A strange but enjoyable experience that literally sucks.
The story begins in the Japanese household of an unassuming, dysfunctional Yamada family. Suffering through the hot dregs of a dreary Summer season, the father, mother and daughter are besieged by a mosquito infestation. As a mosquito, it's your job to relieve these hapless human souls of their most precious resource; blood. But it is not so much as drinking their bodily fluids to the point of anemia; rather, with a harsh winter fast approaching, the mosquito needs a hefty amount of the red stuff to survive. However, your proverbial quest for blood literally leaves a rash of irritation upon the Yamadas and, as the game progresses, their relationship sinks further down the pipe, and the entire clan emotionally falls apart. I won't give away the ending, but I can tell you it ain't pretty.
The controls take a little getting used to, but once you get a handle on it, you'll be sucking blood like a true mosquito. There are twelve stages each representing a room in the household, and there's always going to be a human walking around tending to their daily routine; Daddy Yamada louses on his lazy butt and glues his eyes to the tube, Mother Yamada's scrounging for old photos, and daughter Rena .... well, let's just say she's got nothing better to do than whine and carry on about how boring her life is. Typical teenage angst at its worst. Yet, they provide perfect and ample opportunities for some good blood-suckage.
You have to find lock-on "sweet spots" on specific areas of their bodies, such as on their legs, arms, under their feet and so forth. They don't appear right away--you either have to wait a while or do something to get them to move around. Once you find a target spot, you move in for the piercing and drink away by rotating the right analog stick around a specific speed. Drinking blood isn't as easy as it sounds--you have to rotate the analog stick at the right pace. One slip of the stress meter and you'll find yourself on the receiving end of a hand palm and die a most agonizing and humiliating one-hit death. Once you fill a certain number of blood vials, the round ends and you move on to the next victim...err, room. You can even try and beat your time record and earn some new colors for your mosquito, and return to levels to find items like extra blood vials, hearts and such to increase your overall life meter.
If by some unlucky perchance you're seen by a Yamada and forced to fight, don't panic. As long as you're not in the process of sucking blood and risking a one-hit kill at your expense, you can fight back by relaxing their nerves when they're coming at you like a bull to a matador. You must quickly find sweet spots and charge at them at the right moment to get them to faint temporarily, allowing you some easy blood-sucking. Later on, you will also have to contend with nasty pesticides and other poisons that will certainly hinder your progress. The Yamadas are not nice to insects at all, and it appears that they aren't educated in the proper use of insect repellent and bug sprays, so be forewarned.
The graphics are somewhat subdued, but nicely done. The frame rate is consistent throughout, though sometimes you might get motion-sickness with all the blurriness that occurs during flight. The voice clips are in pretty bad English--laughably corny and off-kilter in their deliveries. Rena Yamada seems to whine about everything, it seems. The Yamada clan as a whole don't have a lot of personality; save for some weird moments when they're doing ninjitsu somersaults while cutting vegetables.
The game is definitely very strange, but it's also quite a bit of fun at the same time. If you ever wanted to know what it's like to be a bug making human life as miserable as possible, you can do far worse than Mister Mosquito.