Further limiting your activities is that each day you can only access certain rooms or areas outside of the hotel. At first this seems like it's holding you back too much, but actually it protects you from getting confused by having access to too many locations. Unfortunately, there is an over-reliance on walking from one end of the island to the other, which takes increasingly longer to accomplish and is incredibly tedious. Even Sumio himself complains to everyone he meets about this, and finally he borrows a bicycle, but this happens too far along to really make an impact.

At a certain juncture, you will briefly take control of Detective Remy, who is called in with her cop partner to investigate a suspected murder, and periodically throughout the game you'll see Sumio's progress from the perspective of a girl with a talking pink alligator, whose role in the game is something that remains unclear until much later in the adventure. You'd be hard pushed to find another game featuring so many wacky characters, from a hotel maid that tries to talk to spirits and hide underneath your bed (yes, you read that correctly) to guests that seem to be equally unhinged, like a drunk woman claiming to be an angel in disguise and then flying – as impossible as that should be – into yet another airplane, and a football fanatic who threatens to kill people under the veil of football terminology. Before long, however, all this absurdity begins working against the game’s benefit. I’m all for a bit of craziness in games (Phoenix Wright and his clan provide that by the bucketload), but there has to be some thread of coherence running through its core, and with Flower, Sun and Rain you never get a sense of that. It feels like many of the strange characters are there just because they can be, rather than to contribute anything to the overall storyline.

A similar problem extends to the story itself. Lots of crazy events take place on a daily basis, like guests mysteriously dying and then seemingly coming back to life, getting locked in a room by a ghost that you cannot see, discovering a network of clones living underneath the island, and characters that act as walking bombs (literally) that explode at certain locations. Just when you think you’re starting to follow it, however, the storyline will change dramatically again to add a new wrinkle to the time problems of the island. While there are a handful of plot twists that do make sense of some of the madness toward the end of the game, there is still a prevailing feeling of never being entirely sure what is going on. In one respect, it seems like the developer is teasing the player with cryptic logic you might be able to grasp, but really it just doesn't make any sense at all. Even now, having completed the game and subsequently reading up on its history, I am still unsure as to just what Flower, Sun and Rain is really about and who Sumio Mondo really is.

Visually the game is pretty ropey, and while this fact is clearly embraced by the developer breaking the fourth wall with constant self-mockery, it can't overcome the fact that everyone looks severely jaggy and the background settings just look ragged, as if an earliest-generation 3D game. Which, of course, FSR once was, but a graphical update would have served this DS conversion far better than a near-direct port of an eight-year-old game. Sumio’s walk also has a weird gait to it, and he seems incapable of traveling in a straight line no matter how carefully you maneuver him. Background music is a curious but rather effective choice of classical pieces given an electronic twist, which suits the madcap nature of the game perfectly. Displayed entirely in text, the dialogue is nevertheless supplemented by a strangely distorted computerized garble that manages to grate on the ears after a very short period of time.

In its favour, the game does have some decent writing amidst all the insanity, and it will raise a smile at those self-referential moments when it pokes fun at its own inferior graphics or re-use of popular music tunes. It even threatens to reveal the secrets of the game early, though personally I’d have preferred too soon to not at all. One memorable occasion is when a boy taunts Sumio about his constant need to fulfill other people's demands and mocks his reliance on the all-important guidebook, which leads to a plot twist later in the adventure.

Despite its few moments of levity, however, the surreal nature of the storyline remains a little too odd throughout, and the repetitive nature of the gameplay makes Flower, Sun and Rain more of a slog to play through than it is enjoyable. It’s certainly unique, and at about fifteen hours long, it’s a pretty sizable quest, yet the similar nature of the puzzles and heavy emphasis on backtracking means that it all feels too long. Fans of Suda51's previous games may find this more of an interesting prospect than most, but adventure fans can find better games on the Nintendo DS elsewhere.