If I can find just one game this good each year, I’ll be happy.
Stray Sheep: The Adventure of Poe and Merry (ストレイシープ ~ポーとメリーの大冒険~) is a wonderful, cute and whimsical adventure game. Sadly it has quite a substantial language barrier, so you will either need sufficient Japanese language skills, or be comfortable with using translation tools to play games, but you will be rewarded with an absolute gem of a game.
Stray Sheep itself is a surprisingly broad franchise. It started out with just three short stinger clips for the late night program of a Japanese TV channel, where protagonist sheep Poe has various slightly anxiety-inducing dreams before waking up at the end of each clip (this one is my twitch raid alert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIhQYSyFzhg). Over time it expanded quite a bit, with this game, picture books, music CDs, and even two anime shows. It kinda reminds me of Domo-kun and Hachiemon in that way, since they also started out as minor TV mascots and got their own videogames. Fuji TV’s official page about Stray Sheep is still online, although the last update seems to have been in 2010. It has a large section about the game here: https://www.fujitv.co.jp/straysheep/index2.html
You might also be familiar with the old desktop pet “eSheep”, which featured a little sprite of Poe wandering on your desktop and windows. I’m fairly sure it was not officially licensed, but lots of people remember it. There are even various modern recreations of it, for desktops, websites and phones, like this one: https://adrianotiger.github.io/desktopPet/
I’m not really sure who the developer of this game is. In the credits and on the back cover it only mentions Fuji Television (where the original clips ran), Robot (the company of the original creator of Stray Sheep), and Links Digiworks (a computer graphics studio that has worked on a bunch of games). I think the wider conglomerate of Fuji TV owns several game studios, recognized by the same logo (kind of a cell or eyeball with three hairs), so it may have been made “in house”.
The game begins with a cutscene about a group of hooded wolf-like creatures, one of which is losing a lot of fur, and another one reading from an old book that the cure for this hair loss might come from the tears of a black sheep. So they hop into their oddly banana-shaped airship to catch themselves a black sheep, and the one they find is sadly main character Poe’s friend (girlfriend?) Merry, who was just snoozing next to him on a meadow. As they grab her and fly away, Poe can only watch helplessly.
This is where the game starts you off. Poe wants to chase after and rescue Merry, but he’s only a little sheep on a small island. Stray Sheep plays out as an adventure where you mainly run around and talk to characters, solve some light puzzles, and occasionally play separate minigames. The minigames can be pretty difficult for a game that is otherwise focused on its narrative. One of the first characters we meet is little baby bird Piikichi. He fell out of his nest at the top of the mountain, and can’t get back up. He’s also a hungry hungry little boy, and so our main task on this first island is to find food for Piikichi, so he can grow big and strong and hopefully get back to his mom, who might be able to help us out.
In service of Piikichi’s appetite, we have to harvest bananas via bungee jumping so that a gang of monkeys lets us pass, we have to get the stolen record player of a frog barbershop group back, we help a mole farm some earthworms for food, we catch fish for a bear and count sheep for a sheepdog. After feeding many different food items to Piikichi, he grows into a big handsome bird, and coincidentally his mother finally finds us. We learn from her that the mysterious abducting airship is most likely headed to a place called “The End of the World”, and she sends Piikichi to take us to a wise man who might know how to get there.
So we arrive on a snowy island, and it turns out the wise man there is Santa Claus himself. His reindeer are currently suffering from a cold, so we help him with that, and there’s also a lovesick yeti and some rowdy penguins to deal with through minigames. After our work is done, Santa takes us to the island where the so-called “End of the World” is supposed to be.
This next island is a sandy desert, and at the start of it is pretty much the only place where the language barrier becomes significantly higher. A sphinx subjects us to a mandatory quiz based on Japanese language puns, which have to be answered in a tight time limit, ten in a row without mistakes. Thankfully emulators can be easily paused, and with the help of the translation software and the combined skills of me and twitch chat, we got through it. After being challenged by the guardian of an ancient pyramid to a difficult game of jan-ken-pon, exploring the pyramid and escaping through a Simon-says minigame, we arrive at a circus tent called “The End of the World Circus”, where a lonely young elephant has been left behind. But neither Merry nor the kidnappers are here, so this can’t be right…? That’s as far as the manual spoils the locations of the game, so I’ll also stop here, but there is a surprising amount more coming after it.
The game really shines with its characters and their cute little stories and quests. Everywhere you go there are new funny little guys to interact with. They’re nice, cute and whimsical as is appropriate for this franchise, but towards the end, the game also has some darker, sometimes creepy or depressing moments. In the end, even the main “villain” doesn’t seem so bad though, and the game finds a happy conclusion.
There is also a focus on music, with the various minigames and cutscenes often having their own music tracks, a few of which even have lyrics. Check out this early moment in the game, one of my favorite scenes, when the frog band rewards you with a live performance:
https://www.twitch.tv/mooware/clip/AthleticFilthyEagleCclamChamp-Oe0jEr8v88oVAhNI
After finishing the main game, you can replay the minigames, now in three difficulties, and beating them unlocks collections of the game’s cutscenes, related videos and music tracks. The “final challenge” is to beat 99 iterations of a particularly tedious and slow minigame, which unlocks the last music track and also shows a little easter egg to reward the effort. I did unlock these things and record them for easier access, so check out the record collection here, and the minigame playthroughs and easter egg at the end of my playthrough playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEbaMf-hSp8
I also scanned the manual and other materials from my copy of the game, which you can find on the Internet Archive. I also have a guide book for the game, which I do want to scan at some point, when I get around to it. Both the manual and guide have some lovely art of the game.
https://archive.org/details/stray-sheep-psx-manual/
I love this game, it’s absolutely one of my favorite Japan-only PS1 games, a wholesome and cute time that I would recommend to anyone who is able to play through it. Considering how many fan translations of this console generation are coming out these days, maybe it’ll even be translated before long. Speaking of, while looking around I stumbled upon this Github repository which has at least a data extraction script for the game, so maybe someone was looking into translating it at some point: https://github.com/master801/PS1-Stray-Sheep
If you want to see more of the game, or you’d rather watch it instead of trying to play through it, my streams of it are archived on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLorAgM9Rd_jXWgpkhmwv8SzeEw-4wK0Eh