Obviously, this game seems to beg questions out of people, hope this answers a few. Don't bother asking me any more though, I won't be able to answer, I'm only posting this because I told olimario would a few weeks ago and DDF needs his sustenance!
I suspect IGN mentioned the point of the game, or you've heard of it, but I'll reiterate. You are Pockle, a resident of Nanashi Island, and you missed your coming of age ceremony, so now you have to raise money in order to gain your acceptance as an adult as the island. So unlike Animal Crossing, you have a goal, therefore I don't think its helpful to compare it to that, especially since every item you get will be useful to do something else -- you never collect just for the sake of having it. And other than the fact that it focuses on a town and those smaller areas of life, its not at all like Harvest Moon in the slightest.
So you've got to raise a whole hell a lot of money and how do you do it, but by finding jobs, doing them well and collecting money, bit by bit. There's only one problem. Since you're not an adult, you have something of the limitations of being a child or an adolescent, both in how people see you and Pockle's responsibility and in the means of a curfew. If you can become more of an adult (and you can) on your journey to the impossible amount of money, then you can stay up later. The consequences for staying up past bedtime are encounters with the Sleep Spirits. Anymore than that, and I'd be telling too much -- a great part of Giftpia's gameplay is figuring out the rules and conventions of the society of Nanashi Island. Because it DOES work like a very silly and foreign society. These are but tastes of some of the ideas and rules at work and its your job to weigh them carefully and measure your way to adulthood.
Giftpia is definitely an RPG in many senses of the word, you have the same consideration of different elements, an eventual goal that may change due to the plot and ways to improve your character to allow you an easier time with your role. (One of these ways, BTW, has to do with the cauldron and the "seizure" like chanting motions some people spyed in one of the first movies released on the game last year. I hope IGN hasn't ruined it for you yet, so that's all I'll say about that. ) There are no real, hard stats, per say, other than things like more money, more curfew and more trust in the people you deal with -- your abilities change on an intangible level, its more reflected in how much you can do and deal with and how the society changes around you than in any numbers or such.
The game is also an RPG in the sense that if you don't look at FAQs (which would be especially damaging to this type of game) its gonna take a while to complete. It isn't especially long, I don't think (I haven't won it yet) but it certainly isn't small in scope, despite the quaintness of the setting (Nanashi Island and its environs) the game has a depth of implementation that is on the very long end of the stick.
I should clarify that there really isn't any battle system (I say not really, because there is a way to "encounter" some things, but its not a battle or a fight, despite the rather systemized way its implemented) and like I said, its not stat heavy, its rather NPC and puzzle heavy. Think of Giftpia as a PC-type adventure game that is so huge and non-linear and filled with so much to consider for your actions that its no longer really an adventure game. The vast bulk of the gameplay involves finding jobs, doing them well and doing so in the time your curfew allows for. This is made complex by the fact that the game REALLY doesn't quite allow for use all the items on someone until something happens approach -- there's too many people and waaaay too many items and you kinda have to experiment somewhat and know what you're doing somewhat to get anywhere. Like I said, as you progress, you'll find the game has a few systems that lie outside the realm of inventory, NPC talk, jobs, mini-games and puzzles that you'll grow to understand as part of the society as you play.
And that's the biggest reason why the game is so weird. Yeah, of course the overlying motive is because the creativity is so unbridled in its excess of inspired bizarreness. There's a gameplay reason too, while all the puzzles and puzzley gameplay is logical (I have no other way to describe it other than to say the main mode of interaction is problem solving like an adventure game -- it seems a disservice to describe it as "puzzles" and I think you'd understand what I mean if you played it). Ahem, sorry, my mind does wonder. While its logical in its puzzle-y-ness, it has that Monkey Island type of internal logic, you'll only understand as much as you understand the society and logic of the island, which, BTW is as much a light-hearted, funny parody of modern Japanese youth culture as Moon, one of the previous games of this developer, was of conventional RPGs. That is to say, nothing makes a great deal of sense at first. You'll likely spend your first few days talking to people and exploring the town to find out exactly how to play the game.
