Milano’s Odd Job Collection is a port of a Japan-only PS1 game in which you spend 40 days working living alone as 11 year-old Milano. Each day has three phases: one for working a job in order to earn money, one for performing two tasks at home to hopefully raise your stats, and a third for picking one bedtime activity to either raise stats or buy new home furnishings. It’s a cute idea, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing.
Minigames
Let’s start with the jobs, because that’s where you’ll spend most of your time. There are eight in total, but six of them are locked behind stat raises and only a couple will ever be available at once depending on the weather. The jobs are a good variety of simple arcade games ranging from a Panel de Pon-esque match 2 (yes, not 3) game to a secret rhythm game, and all of them have five difficulty levels that you can unlock with more stats. The games are all pretty decent other than the garbage rhythm game, but the games barely change at all over repeat plays. It’s not a huge issue early on since you’ll be unlocking new games and difficulties quickly enough to prevent too much repetition, but once the unlocks run out, the remaining weeks of the game boil down to just playing the same games over and over again. It doesn’t help that some games are just much easier than others despite all awarding the same amount of money, so it’s best to just keep playing those if you’re trying to save up.
Stat Raising
Once you’re done working, it’s time to go back home and pick your two daytime activities. This would be a fine system if it wasn’t so determined to not tell you anything. You start out with six options available and five more locked, but no context about why you’d want to do any of them. Picking one will play a long, but thankfully fast-forwardable, animation and award you with either absolutely nothing or a stat increase. Trial and error will eventually lead you to realize that you want to cook an omelette and either drink tea or clean every day since that will boost your energy and mood by one each, leading to more jobs and more lenient time limits. The remaining locked activities require you to purchase certain items first, but the items are very expensive and there’s no way to know if they have any point before you spend the money. It seems like you’re still supposed to do some of the ‘pointless’ activities in order to receive a better grade at the end of the game, but there’s no explanation of what this interaction might be.
After that, or immediately if you chose ‘sleep’ as your daytime activity, it’s time for bed. This always gives you three choices: shop, make a wish, or read. Shopping is pretty self-explanatory: you spend money to buy items, receive them on days divisible by 4, and then need to spend a future job period decorating the house to make the items usable. Making a wish basically always does absolutely nothing, but if you get lucky and a star appears, you can wish for either good weather or two options that have no explanation. Finally, you can pick one of six books to read. Four of these will have no effect, one will raise your mood, and one will be the only way to raise your skill until you buy a desk and can study. Skill is what allows access to higher-paying difficulties and you’re going to need money to buy a desk, so you’re going to want to save scum to pick the skill book here. Luckily this version has save states. In the original, you’d have had to restart the entire day to pick a different book.
Conclusion
Milano’s Odd Job Collection is a very good idea for a game, and it could have also been a very good game if it was 10 days shorter and better at communication. As it is, it’s fun, but repetitive and needlessly frustrating. I do feel like I got my $12’s worth on sale largely thanks to how unique it is, although I don’t think there’s much replay value and even $12 is borderline. Give it a try on sale and just don’t expect too much.
Rating: 70%
Time to beat: 3 hours
Price: $15
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