amphibious_ReViews

This is it folks. We've made it. The grand finale. Just over a year ago, spurred on by the release of NetPass, an online resurrection of the 3DS's native StreetPass feature, I decided to beat every game in the StreetPass Mii Plaza. That journey concludes here with Feed Mii. While it took me the most real-life days to beat out of the bunch, it was one of the shortest games in terms of how long I actually played per session. It's thanks to that and the clever premise behind the game that it was one of my favorites in the plaza. Long before I embarked on my Mii Plaza quest, I was playing Puzzle Swap and Find Mii . These two games came packed-in with the software, whereas all the rest were introduced later as paid DLC. Because it was free, I would be surprised if anyone with a 3DS hadn't also invested at least some of their time into Find Mii. That's where this game comes in. Running with the assumption that the heroes in Find Mii were not adventuring on an empty stoma...

Returning to my StreetPass Mii Plaza quest after a multi-month hiatus, I decided I had to adjust my play style for Monster Manor. This game, while initially one of the more engaging choices in the collection, was the primary reason I took a break from StreetPass at the start of the new year. I was consistently spending the most amount of time on Monster Manor with every pass through the plaza, but the gameplay never changed and the finish line always seemed so far out of reach. There is a fake ending about halfway through the base adventure, and if it was a real conclusion, I would have been okay. Instead, my frustration with Monster Manor peaked and my interest quickly started to fade. My restructured strategy felt a little sloppy, but it did speed the game up a bit, giving me the strength to see it through to the end. Monster Manor is an exploration-style game that finds you trapped in a haunted tower. Your challenge is to find the way to the top so you can defeat the master of the m...

I have a mixed relationship with Ultimate Angler. On one hand, it is one of the better StreetPass games, both in terms of its gameplay and its visuals. However, the randomness implemented in multiple layers of the game had a habit of stunting my progress and I almost quit the game multiple times. I did end up finishing all of the main content, save for collecting every species of fish, but it wasn't always a fun road to get there. At the start of Ultimate Angler, you can unlock up to nine islands, giving you a wide selection of locations to fish, each requiring different bait to catch their local species. This is when the game is at its best. There is always a clear path for making progress, and you're all but guaranteed to be catching something new with every play session. As you finish islands, this selection narrows and progress can become frustratingly slow. Completing islands is the name of the game though, so there's no avoiding it. Ultimate Angler's story has you...

I will need some time to let my thoughts about the StreetPass games ruminate, but I think Market Crashers might be my favorite of the DLC. I wouldn't have thought a game about the stock market would keep my interest, yet it was always one of the most exciting to get to. This also ended up being the only DLC game in the plaza that I fully completed (so far, at least). My appreciation for Market Crashers isn't just random chance, though. Instead, it's thanks to an excellent combination of clever design and enticing rewards. I think something Market Crashers does better than any other StreetPass game is balance its playtime. By their very nature, each game in the plaza is pretty simplistic, and without the StreetPass aspect, they would come off pretty thin. Market Crashers embraces this limitation better than any of it's peers by delivering an experience short enough that I'm always excited for the next play session, yet long enough that it still feels substantial.   T...

Flower Town was one of the few StreetPass Mii Plaza games that I actually wanted to keep playing after I had beaten it and along with Puzzle Swap , the relaxing, collection-focused structure of this game easily made it one of my top three in the plaza. I had originally hoped to get one of each flower variety in my journal before quitting, but the later stretch of the game slowed down significantly, and I decided to stop playing before my opinion soured. While I didn't finish as much as I wanted to, I still really enjoyed everything Flower Town had to offer. While the game's premise is simple, it's supplemented by a wide breadth of complementary mechanics. Each time you open the game with a new set of StreetPass tags, the Miis you bring along will water your current flower one by one. Watering will start by helping a seed to grow into a blooming flower, but will later grant the opportunity for your flower to cross-pollinate with those of your tags. When done correctly, you s...

Mii Trek was one of the StreetPass games that I truly looked forward to. The simplicity of directing my adventuring Miis and the excitement of making important discoveries made this a perfect successor to both Find Mii and Puzzle Swap . There's really not much to Mii Trek, and it feels like some of its major features were shoehorned in to help pad the game out, but I think it actually fits nicely within the StreetPass Mii Plaza for precisely those reasons. You're placed in the role of an archeologist seeking ancient artifacts, and your StreetPass tags make up your team for each expedition. Each of those tags contributes to the team's stamina meter, presumably based on the number of steps they had taken when they were tagged according to their 3DS pedometer. Since all of my tags were received exclusively through NetPass, most of the people joining me weren't walking with their 3DSs and contributed the minimum 500 steps (which gets you just about nowhere). This made the ...

I generally enjoyed Warrior's Way, but I wish I could have spent more time actually playing it. Warrior's Way is a strategy game about balancing risk and reward, but as a risk-averse person, I tended to play it very safe. That came down to playing very slowly so I could just about guarantee victory in every matchup. Oh, and it worked, too. I never once lost a battle during my entire time with the game, and I fought in hundreds of them. It wasn't until I started getting a little antsy in the last third of the game that I started to enjoy it though. That's because I actually started to take a risk here and there. There are two major phases to any play session in Warrior's Way. First, you recruit new soldiers for your army from your StreetPass tags. People who don't own the game appear as generals and bring a small group of soldiers who join you right away. Other Warrior's Way players appear as monarchs and visit with their entire army in tow. They may voluntee...