In this way, Giftpia mimics real life, you mature to realize how society works and then find your place in it -- sometimes manipulatively. As some Jedi would say the "the force is strong in you" or some bunk like that, I would say "the manipulation is strong in Pockle" or it had better be if you have ever want to see yourself getting close to that absurd amount of money. So Giftpia's creators made the island as bizarre as possible, because it disconnects you with the working of the society, if it were just like real life, then you'd already know the rules and how to manipulate them. The idea is to disassociate yourself so thoroughly from the normal sets of everyday life and RPG rules that part of the game's gameplay is to find out how to play it. Just as you had to learn what bombs did to walls in Zelda when you first played it or had to re-orient what you expected out of RPGs with Dragon Quarter, so Giftpia grounds a lot of its grit in the puzzley-ness of its design. Its so out there, that's part of the appeal, the grand puzzle, if you will.
Though to reiterate, its on a much larger scale than any PC adventure game or the relatively shallow hypertext commands and choices in PC or console RPGs. First of all, unlike PC adventure game in which you usually have only one problem or set of problems and one area to deal with, you have most of the island that you can reasonably get to within the realms of your curfew to take in and all the NPCs. And unlike normal NPCs, they don't just sit there, much like the experimentation seen in The Last Express, time moves on without you, they all have their own cycles and such and as the day goes by, you'll find them doing different things and in different places -- that change as their motives and lives change. There is more to interacting with them than just "I need you to solve this puzzle" chances there are multiple things you'll need them for, all interacting with the different systems you'll find out. Second of all, since the only goal is the large "earn enough money" one, Giftpia leaves a lot of the choices up to you and how much you think you can deal with reasonably. And its reasonably difficult, if you think the beginning curfew will allow you an easy time of it, you're quite mistaken, though as you grow, it doesn't get any easier, because the tasks demanded of you will get increasingly complex and involved. Third, often the jobs ask that you weigh in a very RPG-y way your resources and abilities in various mini-game like tasks that interact with the main game. The closest I can describe if you took the towns of Kakariko, Clock Town and Windfall Island, then multiplied their complexity considerably, and the checklist like in Majora's Mask, you'd come a way to understanding how Giftpia is mainly structured.
But Moon, made six years ago, was just the beginning and it had a lot of these same things before Majora's Mask or Shenmue ever came out. Since then Chulip and now Giftpia have inherited many of the same ideas, but expanded greatly on them, so if you haven't played them and play Giftpia, it'd be like saying you never played the original Dragon Quest, but you've played FFIV or Dragon Quest III or Lunar -- all of which were a good deal more developed RPGs than the original Dragon Quest. Comparing it to Shenmue is a bad idea -- there really isn't much dead weight in Giftpia, not much of it at all (I only say not much, because I haven't found anything, it might be there though) is dedicated to immersing you in the world, every item and person and task and place has a definite purpose for being there. In that sense, Giftpia is a kind of thrifty game, there are tons of little details that make your smirk and smile, but this is a gameplay first, cutscenes and immersion second, or even fifth or sixth, kind of game. And no offense to Shenmue, but the main character is a good deal more filled with personality-- not to mention a realistic sex drive.
That's not to say the plot doesn't develop, it does. But it remains firmly in the context of the island and the society, there are no identifiable villains or earth-shaking events going on, it doesn't resemble ICO in any other way than that its very economical and focused on what it wants to be a light-hearted, funny game more focused on provincial life and character development than on world-shaking plots o' save the world DOOOOOOM! Various subplots and interesting (and sometimes even shockingly unexpected) revelations come about and it does develop into something more than than the original premise, at the same time as the gameplay is getting increasingly devious and clever. In fact, the biggest twist involves a moral dilemma that begins to develop and I'm happy to say you have a great deal of leeway in deciding where you want to come down on that dilemma. Well, okay, at least it seems so, I haven't tried the other branches, since I've yet to replay it.
