Chulip

Chulip is an adventure/simulation game in which the player must improve the hero's reputation in the community of Long Life Town by kissing its various citizens. The player's health is represented by a number of hearts. To gain more hearts, the player has to find and kiss other characters in the game. Finding out how and when to kiss other characters is a puzzle in and of itself.

The game and each of its non-player characters (NPCs) follow a 24-hour day schedule. In the daytime, many of the NPCs of the game walk around the streets. To succeed in kissing an NPC, the player is required to wait for the correct time where they will be happy and press the corresponding button. The player must sometimes complete a certain task for that NPC in order to achieve the kiss condition.

Chulip opens with a dream sequence in which the unnamed male protagonist kisses the girl he loves under the talking "Lover's Tree" on a green hill. The dream takes its course and the tree ends the sequence saying they lived happily ever after. However, once the protagonist wakes up, he and his father are just moving into Long Life Town, which appears very much like a small, Japanese village. Coincidentally, the girl of his dreams lives in this town, but she flatly rejects him due to coming from a very poor family.

Taking his father's advice, the hero decides to kiss the odd citizens of the town in order to strengthen his heart and improve his reputation. En route to doing so, he also resolves to write a love letter to his crush. When this treasured set of papers is stolen, he must search Long Life Town for the missing pieces. The hero's journey involves numerous bizarre incidents that lead him to cheating his way to the top of a major corporation, making contact with aliens, and acting as a defense lawyer in court.

Chulip was developed by a team of 12 to 14 people at Punchline, then a department of Skip Ltd. The game took two and a half years to complete after its initial planning; one year and three months were devoted to programming. : Lack of Love. Production of Chulip began in the earliest days of the PS2, making it a challenge for the development team who only had experience with the original PlayStation.

Kimura valued his team members' opinions and ideas while working on it. "It was challenging and interesting at the same time to program a game for a new console," he stated. "We were definitely eager to see what we could do with it." The original idea for Chulip came when Kimura visited Western countries and saw couples kissing in public, a custom not often performed among Japanese people.

Chulip received mostly average critical scores upon its release in North America. The game currently holds a 57% on the aggregate websites GameRankings and Metacritic. The ambitious gameplay of Chulip has been almost universally criticized. com, Ryan Davis of GameSpot, Micah Seff of IGN, and Gus Mastrapa of X-Play all labeled the often-unclear progression presented to the player as "frustrating" and "tedious", requiring an excessive amount of patience.

Mastrapa summarized, "Since the game is on 24-hour clock a missed opportunity means having to wait until the next day to take another crack. Add the fact that your inexperienced, young avatar can die from heartbreak, resulting in a 'game over' screen and the loss of unsaved progress and you've got a recipe for annoyance." Barnholt, Davis, and Seff did positively credit Natsume Inc. for the inclusion of the mini-strategy guide.