Original Post Date: 2024-09-11
As I mentioned back in my very first blog post, the Petz community loves Petz 4. This makes sense – it’s got more features than Petz, Petz II, or Petz 3, after all. But then, if so, why does Petz 5 – which has even more features – seem like the “black sheep” of the Petz series? (And no, we don’t talk about the post-2002 games, though I will admit that I liked Petz: Dogz 2, otherwise known as Puppy and the Magic Hat.)
As someone who, as of this writing, has only ever played Petz 5, I have compiled a list of all the things the Petz community dislikes about Petz 5. Obviously, I’m not trying to claim that people who dislike 5 are wrong. I myself also dislike some of these things!
Petz 5 was the first Petz game to not be fully under control of the rest of the series’ developers, P.F. Magic. Instead, it was made by Studio Mythos. It was also published by Ubisoft, which was the beginning of the end of the Petz series being the way that Petz 1-5 were.
However, as I noted in my breedz guide, a lot of these breedz only have one variation, and those with more than one usually only have a few colour changes. It’s as if the programmers were trying to do as little as possible. While people do like these new breedz – I myself am endlessly fond of Papillons and Desert Lynxes – most think more effort could have been put into them. Thankfully, there’s always hexing!
Petz 5 adopted a newer, more photorealistic style for the Playscenes. Some people like the change, some people don’t.
While lots of people do like that Petz 5 allows you to have litters of up to 4, some don’t like it. I’ve heard people say that litterz turn out looking “samey”, which is fair. Some people also play the game “vanilla” (without using PetzA to set litter size) and don’t like the randomness of how many babies they get.
There were three big changes to the Petz format that happened in Petz 5:
These changes were contentious for clear reasons: they changed parts of the game that were perfectly fine as is, and made things more complicated for no reason.
Speaking of the Carrying Case and toyz…
Petz 5 introduced a minigame mechanic, which sounds cool. The problem is, the Carrying Case starts with the bare minimum, and you earn more toys from going to other Playscenes and, once there were no new toys just sitting around anymore, playing these minigames.
Assuming the system works and you don’t end up with nothing, most of the time you’re going to get repeats. Plus, some of the minigames are freakin’ annoying. I’ve never won a game of Tic-Tac-Toe against the Prairie Dog. I always used to do the Scarab Beetle Catch one because it was the easiest and fast. The Obstacle Course was good for training petz but that was about it (besides, you could cheat on the pole and balance beam ones). Other people like Rock Paper Scissors for the easy cheat there too.
These minigames are the reason I use Tinker. It can put all the toys into the case for you, so you never have to catch another beetle or suffer the prairie dog’s smugness again!
Something I didn’t know until now was that in Petz 4, you could actually adopt Bunniez and Pigz (though you couldn’t breed them). In Petz 5 they’re just the host characters for the Backyard.
On the sharing side of things, it’s harder to convert a Petz 5 pet to another version than it is to convert a Petz 4 pet to another version. There is Petflux, made by Reflet at Yabiko, but that wasn’t available for a long time.
All the Petz games can be finicky with newer computers, but I think the fact that my fellow WordPress Petzer, Wayback Petz, has a page on Petz 5’s compatibility “issues” as opposed to “fixes” like the rest of them says a lot. I literally had to reduce my computer’s resolution to have my petz not look like Picasso art.
Because Petz 4 is so beloved, one recursive thing that has happened is that there is less Petz 5-specific fan content. Hexed breedz, clothes, and toys are more common for Petz 4 than 5, though there are also many sites that offer them both (and stuff for 3 as well). Plus there’s always Unibreed.
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