It’s no secret that completionist.com loves Viva Pinata.  It’s also fairly obvious (at least it should be) that we love completion.  Usually, these two facts aren’t at odds with eachother.  Quite the opposite, as Viva Pinata is a completionist’s dream.  An entire encyclopedia of achievements numbering in the hundreds is sure to delight completionists of all ages.

Unless, of course, you are me, and the VP game that you are playing is Pocket Paradise for the DS.  If that is the case, then you are completely screwed.

Pocket Paradise started out as my favourite Pinata game yet.  The touch screen was so easy to use and intuitive that it left me wondering how I’d ever played a VP game without it.  Ditto for the dual screens.  There were just enough changes to gameplay to make it interesting, but the heart of the game was enough like the 360 titles that I didn’t feel it lost any of the magic I’ve come to expect.  The romance mini-game has been eliminated entirely, and now the challenge in getting your paper animals to screw comes from the fact that you can no longer BUY romance candy.  You have to earn it, which means it’s limited.  Also, you can’t buy happy candy either, so if your pinatas are pissed off about something, you actually have to find a way to cheer them up, instead of just drugging them into oblivion.  The Master Romancer award requires that you romance a species three times.  However, unlike in the console versions, you can’t cheat your way through this by buying 5 pinatas to live in your garden.  They actually have to do it three times.  Once I got the hang of it, I found these changes made Pocket Paradise a much more fulfilling game experience, and I didn’t have to worry about making the mistake of accidentally selling off something before the MR achievement kicked in.  Top all that off with the improved leveling system, and I was in pinata heaven.

So there I was, happily gardening my way through when I ran up against a wall.  Game completion: 98.12%  I’d tried to play through the game without using any faqs, relying on the game’s very informative encyclopedia (another improvement), and my own memory of past titles to get me through.  At this point, though, I felt it was time to get down to business.  Turns out that I forgot about salamangos.  Oops.  So a few minutes later, salamangos are finished, and I’m checking through my awards book to see if I missed anything.  All loose ends appear to be tied up.  Game completion: 99.09%.  Back to internets I go, and I notice that there’s a species that I’m still missing… the jeli.  Quick lookup of the jeli’s appear requirements, and it says the only requirement is that it’s nighttime in the garden.  Since I’d been playing this game for almost 200 pinata days, it seemed a bit odd that I hadn’t seen one of these yet.  So I waited through a few clock spins, and five pinata nights later, still no jeli.  Internets was happy to take me back, and I began to dig deeper into this mystery.

As it turns out, the answer is that Rare hates me.  Personally.  After countless faqs, message boards, and blogs, I was no closer to finding the stupid jeli.  I found a lot of people exactly like me, who had never seen one, and had tried any number of absurd things trying to lure it into their gardens.  “Jelis don’t like lights, so make sure you have no lights”. “I think they like the cold, so if you plant some fir trees, they’ll think it’s a cold environment”. “Jelis only appear if you’re yelling into the DS mic”.  The only people who had jelis just came across them randomly, none of their gardens had anything in common, and other people had tried duplicating their gardens exactly anyways, with no success.  So apparently the answer is just that the jeli is “elusive” and “rare” (read: infinitesimally small spawn rate), and you can wait forever and never get one.  I know, because I kept my DS on for an entire real-life day, going back to it every few minutes when it was nighttime in my garden, and never seeing a single frigging jeli.  To make matters worse, the only way to get the jeli to stay once it finally shows up is to whack it with your shovel.  So you have to be actively watching, you can’t just leave bait out and then leave your DS on for the hundred hours it takes for the damn thing to finally appear.  Who thought that was a good idea?  Whose idea of fun is this?  Certainly not mine, that’s for sure.  I am completely finished the game, and now in order to be rewarded as I deserve, with a 100%, I either have to spend hours staring at a game that I’m done with, or give up and be happy with 99.09%.  Way to turn an awesome game into a totally crappy experience.  Also, if I ever end up going back to this game, and a jeli decides to grace me with its presence, I’m going to poison it and let it die slowly.

Wow…such anger and agression for a game with charcter names like ‘Fudgehog’ and ‘Galagoogoo’.  Anyone who is concerned that this experience may have turned Julie off of cute and cuddly games can rest easy in the knowledge that she has just popped Animal Crossing: Wild World into the DS.  Sleep well.