Ok, so before I say anything here I should mention that I have been highly in favor of Labo since the reveal trailer and thought it looked like an extremely cool concept with lots of potential. I should also say I'm well aware that the target audience is kids, not adults, and I'm not judging it as a product made for adults.
With all that said however, after a decent amount of time with the Variety Kit, I am very sorry to say that I think this is one of Nintendo's biggest rip offs ever from a price standpoint, and a huge waste of potential even for kids. The software itself included in the variety kit is extremely underwhelming. We're talking about minigames that aren't even actual minigames, but more equivalent to demos of minigames. They're fun for about 10 minutes, and then you realize there's really nothing else to them and they don't have much of any replay-ability. With the exception of maybe fishing, but even the replay value there maxes out pretty quickly. And I'm not even looking at it from just an adult standpoint, even my little nephews lost interest in the games very quickly. In the case of the piano, it's literally just pressing the piano keys and hearing noise come out. No rhythm game, not even basic piano lessons! This sucks, because building the toy cons themselves and seeing how they interact with the switch is a really cool experience and there's tons of potential to be had for fun minigames with them. But the software is simply woefully lacking. We're talking software that is maybe a $15 value, and even that might be a stretch.
What this basically means is you're paying $50-55 for cardboard! Even if I'm being generous and saying that the experience of building the toy-cons is worth an extra $20, that's still like $30 too much for the product. Now I haven't actually had any hands on time with the robot kit, but considering it's $10 more and you only get one toy con building experience with that one and based on reviews it doesn't sound like the software is much deeper. So I can't imagine feeling any different about it.
Overall, I think this is one of the biggest wastes of an amazing concept I've ever seen from Nintendo, and beyond that I'm shocked at how much of a rip off it is coming from a company I've always personally felt does a good job with their pricing being appropriate. I had predicted this to be a huge success for Nintendo in spite of all the naysayers since it was revealed, but I'm sorry to say I think it could be a huge failure. That said, they still have time to turn this around. Beef up the software with free Splatoon-esque updates and drop that price point by a solid $30 and they might have winner. If not though, all I can say is this is a surefire miss.
