ZenicReverie
Reviews
Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo DS)
Uhh....What's this game supposed to be about?
The Good
So, creating your own designs to go on clothes, hats, umbrellas, walls, and floors is interesting. Being able to visit other people's towns would be interesting if there was anything to actually do. Creating constellations has many many possibilities. Collecting items and being able to show them off is usually fun.
The Bad
But, these things still don't make a good game experience. The whole purpose of the game seems to be to complete collections, for no reason at all. I say no reason because completing the collections doesn't really get you anything to help you out in the game. Also, you're working to pay off a debt on the house you're given. Once you pay off the debt... well you can get a bigger house to put more junk, and incur a bigger debt as well.
There're no fun mini-games to break up the monotony of it all. Just collect stuff to either put in the museum, your house, or sell so you can finish collections, have pointless junk around the house, or make money so you can pay off your debt to have a bigger house. I guess money can also be used to create designs or wasted on fortunetellers that tell you nothing.
The events are pointless too. While they sound interesting, like flower contests, flea markets, and room decoration contests they are boiled down to basically how many flowers do you have around your house, I can buy things for cheap while selling my stuff for more than at the store, and how much junk do I have in my house? It was a little fun to remove everyone else's flowers in the middle of the night and place them all around my house, but no one seemed to remember that they had flowers the next day, so any sort of expected reaction like "Where the heck did all my flowers go?" were sadly absent.
One last pointless activity I'll mention before getting back to the overall experience of the game is letter writing. About the only thing this gives you is collecting different kind of paper to write on when getting generic often empty letters from the AI to the effect of "Thanks for your letter and present, you're the coolest. Here's something from me." in response to my letter of "Attached is a red rose from your flower bed. If you want the rest, send money!"
The controls can be clunky, resulting in unexpected game play that you would like to go back to a previous save point to avoid. This results in a visit from a mole man that explains you should never play this game like that because it's not like other games. Getting scolded at for trying to reverse a gameplay error is just not encouraging. The error you ask? While having a watering can I tapped on some new grass, hoping to water it, which is supposed to be the default action in this case. But, I instead rip it out of the ground forever destroying it. This other similar control issues negatively affected my experience.
The Bottom Line
An exercise in meaningless socially meaningful actions. If you're looking for a game that can be played with friends for a long time to come, don't buy this game. However, it does have some redeeming value somewhere. I really didn't give the title a chance and ended up traveling through time in the game, it's real time even when it's off, and changing the clock on the DS will actually cause the entire town to change. About the most interesting thing there is to do is to see what your town would look like in 50 years without you being there.
By ZenicReverie on April 7th, 2007
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All (Nintendo DS)
Another Mediocre Adventure Game
The Good
The sound was good, meaning it wasn't distracting or annoying. It's an original idea for a game, and the only one I can think of that allows you to take on the role of a lawyer, although you also seem to take on the role of a private investigator collecting evidence to help your client. I liked the first episode as well because it was short, easy, fun, and fairly easy to come up with the "what's the developer thinking here?" answers. Multiple after story endings offer some interesting replay, but not much.
The Bad
Just another adventure game wrapped up in an original setting, but it failed to distance itself enough. It failed I think because of the many instances where you're left with trying to figure out what the developer was thinking when they picked the one item that would let you pass the present obstacle of the story. Yes, one and only one answer to each and every scenario. A hypothetical example would be, "oh the developer wanted me to show the profile of this person, not the picture of them I have in evidence." and this can be very frustrating. This leads to the failing of many other games in this genre when you need to just try everything. This is especially true while gathering evidence.
The Bottom Line
It's a point-and-click adventure game basically, including environments to explore for items that are useful later on. It has an overlaying story of lawyers, courts, and prosecutors, but this fails to hide the game in an immersive way. Pick it up for $20 or less if you like adventure games; otherwise, I'm not sure if it's worth $10. There are better games out there.
By ZenicReverie on April 7th, 2007