Majesco tries to engage Harvest Moon fans, with repetition.

Published by Majesco Entertainment and developed by GAMEINVEST, Toy Shop is a very simple game aimed at a very large audience, the casual audience, but more specifically the Harvest Moon audience. Instead of using the theme of farming and wooing girls with gifts to have your babies, Toy Shop allows players to simulate life as a small time toy shop owner with the aspirations of saving the family business and making it to the big time. By mainly using only the stylus, it is up to Mel and Mark to ensure they do just that.

Players will take control of both Mel and Mark whose grandfather has passed away and has been left in charge of turning the little family shop into a profitable super-store, before it is absorbed as property of the city in three years (played out through 4 seasons a year). How will Mel and Mark save the family business? By using very simple and very repetitive routines, that’s how.

If this sounds like Toy Shop is borrowing from Harvest Moon to you, then what follows will not surprise you in the least. Right off the bat, you will notice the habitants of the game world are big-eyed cute characters in the shape of Kubrick figures. Almost every thing in the world shares the use of polygons except for the trees which are oddly pixilated, though not to an upsetting degree thanks to the game’s main focus of a top-down camera. The world also shares only a handful of music tracks that are assigned to loop in each of the six areas of play over and over again.

Running the shop can be done one of three ways, by controlling Mel, Mark, or both characters. Controlling Mel basically means that you will be running the toy shop which requires laying out the shop’s shelves, cash registers, decorations, etc. At the start, you are given one shelf, one register, and one showcase but as you gain more money, you can buy more things for the shop to spruce it up.

Mel is also in charge of placing the toys on the floor, adjusting toy prices, and checking on the customer wants and satisfaction. Almost telepathically, when you click on a customer, Mel can tell you how much money a customer carries and what kind of toys they are looking for. Mel is also in charge of keeping tabs on the inventory, so when a toy runs low it is her job to give a shout over to Mark in the workshop to stop playing the computer and getting on making more toys.

While Mel is running the toy shop, Mark is somewhere else running the workshop. This is the place where all the toys are made and is where GAMEINVEST sneaked in some quasi-RPG elements to the game. At the start, Mark can only create a handful of toys with the rest being locked away thanks to his inexperience.

Unlocking other toys and having better toy creation success depends on Mark’s skill level with that particular toy and ultimately decides how well, how fast, how much it costs to make that toy. You can increase Mark’s skill level by having him make the toy numerous times, similar to level-grinding in an actual RPG. The process can be done one of two ways, let Mark work on his own or help him out by using the D-pad in QuickTime-event fashion to hand him tools.