One Week With Labo | Is Nintendo Labo Still Fun?
Nintendo Labo is video games + cardboard, but you know what Labo is. Why else click on a video titled One Week with Labo, unless you thought this was a indie film emote piece about a boy’s final days with his pet Labrador retriever as it, or he, or both are dying of cancer, or rabies, or both. But I doubt that’s why you’re here, and frankly only an inconsiderate jerk would waste your time even imagining the very idea that you don’t know what Nintendo Labo is, so I’ll move on with giving you my thoughts on how Nintendo Labo is going after just one week.
I’ve been folding nintendo branded cardboard and playing with the aftermath for just over 1 week, and I’d like to give my thoughts of the experience so far. Is it fun to construct? Is it fun to play? Does the cardboard hold up to aggressive play sessions tempered over the decades by perhaps too-forgiving plastic controllers?
I can happily say Yes. Yes. And I’m on medication for that, okay, and I keep plenty of spare controllers around so back off.
Because there’s so much that can be talked about, given that Labo is objectively stranger than most other Nintendo products (insert ROB). I said most Nintendo products…and I could have shown you pictures of Nintendo’s love hotels or even their lie/love detector, both are actual Nintendo enterprises of the past, but I didn’t show you those because this is a family friendly channel…but i do have to ask, what’s more friendly toward families, in the sense of making families, than a love hotel?
Anyway, considering Labo is weird, perhaps a good approach with this video would be to list a few observations I had when building with Labo, observations that I don’t see many others talking about, but that I feel are actually important when considering a Labo purchase for yourself or your love hotel made family.
1. It’s Heavier You Might Think
The entire package itself is heavier than I expected. After all, it’s just cardboard, right. But I should have realized that even cardboard, when densely stacked, gets heavy. And in is it densely stacked. There is a lot of cardboard here. Most of mine has been punched through already, but this shot should give you an idea of how much cardboard we’re talking about.
2. Give Yourself Lots of Space
Number 2 is less an observation and more a suggestion. Give yourself a lot of space.Go with an entire dining room table, like I did. The more space the better. Organization is key with Nintendo Labo. I maintained several piles of cardboard sheets in varying stages of dismantle. One with untouched sheets. One with empty sheets. And one with sheets that I’m currently using. On top of that I had a discarded chads pile (chads are those pieces that you punch out and discard, the negative space of the Labo world). As the French say mise en place, which means “putting in place.” It’s a culinary term for when chefs make food out of cardboard.
3. Perforations Are Godly
The cardboard is beautifully perforated. Now, I never thought I would use the term “beautifully perforated” ever again, after my college band of the same name disbanded..I was left with many tiny, linearly placed sequential holes in my heart when that happened.
When we have to punch out so much cardboard, even small problems in the perforation department would compound causing a swell of frustration and eventual quitting. It sounds dumb, but think about this. If every time you took a step, you felt a pain in your foot, eventually you’d stop walking (or see a doctor, but in this analogy I’m assuming that perforation doctors don’t exist). Small annoyances add up to big problems. Nintendo knows this. It’s User Experience 101, and you’ll be happy to know that Nintendo cares so much about user experience.
4. Folding on Folding on Folding
You will deal with lots of folding. Lots and lots of folding. So much folding. If there’s any problem with Labo it’s the amount of folding. But I understand that pre-folded cardboard isn’t an option. Not only does that eliminate the very idea of building the toy yourself–central to the Labo experience–but at that point you might as well just buy a tiny piano or a tiny fishing rod.
A less obvious, but still necessary, drawback to all the folding is that the video instructions must walk the viewer through every fold of every piece. For the sake of consistency, I understand this need. For the sake of sanity, I question it. However, thankfully, we’ve got item #5 on this list to the rescue…
5. Fast forward is your friend.
The instructions tend to veer toward the redundant, especially as you become so familiar with the building concepts that you can anticipate every fold and closure. I take this anticipation as evidence that I’m getting better at construction, meaning I’m getting closer to ditching the instructions altogether and going rogue with my own creations, which you can do using the “Discover” section of the Labo software. Nintendo knows gameplay, and knows how important a sense of progression is even when there’s no real game to play.
But be careful. Fast forwarding does mean you might miss some of the funny writing. Nintendo knew watching videos of cardboard being folded would get boring, so Nintendo livened it up with genuinely funny text. Don’t be afraid to read a bit while folding.
6. Collectors Need Not Apply
Video game collectors should avoid Labo. Not only does Labo only work when you destroy the core product..the cardboard..but all that creasing of the cardboard will make collectors cry. When you’ve been ardently controlling the condition of every video game acquisition you’ve made over the last 20 years, for a product to insist you deface the cardboard feels like a vet telling you that your dog has rabies and he must be put down…and that your dog’s corpse will sell for much less on the second hand market.
7. Cardboard is Stronger Than You Might Think
While the individual sheets of cardboard themselves are relatively thin and the tensile strength probably isn’t enough to bring an engineer to climax, the projects, at least in the Toy-Con 1 Variety Kit, are constructed in such a way that they end up being surprisingly sturdy.
RGT85 did a video recently in which he lambasted the thickness of the cardboard, but I would guess his criticisms are more valid for the Toy-Con 2 Robot Kit. Considering the size of that kit, there isn’t much room to have the pieces overlap, which is one way we get structural integrity from the cardboard.
My experience is that the cardboard is much less a fail point than many are suggesting.
8. Kids love the Chads
Almost immediately upon starting construction on my first item in the variety kit, my kids ignored the primary build in favor of the discarded cardboard pieces. Hey Nintendo, I’ve got a product idea for you: Bag of Chads. “Hours of fun with negative space (and, if you are interested, there’s a freaking cardboard fishing rod being built over here. But yeah, play with the garbage pieces, I don’t care).”
Overall, I’m really happy with the quality of and fun I’ve had with Nintendo Labo. But what about you? Tell me in the comments below what you think of Nintendo Labo. I’ve been genuinely impressed so far, and probably would be even if I didn’t have kids.
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Credits
- Nintendo Labo official
- Love Hotel image By Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=993812
- RGT85’s Labo video, WARNING: BEFORE YOU BUY NINTENDO LABO ROBOT KIT!
Music Credits
- 8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
- “Metalmania” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