Ninja Launcher truly baffled me. It had a pretty good gameplay foundation, and there are plenty of game modes to try out, it just feels unfinished. I think what it came down to was a general lack of exposition. Where pretty much every other StreetPass game had at least some kind of dialogue before or after a play session, Ninja Launcher didn't have anything. It's a real shame too, because the concept could have been fleshed out into a pretty neat story. Now I'm just left to wonder what it could have been like. Ninja Launcher puts you in the role of a ninja, but all of your enemies are perched on top of unscalable cliffs. To fight back, your apprentice suggests that you hop into a cannon and strike at their level. Unfortunately, you can't take any weapons or armor for the launch. That's where your StreetPass tags come in. Everyone you tagged becomes an ally that will fly a kite along your flight path with weapons or armor attached that you can then pick up along the ...

While its sequel is an overall marked improvement, I felt like my journey through the StreetPass Mii Plaza wouldn't be complete without revisiting the original Find Mii. It may not be the one that I played the most, but I have a lot more nostalgia for this Find Mii than I was expecting. Something about it reminded me of playing the 3DS's built-in AR games in my brothers' bedroom while I was still discovering what the incredible new handheld could do. Thinking back on those times gives me a nice warm feeling that I just don't get with  Find Mii II . The original Find Mii is a relatively simple affair. There's no potion shop, no pairing up, no helper hare, and no branching paths. It's a linear quest where you use StreetPass-tagged adventurers to move from place to place and defeat the monsters that get in their way. This meant I couldn't cheese my way through with just one or two teams as I did in the sequel, but the journey was so much shorter that I didn...

When the StreetPass Mii Plaza DLC was first rolling out, players could pick one of two games to receive for free as a demo of sorts. The options were Slot Car Rivals and Market Crashers, and I quickly chose the former because it looked a lot more exciting. Now that I've played both of them and learned that Market Crashers might just be my favorite StreetPass game out of all of the DLC, I know I probably picked incorrectly. However, Slot Car Rivals was still enjoyable in its own right. I can't think of any other racing games that are controlled exclusively with one button, let alone any that are still fun, but this one managed to pull it off! Mimicking the real-world hobby of slot car racing, Slot Car Rivals invites you to race against your StreetPass tags on increasingly complex tracks as you aim to become the champion. Each course has a set of challenges to complete in order to progress. Each of the four circuits has five tracks (although the fifth track in the final circuit i...

As I said in my review of Mii Force , I prefer the StreetPass games that are more passive, rather than those that are action-oriented and demand more focus. Because of that, Battleground Z was the game I dreaded trudging through the most. It was the final game in my lineup, so I had the incentive of getting a new set of Miis from the line and going back to Puzzle Swap as soon as I beat the next level, but I still had to work up the motivation to continue every time. It wasn't even a bad game, and I can see all the cool things they're doing, it just didn't fit with the way I like to consume my StreetPass-fueled media. Battleground Z takes place in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, with you and the people you meet via StreetPass being some of the few survivors. Following the instructions of a genetic scientist who thinks she can cure the zombie virus, you have to battle through various locations to protect survivors and collect zombie DNA for testing. The stages have a lot o...

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to complete Find Mii II. Unlocking only after you beat the original Find Mii at least twice, Find Mii II is longer, offers multiple branching paths, requires multiple playthroughs of the same routes for completion, and has a secret second quest that does that all again, just bigger! For a long time, the Find Mii games were the only way to unlock new hats for your Mii to wear in the plaza, so their slow grind was still rewarding, but it truly felt like I was never going to be able to finish it. Thankfully, with the combined powers of NetPass and a 3DS Play Coin hack, I finally collected all of the hats in both quests and can move on with my life. Find Mii II is functionally and aesthetically a very similar game to its predecessor, yet it has enough improvements to effectively replace the original. For comparison, the relationship between PAC-MAN and the far superior Ms. PAC-MAN comes to mind. Just like in the first game, your goal is to save ...

All of the pre-installed games on the 3DS were incredible to me as a kid. They may have just been glorified tech demos, but the fun of experiencing such novel technology cannot be overstated. I spent a lot of time playing Face Raiders and the AR Card games, but Puzzle Swap, a demonstration of collaborative gameplay via StreetPass, was easily my favorite. Originally one of just two games in the StreetPass Mii Plaza, Puzzle Swap has now been joined by a large variety of StreetPass-based games, yet it remains one of my favorites. The simple yet rewarding act of trading puzzle pieces and unlocking 3d dioramas had me hooked from the start. While it was a ton of fun finishing up my remaining puzzles all these years later, the prime Puzzle Swap experience was back when new puzzles were still being released. With every update, you'd get a piece of one of the new puzzles as a starting gift, making it your duty to disseminate your share while you try to collect the rest for yourself. Th...

I jumped into the StreetPass Mii Plaza DLC train far too late. By the time I could actually play any of the new games, the 3DS's popularity had waned enough that even one StreetPass tag was cause for elation. That reality forced me to neglect a surprisingly delightful suite of games until about a month ago. Enter NetPass - a custom tool that attempts to recreate the magic of StreetPass through digital lobbies that you can join to "encounter" other 3DS players and collect new StreetPass tags. Using NetPass, I was able to dive headfirst into the Mii Plaza DLC that I've been sitting on for all this time, and I'm loving it! Mii Force is the first game from the collection that I've beaten so far, and I appreciate its novelty, but it's one of my least favorite of the bunch. I prefer the StreetPass games that are laid back, letting me take them at my own pace throughout the day. I'm not so much a fan of the ones that demand focus and quick reactions. As a sho...