The graphics are surprisingly good. I say so, because Skip and the people they've worked with in the past haven't been able to afford much more than serviceably nice graphics, but obviously working with Nintendo has had its pay-offs. Its all real-time pretty much, but the cel-shading is extremely nice and the world design is exceedingly pretty with lots of neato special effects that when they come around are bound to at least produce a small "O" of your lips when you see them. Its all very cute of course, and I don't need to tell you if you found Celda "ghey" than this game is a flaming homo to you, but if you're a bit more open-minded than that, the obvious care and attention devoted to the engine and the world will shine through. Its obviously a game thats devoted more to aesthetic excellence than technical, but technically, it really isn't a slouch either -- the amount of polish is astounding and the game really, really pulls it all together, the animation, the world, little touches, its extremely polished.
However, while the graphics are better than I thought they'd be, if its one thing the game really excels at, its the sound -- its almost an acheivement. The game has a soundtrack more in keeping with a movie soundtrack than a game, and not an MGS2 style orchestral soundtrack, but more of a licensed from many sources, and sold-and-probably-more-successful-than-the-movie-itself-soundtrack. It encompasses everything from a Beatles-esque song to thrashing metal to lazy lounge-style jazzy rap to classical pieces in other languages (I think French?) with lots of piano. If you like ecletic music that does not bow to mainstream pop pressures, this game is full of it. A lot of the tracks on the site wound up in the game, but a good deal of them are much longer than the snippets on the site and more often than not, they have full, deliciously clever lyrics. Its really impressive and definitely the Gamecube's strongest soundtrack (not that that's terribly hard yet, but it would still stand out on the PS2). If the game never comes over, I recommend digging up the soundtrack alone.
As for the game, there are dozens of rather odd and extremely incongruent sounds matched to actions they really don't signify. An easier way of saying that, I suppose, is they don't match the action, until you've heard them for the umpteenth time and then learned to connect them to it. Which makes the game even odder, oh, some of them are like what you'd expect (a couple are ripped wholesale from other Nintendo games) but consider the speech, which continues the tradition of sampling bizarre snatches of radio, random noises, different languages and oversampling and distorting them into oddly harmonious snippets of sound. Its not at all like Banjo-Kazooie or Rayman or Klonoa-speak, it sounds more like a sample that's burping up random bubbles of the world.
Of course, I was one of the original pimpers of Giftpia on this forum, so its not much of a surprise that I think it turned out well and love it, but I really do recommend people give it a try. If nothing else, you're bound to come away thinking its certainly five times more original than most games out there. Maybe you won't get some of the parodies (though I doubt you could miss what the mayor and the robot and the jail signify) of absurd Japanese ridicularities in this day and age, but the game's cleverness and charm is based more on a light-hearted joy of life that has a stinging undercurrent of taunting playfulness. Unfortunately, the bad news I really doubt much of the game's appeal will come across if you can't read Japanese and understand what's going on. You're probably left with the feeling that something just happened, but you don't know what.
There's also the prospect that the game doesn't really offer you much more than the basic quest, which is plenty in itself, but Giftpia's replay banks more on good book type of re-reading for the joy of it (and the joy is everywhere in this proudly irreverent game). So its not a small game (at least not as small as ICO, per say), but since the developers don't really string out the gameplay with repetitive tasks and the like and most of all what you do will be unique things, its not huge either, though much, much larger than your typical PC adventure style game. And if you have to stick to a FAQ or don't know what your doing, its bound to go much faster than it was meant to be be paced.
So get on NOA's case and see that you get the game, for the love of God, don't let totally awesome attempts to redesign and rethink RPGs like this stay adrift here in Japan!
As a final word, though I found Lack of Love and Chulip good games too, they really didn't measure up to Moon, which is one of my favorite games ever and I really think its one of the most accomplished games out there. Giftpia, has, from the start looked like it could measure up to Moon and I'd obviously have to give it time and flip it first to see whether it really does, but for what its worth, this is a devastatingly clever and sly game.
Sorry to be vague, but if you know my style, I don't like to ruin surprises or say spoilers or give away nuances in gameplay, 'cause I think its more fun to know how the game works and such, but figure it out yourself.
Point of viewpoint.
-Kitsune no Takuto