At a glance: Ojamajo Doremi # · Sega Pico · Fupac / Bandai, 2000 · Edutainment activities (Japan) · Score: 7.0/10
By 2000 the Pico was dead in America and entirely unbothered about it in Japan, where Bandai’s Fupac-developed Ojamajo Doremi # arrived that March to serve one of the biggest girls’ anime of the moment. Doremi and her friends were apprentice witches working in a magic shop, and the Pico book follows the show’s own formula: everyday childhood activities with a sparkle of magic over them, friendship first, lessons smuggled inside errands and games. It is a useful corrective to the Western idea of the Pico as a 1994 novelty. This is a mature, sixth-year Japanese library title — slicker, denser and more confident than the launch-era books, made for an audience Sega Toys still knew by name.
The book, page by page
A Pico Storyware is a picture book first and a cartridge second, and Ojamajo Doremi # uses that shape well. The cast — Doremi and her fellow witch apprentices from the hit anime — carries the child through magical-shop scenes, music and colour activities, matching games and story pages with the apprentice witches. Turning a physical page changes the scene on the television, changes the music, and changes the job to be done, and that rhythm still feels clever: the book tells the hands when to move on, and the screen rewards the turning. Sessions settle into a comfortable loop of story page, activity page, praise, next page, which a child of 4 to 7 can follow without an adult reading instructions aloud — the voices do that work, page after page.
Pen work
Everything is driven by the Magic Pen on the touch pad and on the book’s own final page, with the console’s chunky buttons in support. The pen suits this material: pointing at answers, tapping objects in busy scenes and drawing where the book invites it are natural actions for small hands, and the targets are big, forgiving and clearly spoken. There is a real skill being practised underneath the play — hand-eye coordination between pad and screen, careful pointing, listening to a whole instruction before acting — and the book paces it kindly, never timing a 4-year-old into panic. Adults should expect to set the console up, then be usefully unemployed for most of a session.
What it teaches, honestly
The stated curriculum is colours, music, matching, everyday activities and character-led mini-games (in Japanese), and the honest verdict is that it is really taught, not merely advertised: a mature late-library production — art, voice and density a generation beyond the 1994 books — serving a huge anime audience properly. That is the standard this site judges Pico software by — not whether it resembles a Mega Drive game, but whether a child leaves a session having practised something real, willingly, at the right level for 4 to 7. On that standard this book earns its place. Its limits are equally clear: Japanese-language throughout, and beneath the magical dressing the activities are the familiar Pico toolkit rather than new ideas. Neither the strength nor the limit is a surprise, and parents in the 2000 knew what they were buying — which is part of why the Pico sold in the millions.
Six years after America’s Pico obituaries, a slick, dense, confident book for a hit anime: the Japanese long tail, in cartridge form.
The production tells the story of the Japanese long tail in miniature. Character art and voice are a clear generation ahead of the 1994 books, activities are plentiful, and the whole package assumes a child who has owned a Pico for years and expects a full book for her favourite show. It also shows the library’s Bandai-driven character: the Japanese Pico became, in large part, a Bandai anime platform, and titles like this are why it kept selling. For Western collectors the language barrier applies as with all Japanese Pico books, and the activities themselves, under the sparkle, are the familiar Pico set. But as evidence — of a console living a second, longer life an ocean away from its obituaries — it is a delightful cartridge to own.
Presentation and place in the library
Built on the Pico’s Mega Drive-derived hardware, the book mixes large, clear cartoon art with constant sampled speech — the system’s party trick, and the reason pre-readers could use it alone. Music is cheerful and short-looped in the way of all Pico software; adults in the room will hear those loops in their sleep, which was as true in 2000 as it is for collectors now. As a Japan release it also tells you something about its market: this is the edutainment activities (japan) end of a library that treated very young children as a real audience with real design, years before the app-store era rediscovered them.
A session, start to finish
Picture the intended scene, because Pico software was designed for a room, not a desk. The console sits open on a table or a lap tray, the book locked into its slot, the television a few feet away. Power on, cover page, a burst of music and speech, and Doremi is already talking to the child before a single instruction has been read by anyone. The first pages teach the session’s grammar — turn, look, tap, listen — and by the third spread a child of 4 to 7 is running the book alone: turning pages at their own pace, repeating a favourite activity four times because the book allows it, skipping nothing because the story will not let the pages be skipped in spirit. A full run through the book suits the format’s natural session length, roughly fifteen to twenty-five minutes, and the closing creative or free-play pages act as a cool-down rather than a cliff-hanger. There is no save file because a picture book does not need one; tomorrow’s session starts at the cover, and for this audience repetition is not a compromise but the entire method, the same page teaching the same lesson a little deeper each time it is turned.
The adult in the room: replay, siblings and patience
Every Pico book is also, unavoidably, entertainment for an audience of one supervising adult, and Ojamajo Doremi # handles that audience better than most. The speech is constant but characterful rather than robotic, the music loops are short — you will know them by heart within one session, for better and for worse — and the activities are pitched so that an older sibling can be promoted to helper rather than excluded as too old, reading the story pages aloud and demonstrating the pen while the younger child takes the turns. That sibling ladder matters in real houses, and Pico books that built it in, as this one does through its clear story-activity rhythm, stayed in use for years instead of months. For collectors playing today, the same qualities make it a kind book to demonstrate the system with: five minutes shows a visitor everything — the page turns, the voices, the pen, the praise — and why a machine like this sold in the millions to families who had never bought a console before.
Verdict
Judged on its own edutainment terms — target age 4 to 7, pen in hand, book open on the lap — Ojamajo Doremi # scores 7.0/10. It is recommended for collectors building a representative Pico shelf and, more importantly, it would still do its original job today for a child of the right age with a working console and a patient television. That double life, teaching tool and time capsule, is the Pico’s whole appeal, and this book carries both halves well.