My World, My Way

6.25

She Should Have Pouted Until She Got a Better Game

Review

Veggie Jackson Fri, 13 March 2009 03:32PM

Game: My World, My Way

/ Platform: Nintendo DS

Genre(s): RPG

Name: My World, My Way
Genre: Role Playing
Platform: DS

Sometimes a new twist is all it takes to reinvigorate a time-worn genre. With their newest offering for the DS, My World, My Way, developer Global A has tried to spice up old-school RPGs with a mechanic based on pouting, whining and throwing tantrums. Like I said, SOMETIMES a new twist is all it takes…but not always.

In a major departure for the genre, the protagonist of My World, My Way isn’t an amnesiac street urchin in a belly shirt, nor a spiky-haired swordsman with a secretly royal bloodline. In fact, the hero of the story is actually a heroine, and not a very likeable one. Elise is a princess with a problem; she’s sweet on a male adventurer who won’t give a spoiled rotten brat like her the time of day. To win him over, she decides to become an adventurer in her own right, and sets out on her epic quest.

Elise’s journey basically consists of a series of towns with combat areas attached to them. Each town consists of the same four buildings (Inn, Item Shop, Fortune Teller, Weapons Shop) and a few townspeople who will give you missions. Instead of having to wander around the town to find the stores, towns appear as simple menus, allowing you to select your store. While this does make outfitting your character quicker and more convenient, it detracts from the game’s immersive nature. Part of the fun of RPGs is exploring the various villages and towns of the given world. Turning these towns into menus and omitting any exploration only serves to make the world less interesting and eliminate any connection the player feels toward it. Once you’ve seen what there is to see in each village, you’ll be tasked with clearing the surrounding area of monsters and the like. These outlying areas are laid out in a grid pattern with each square potentially containing enemies. Clear out all the enemies, and you’ll move on to the next village. Sadly, this routine repeats for every village with almost no variations, and these battle sequences grow tiresome very quickly. Since these battles make up about 90% of the actual gameplay, My World, My Way will turn off most gamers with its tedious and repetitive structure.

Atlus, the game’s publisher, is well-known for its spot-on Japanese to English translations and its willingness to poke fun at its own games and genres. This holds true for My World My Way as well. Not only does the game deliver perfect English dialogue, it can, at times, be quite funny. The problem is that many of the tongue-in-cheek jokes are at the expense of RPG trappings that the game falls into itself. Jokes about repetitive missions lose a lot of their luster when you realize that you’re being subjected to a series of extremely repetitive missions.

The twist of My World, My Way is the “Pout System”. By throwing hissy-fits and whining until she gets her way, Elise can alter the world around her. Using the Pout, “This is Annoying!” will allow you to skip a random battle, and “I Want More XP!” doubles the experience given by defeated monsters. There are also Pouts that will lower an enemy’s level, produce more coins from fallen foes, or even change the type of terrain you’re standing on. The system is certainly unique, and goes a long way towards giving the game an identity, but like pretty much everything else in the game, it’s too shallow to hold anyone’s interest for long; especially since all your Pouts are available from the beginning of the game. Allowing players to unlock more Pouts would have helped by giving an incentive to trudge on, but Global A decided to open the floodgates from the get-go; a decision I strongly disagree with.

Visually, My World, My Way does a few things right, just not enough of them. There is some decent character design in play here; especially on Elise, who fits the bill as a bratty princess, but there simply isn’t enough of it. All the villages in the game feature the same three or four residents, and while the game addresses this by making them all actors who travel from town to town, it feels more like an excuse for lazy design than a clever plot device. In battle, monsters are presented in 3D, and look fairly decent for a DS title. Atlus definitely saved some money by presenting villages as lists as opposed to fully designing and rendering towns, but the omission of actual streets, buildings and villagers really hurts the game’s presentation.

At its core, My World, My Way is a very basic, repetitive RPG with a gimmicky twist that loses its novelty pretty quickly. A healthy sense of humor and some decent design elements can’t save it from its own boring structure and lazy production. It’s marketed as a “Girl’s Game,” but RPG fans of either gender have plenty of better options on the DS.