Go Vacation

view of four players having a water gun fight Go Vacation is a party and sports video game. They start the game in the Marine Resort. The island open world can be navigated at the player's leisure by walking or riding on vehicles, the type of which depends on the resort, and each resort 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. The City Resort, which centers around extreme and leisure sports and skating, is the second and smallest resort. It hosts games such as table hockey, carnival games, skate tricks, and mini golf. Players can use skateboards and roller skates found throughout the resort to ride on skating rails. The final resort is the Mountain Resort, where players can partake many in outdoor activities. It includes forests and rivers, which are the locations for activities like rafting, paragliding, off-road car racing, and horseback riding. It also contains a lake with a castle and a shooting park. Go Vacation can be played using a Mii or one of 284 avatars divided into eight categories such as "Grandmother", "Grandfather", "Boy", and "Girl". Occasionally, NPCs may ask players to embark upon a small quest, such as getting an item and taking it back to them. After playing 20 minigames, players gains access to their own virtual villas, ==Development and Release==

Go Vacation was announced at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Bandai Namco Games began development of the game in 2009, 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. When discussing ways to address this, the developers decided winter alone was not enough; they wanted to depict other seasons. 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". The developers conducted surveys in the United States, Europe, and Japan to determine what activities to include in the game. and 17 November in Australia. The game was distributed by Nintendo in all PAL region territories. 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. The soundtrack of Go Vacation consists of both original music, as well as instrumental and vocal arrangements of music from past Namco games. Several composers, musicians, and vocal artists worked on the soundtrack for Go Vacation, including Taku Inoue, Norihiko Hibino, Aubrey Ashburn, and Jody Whitesides. Two soundtrack albums released. The first, the officially licensed album Namco Music Saloon, was released on 21 December 2012 by Japanese record label Sweep Records, and includes live instrumentation and vocals. This album contains original music composed by Taku Inoue for Go Vacation. ==Reception==

{{Video game reviews Go Vacation received a mixed reception from critics; both versions of the game received "mixed or average" reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic. 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. The controls of the Wii version received a mixed reception but those of the Switch were praised. Of the Wii version, IGNs Audrey Drake said, "from Marine bikes to roller blades to horses, traversing the island proves engaging in its own right". Sterling took issue with the need to plug and unplug the Nunchuk controllers on the Wii version when swapping between minigames. Alessandra Borgonovo of IGN Italia praised the controls for the roller skates, saying that they were fun to use. On the game's minigames, critics were mostly negative. In her review of the Wii version, Sterling called them "tepid and shallow". 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. Nintendo Lifes Ryan Craddock felt that they are "an undercooked version of things we've seen countless times before." Jeuxvideo.coms Anagund praised the amount of minigames available, saying that the proverb of "quality over quantity" might have lost its meaning with Go Vacation. 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". 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". 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". 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. 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. According to Drake, the game's island is "where everyone but yourself is actually a robot", referring to a lack of interaction with NPCs. Sterling criticized the NPCs for their design, calling them "faux anime characters" and "completely charmless". 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". ==References==