to ride on skating rails.[4] The third resort, the Snow Resort, focuses on winter sports like ski jumping, snow tubing, snowboarding, snowmobiling, and snowball fighting.[4][8][10] The final resort is the Mountain Resort, where players can partake in outdoor activities. It includes forests and locations for rafting, kayaking, exploring, off-road car racing, and horseback riding.[4][8][11] It also contains a lake and a shooting park.[12]

Go Vacation can be played using a Mii or one of 284 avatars divided into eight categories such as "Grandmother", "Grandfather", "Boy", and "Girl".[12] Treasure chests containing outfits for the players' avatars are scattered around the resorts.[13] Players can create a virtual dog and a non-player character (NPC) to accompany them as they explore the resorts which, with some exceptions,[lower-alpha 3] cannot participate in minigames.[12] Up to four players can play together through local multiplayer.[13][14] Occasionally, NPCs may ask players to embark upon a small quest, such as getting an item and taking back to them.[15]

After playing 20 minigames, players gains access to their own virtual villas,[16] which can be decorated with furniture or photographs taken during the game.[13] Furniture can be found in the game's world or unlocked using "silver keys" that are obtained after completing minigame goals.[12][13][17] Furniture is gained in sets, of which there are 90.[12] Players can alter the exterior of their villas using "gold keys", earned by completing challenges.[13][17]

Go Vacation was announced at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3)[3] as the third entry in the We Ski series.[18] Namco Bandai Games began development of the game in 2009,[19] shortly after the release of We Ski & Snowboard because the developers felt they had not given players a "complete sense" of winter in the previous game.[20] When discussing ways to address this, the developers decided winter alone was not enough; they wanted to depict other seasons.[20] Producer Kenya Kobayashi wanted the game to focus on the experience of going on a resort holiday, rather than strictly focusing on the minigames themselves.[6] Part of the game's development was outsourced to other companies; the rest was done by Namco Bandai Games staff who had previously worked on the Ridge Racer series.[19] After realizing the word "vacation" is frequently associated with relaxation, Kenya Kobayashi named the game Go Vacation to clarify that it is a game in which you must be active.[21]

The resorts were not directly based on any real-life locations, although Kobayashi said the Marine Resort "might be inspired by things you find in Hawaii".[6] The developers conducted surveys in America, Europe, and Japan to determine what activities to include in the game.[6] The development team included 50 minigames in Go Vacation because most of the game's contemporaries included only 10 to 15 minigames.[19] Developing the controls for the game's vehicles felt like "second nature" to the development team due to their experience on the Ridge Racer series.[19]

Go Vacation was first released for the Wii in 2011, however the exact date of release vary depending on region. It released on 11 October in North America, 20 October in Japan, 4 November in Europe,[22] and 17 November in Australia.[23] It was later ported to the Switch. The port released on 27 July 2018 in all regions except for Japan, where it was released on 27 December.[24][25]

The soundtrack of Go Vacation consists of instrumental and vocal tracks from composers, musicians, and vocal artists, including Taku Inoue, Norihiko Hibino, Aubrey Ashburn, and Jody Whitesides.[26][27] On 21 December 2012, Japanese record label Sweep Records released the officially licensed album Namco Music Saloon, which includes live instrumentation and vocals.[26] The album consists of original arrangements of songs from other Bandai Namco Entertainment titles, including Ridge Racer, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, New Rally-X, and Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan.[26] The album was released on iTunes on 23 March 2013.[28]

Go Vacation received a mixed reception from critics; both versions of the game received "mixed or average" reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic.[29][30] Andy Robertson of Wired stated the game was one of his "go-to family gaming suggestions", calling it "a real treat".[18] Jim Sterling, writing for Destructoid, argued that "to call it bad would be unfair, but to call it anything better would give it more credit than it deserves".[31] The Wii version of Go Vacation was the third-best-selling game in Japan during its first week, selling 47,209 copies, behind both Macross F: The Wings of Goodbye Hybrid Pack and Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Impact.[40]

The controls of the Wii version received a mixed reception but those of the Switch were praised. Of the Wii version, IGN's Audrey Drake said, "from Marine bikes to roller blades to horses, traversing the island proves engaging in its own right".[34] Sterling took issue with the need to plug and unplug the Nunchuk controllers on the Wii version when swapping between minigames.[31] Nintendo Power's Cody M. said that while exploring the game's open world can be a "joy", but that the motion controls were "awkward" and could cause players attempting to move forward to accidentally change their direction.[37] Mark Reece of Nintendo Life said the minigames were not fun to play due to "a poorly conceived or unintuitive control scheme".[36] Reviewing the Switch version, Daan Koopman of Nintendo World Report noted that the controls are one of the "biggest improvements over the original".[39] Alessandra Borgonovo of IGN Italia praised the controls for the roller skates, saying that they were fun to use.[5]

On the game's minigames, critics were mostly negative. In his review of the Wii version, Sterling called them "tepid and shallow".[31] Reviewing the Switch version, Koopman criticized the game for not properly informing the player that more activities and modes can be accessed in the individual minigames after the first playthrough of said minigame.[39] Nintendo Life's Ryan Craddock felt that they are "an undercooked version of things we've seen countless times before."[24] Jeuxvideo.com's Anagund praised the amount of minigames available, saying that the proverb of "quality over quantity" might have lost its meaning with Go Vacation.[15] Reviewing the Wii version, Chris Watters, a writer for GameSpot, was mostly positive about the minigames, saying that "most are decent", but that some had succumbed to an "awkward camera" or "unresponsive controls".[13]

According to Reece, the game's music is "irritating and forgettable in equal measure", and the Wii version's opening theme would "more than likely awaken a strong desire to gouge out your own eardrums".[36] In reviewing the game's soundtrack, Don Kotowski said the vocals in some of the music are "cheesy" and tend to "be a huge distraction that really hampers my enjoyment of the album". He praised the songs "Starry Ocean" and "Malasada Break" for their "nice island vibe" and said it was "quite impressive to see how Hibino has elaborated on the simple originals to produce fully-fledged arrangements".[26]

Watters criticized one aspect of villas; he said the game does not properly communicate to players how to gain silver and gold keys, which are used to customize villas.[13] Some reviewers, however, praised the customizable villas; Craddock, in his review of the Switch version, compared them to the house customization mechanics of the Animal Crossing series.[24]

According to Drake, the game's island is "where everyone but yourself is actually a robot", referring to a lack of interaction with NPCs.[34] Sterling criticized the NPCs for their design, calling them "faux anime characters" and "completely charmless".[31] Reece also took issue with the NPCs, writing, "even if you hop onto an ATV and plough into someone at full speed, they'll have very little to say for themselves when they get back on their feet".[36]

• Official North American website for the Nintendo Switch port
• Official North American website for the original Wii version