Nintendo’s recent foray into more mobile games has been cause for jubilation for some long-time fans, determined for Nintendo to survive in an industry more cutthroat than ever before, and dismay for others who would prefer Nintendo not dive into the cheap-and-cheerful world of mobile gaming. This new willingness from Nintendo to embrace cheaper and free-to-play mobile game models is a big step for a company historically reluctant to leave its time honoured strategies behind for newer, untested methods. We broke out the 3DS to take a look at three of these low-cost and free-to-play titles.
Two of these titles are fleshed out versions of sub-games from last year’s fully-fledged 3DS title, Kirby Triple Deluxe, rebuilt in order for them to become standalone titles. The first of these is Kirby Fighters Deluxe, a 2.5D beat-em-up in the style of Super Smash Bros. There are crazy items like Smash, the levels look like Smash, even the music sounds like Smash. Unlike Smash, however, Kirby Fighters Deluxe is a bit more traditional in its fighting mechanics.
Rather than knock opponents off or out of the level, you beat them up until their health bar depletes. There are multiple Kirbies (Kirbys?) to select from like Sword Kirby, Beam, Bomb, Whip and Archer Kirby among many others. You can jump into the single play and battle your way through six early stages to unlock a few more. There’s multiple difficulty levels as well so if you want to face a stiffer challenge you can just bump it to anywhere from Easy to Very Hard.
There’s also multiplayer component that will allow you and three friends to party up on your 3DS’s and beat the hell out of each other (and if they don’t have the game, they can simply jump in with Download Play from the Home menu). For being as basic as it is, there’s a solid little beat-em-up here, perfect for killing time with friends. It’s on the Nintendo e-Shop right now for the 3DS and will run you AU$9.10.
The second of these two titles is Dedede’s Drum Dash Deluxe which sees longtime Kirby villain King Dedede bouncing along a never-ending set of bongo drums in time with songs pulled from various games in the Kirby franchise. The game’s levels are built on three planes – low, medium and high. You move Dedede left and right with the d-pad or control stick. He will bounce along on the drums at the low level by himself but by pressing the A button at the right moment you can get him to do a higher jump that takes him up to the medium plane. Nail the A button press again when coming down from a high jump and Dedede will do a super jump which shoots him up to the higher plane. The object of all this leaping about is to collect as many coins as you can and make it to the end of the level within the time limit. The game also awards you a bonus for being able to play the game on the off-beat. This one’s an awesome time-killer if you’re on your own. The mechanics are simple but solidly implemented and the music is quite catchy. It’s also on the Nintendo e-Shop for 3DS for $9.10.
Finally, we come to Pokemon Shuffle, a free-to-play puzzle/matching game that marks Nintendo’s first real foray into F2P. You are travelling through a new area and beating up Pokemon as you go. You have a basic Normal type to start with and it’s this you use to match with.
Rather than gems or some other macguffin, Pokemon Shuffle gets to match up Pokemon you’ve got in your party. Line up a bunch of Charmanders and you get a match. The match becomes damage dealt to the Pokemon you are battling. Just like in the fully-fledged Pokemon titles, each Pokemon has a type and all the strengths and weaknesses that go along with them.
For the veteran trainer who likes to min-max, you can customise a thug-life gang of adorable goons for maximum punishment if you wish but if that’s not your style you can just hit Optimize and the game will try to select a balanced roster from your captured Pokemon for you. Each battle gives you a certain amount of turns to whittle your opponent’s health down to nothing, at which point the game will tally up your points, multipliers and remaining move bonuses and calculate the likelihood of catching that particular Pokemon (there are currently over 160 Pokemon in the game so far, and Nintendo will almost certainly be adding more). You peg a pokeball at it and see if you get to keep it or not. If you aren’t successful in a catch, the game will occasionally offer you the opportunity to purchase a Great Ball with a better percentage of catching the bugger.
This is where the free-to-play aspect comes into play, and anyone who’s ever played an F2P game before will be familiar with its trappings. To purchase a Great Ball, or most other things in the game, you can use the slowly-accrued in-game currency of gold coins. You have a certain amount of Hearts for use as well – these represent how many Pokemon battles you can attempt before having to wait for the game to accrue more. There are highly valuable Jewels as well which allow you to purchase gold coins and Hearts in vast quantities. These are the only things in Pokemon Shuffle that can be purchased with real money. AU$1.30 gets you a single Jewel, AU$6.50 gets you six and so on up to AU$62.40 which gets you a whopping 75 Jewels. These purchases are made through the Nintendo e-Shop.
Nintendo seem to have realised the inherent danger in the free-to-play model, especially where clueless young players who may or may not have access to mum and dad’s credit card are concerned, and have worked very hard to strike a solid balance between the speed at which you can accrue currency in the game through play and the pay-to-win option. That pay-to-win option is always in the background too, with the menu to buy Jewels set as a sub-menu in the game’s store screen. Even waiting to get back into the game doesn’t feel like it takes too long – you gain a Heart back once every thirty minutes or so, maxing out at five.
Even the matching has been polished to the usual intense Nintendo shine – character icons are clear and vibrantly coloured so there can be no mistaking them and the actual matching mechanic is surprisingly non-constrictive. You’re free to create all sorts of shapes for matching outside of the standard 3-in-a-row or 4-in-a-row gets. You can set them up for plus shapes, T-shapes, multiple lines and more. The game doesn’t want to stop you from getting those matches either, letting you pull icons from anywhere on the board and place them anywhere there’s a match. It makes for a much faster, more interesting game.
A while ago I watched a video by two young game designers on the subject of “juice” in video games and how, when you use it correctly, you can turn even the most boring, uninspired game and make it feel really interesting (and you can watch that video here if you’re so inclined). By “juice” they mean the sort of thing you associate with a poker machine – bells and whistles, flashing lights, encouraging music and pleasant sound effects. I bring it up because Pokemon Shuffle is filled to the brim with “juice”. Everything you do results in some form of positive stimulus, the most intense of which is when you start a match cascade in a battle and the whirling lights and musical sound effects of the matches going off becomes a haze of euphoria and score multipliers.
Regardless of your feelings on the free-to-play genre as a whole, Pokemon Shuffle is the real deal. You might dismiss these sorts of games out of hand but that’s only because you’ve never played one by Nintendo before. It’s proof that Nintendo can take literally any genre of game and make it great through a combination of meticulous, balanced design and intense charm. Every other developer of free-to-play mobile games must be sweating bullets over Pokemon Shuffle – the Grand Masters of design have arrived and they’re about to take all those F2P punks to school.
I’m firmly in the camp that believes Nintendo need to embrace these kinds of mobile gaming experiences. There’s still a place for the $60 premium-content, full-blown gaming experiences the 3DS is known for, like the recent The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D remake or Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate but it can be hard to justify those price tags when people can grab Angry Birds or Cut the Rope on their phones for $1.20 and pull fifty hours of gameplay out of them. Getting on-board with mobile gaming is a smart move and an important step forward for Nintendo, one that will hopefully teach them a few lessons about going with the flow rather than planting their feet and refusing to move with the times.
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