Saving face
(This
review contains minor spoilers!)
Miitopia
is a concept I’m frankly stunned Nintendo hasn’t capitalized on sooner. The
Miis have been around for over a decade now, but not until this year have we
seen a full-blown game starring them that isn’t a weird Sims style watch-and-wait game like Tomodachi Life was. And while Miitopia
has a lot of fun with the wacky concept of an RPG world populated entirely
by a cast of your choosing, the fun soon wears thin as the game starts to feel
like it’s running in a circle and the laughs are fewer and further between.
This game bears plenty of similarities
to the previous Mii game for the 3DS, that being 2014’s Tomodachi Life. The same quirky and at times even sarcastic sense
of humour present in that game is back in action here, only this time in a
pseudo-fantasy setting. Throughout your adventure the Miis in your party will
trade quips and jokes with each other, and it can be plenty of fun to see Overwatch’s D.Va fighting side by side
with Grunkle Stan of Gravity Falls fame.
In fact, the entire concept of the
game’s entire cast being completely up to your imagination is Miitopia’s greatest asset. Everything
from simple villagers to major NPCs to your party members and even the main villain
are all up to whoever you’d like to pick. Want Jafar from Aladdin to be the sinister genie character? Go ahead. Is it been
your lifelong dream to go adventuring with Little
Witch Academia’s Sucy? You can do that. Have you ever wanted to populate an
entire village with the same Mii of Captain Olimar? Miitopia delivers. Having complete freedom to mix and match Miis
with various silly roles never stops being fun, and is really something I wish
we got to do more throughout the game. Basically the entire main cast for each
world you visit is chosen right when you arrive, leaving plenty of time spent
with the characters you choose, but also less fun characters to create.
The game is easily the simplest RPG
you’ll ever play. You can choose from a variety of classes for yourself and
your party members, with some classic genre staples (Warrior, Mage, Cleric and
the like) as well as some fun ones unique to this game (Chef, Cat and Flower are
all enjoyably goofy). You have the opportunity to see exactly what all the
classes do throughout your adventure, so you can easily pick your favourites to
use as you arrive in the final hours of the game.
Just like Tomodachi, this game requires very little interaction on your part.
The other three Miis in your party operate completely on autopilot, using
whichever attacks or spells they think will be viable in the scenario you’re
in. You only control your Mii, who is cast as the noble hero of the story. While
this is a handicap that I assume the game’s target audience of kids will enjoy,
for an adult like me I found myself really wanting a way to make the game more
hands-on. Oftentimes my assigned healer would just heal himself or melee attack
enemies instead of actually do his job, leaving a weakened party member wide
open.
Not that any of the battles are
difficult in the slightest, thanks to yet another training wheel Miitopia
sticks you with. Magic sprinkles are at your disposal early on in the game,
allowing you to use a large but limited supply of them to heal, restore mana,
temporarily increase damage at the cost of not being able to use spells or
select a target, and even revive one fallen party member per level. While it’s
completely possible to ignore the sprinkles entirely and play the game yourself,
the occasionally boneheaded moves your AI party members make will oftentimes
lead to you pulling them out just to get yourself out of a tight spot in a crucial
boss battle.
This sadly leads to a lot of the game
feeling like it’s on autopilot. The B button will become your best friend in
this adventure, as it can be used to fast-forward everything in the game,
including the long stretches of time spent watching your party running in a straight
line as they await a random enemy encounter or event. The only downside is that
this means you’ll likely be holding the button down the entire game, as there’s
no way for the game to constantly move at that speed and I often found myself
tired of the same boring enemy encounters being recycled ad-nauseum.
Miitopia
also finds itself in the unfortunate predicament in that it doesn’t know when
to end. Even after defeating the big bad the game just keeps going, except
now it’s become less of a goofy yet still driven RPG adventure and more of a
fetch quest for random NPCs. By this point the novelty of the Mii cast has
started to wear off and you can quickly see that the constant repetition in
battles with monsters you’ve seen plenty of variations on in the past is
becoming a little big agonizing. Continuing to hold down the B button through
one boring fight after another with no variation just to fight a boring boss
and get a reward at the end and then MAYBE
get a clue as to where the next actual bit of fun plot will be kills the
fun of Miitopia right where it
stands, and I really wish the game had ended sooner because of it.
Ultimately, Miitopia is good at being an entertaining game, as well as a great
place to get kids started on the RPG genre. The user-created cast is a complete
delight, as is the great sense of humour throughout the adventure. But the lack
of a higher difficulty level for older players as well as the fact that the
game goes on long enough to run itself right into the ground makes me feel that
this is a game I can’t recommend buying at full price. If you’re really
interested in the game, the free demo on the 3DS eShop is a great way to check
out the opening act and see if the game is for you, because trust me, it’s all
the same from then on out.
FINAL SCORE
6/10
Okay
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