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You can go shopping to get outfits and accessories for your artistic points. And it's one of those games where they talk all the time. Also, to reach your weekly goals, you have to go all these places and talk to people. I once had to do one compitition five times.
If you don't like super talking games, don't buy. Like they either help you raise stamina, coordination, and artistic. Other mini games help you reach your weekly goals better. you start of by selecting a file, then picking out from a choice of 3 girls. (each of them look like anime models) Then you start practicing and unlock mini games to reach your different goals and pass the months to get to each competition. Then you repeat the competition. It gets very annoying.
And when you beat the game, the end. Where do I start. If you fall during compititions, it really effects you, and you do the whole month over, including practices and mini games. Ugh.
Overall, it's been fun.The first week you have to learn the double toe loop and raise your stamina by eating sushi, weird. I got this game for Christmas and I simply had to have it, when I saw a trailer for the japanese version. There is a variety of mini-games that add an engaging story line to this game, but somehow the tasks you have to do are repetitive, the makers of this game are good, but they shoud've added more experience and interest for customers to play, after all, though it is fun, my only problem is that the tasks are repetitive.
The characters are way flat - I've played a good chunk of the game with two of them, and so far, they are exactly the same. At no point can you make any choices, and even leveling up is severely limited. On top of all that, there are some rather embarrassing mis-translations. Video games for girls were few and far between, and often hampered by limited game-play and stupidity. Some of them are an improvement over those games of my youth.
But what really relegates this game to a poorly executed good idea is the stylus play doing the actual figure skating. I'm hugely interested in this phenomenon and have been picking some of these up to try them out and see how they compare to the games put out for boys. Things like the uniforms, ages of the characters and grades, and the eat-sushi-off-the-conveyor-belt game wouldn't make a lot of sense to an average American preteen. If you are not familiar with Japanese culture at all, I think the game would be a little weird. Other than picking out your character's clothes, they are not customizable at all. The limited plot makes replaying the game, even with another character, extremely boring. It was an interesting idea - you choose a character, they go through a little plot, you play minigames to level up their stats, and you use the touchpad to guide them through jumps, spins, and steps to gain the position of best figure skater in the world. I've encountered similar gaffs in some of those RPGs of old.
Ah yes, Japanese. Imagine: Ballet Star and Imagine: Ice Champions both make great improvements on the idea first presented with this game - and would make much better buys, either for an adult like me, interested in this girly gaming phenomenon, or for a young girl. The game was obviously originally set there (though it claims to be set in America), as the characters all wear Japanese school uniforms and follow Japanese customs. Well, forget that.The Nintendo DS is the first system to really try to reach out to girls by marketing a variety of games to them. The game seemed to have a hard time picking up the movements of the stylus - a major problem when that is all you are supposed to be doing. I, a full adult, got frustrated being unable to win a competition because the game just kept buzzing me instead of letting me trace a shape for a jump, or not picking up my stylus movements for the spins.
Since the moves are timed (in a not very clear fashion), I often ran out of time and failed moves. Some of the types of moves are way easy (like moving shapes to do footwork), but some of them are way hard. As if girls were not interested in video games because we're not any good at it, so everything had to be simplified for us. Some of them are not.Imagine Figure Skater tries pretty hard. So the plot aspect is like reading a really lame, easy book, badly translated from Japanese. Okay - those things aren't the end of the world.
I think a nine or ten year old playing this would be brought to tears of frustration over something they could do nothing about.Overall, a cute idea, but it did not spend enough time in development and testing, particularly in the changeover from Japanese to English. I've been a gamer all my life, but I always had to play the same games as the boys. Sounds like a cute little role-playing game perfect for pre-teen girls, right.Not really. The only reason why a few of them made sense to me is that I took a year of Japanese in college and recognized that the phrasing and wording had been directly translated as if by a computer instead of by a person familiar with both cultures.
It's a very heart-warming story and I love it. It's really fun and it's actually long enough that I won't finish it in a day. I've played all 3 characters and my favorite is Amber (the blond). It's so much fun. I reccomend this to EVERYONE. It took 3 days.
She is just amazing. I LOVE this game. I'm 11 years old and I ADORE this game. I love the characters, I love the music, I love the costumes, and I LOVE the skating.
Overall I would only buy this game for patient people. SHe got very frustrated and couldn't move on because her score wasn't high enough. I got this for my 11 year old daughter and she had lots of fun with it except when she got to the "State Competition". It's cute but the graphics really need to be worked on. This game is really fun at first, though the story line is long and there's lots of pointless dialogue. The romance is a bit weird and the fans are really creepy. She's been playing over and over again and is very annoyed with the game.
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