Take EA’s The Sims and Nintendo’s Animal Crossing and stick them in a blender. Add a heaping spoonful of unabashed anime cuteness and you’ve got MySims. Sounds like a perfect combination right? Well, sort of. The end result is far from the spectacular gaming smoothie that you would expect, and while it does have its merits, particularly a terrific building mode, it falls far short of what it could be.

As far as story goes, it’s a pretty basic setup. The designer of a once-flourishing town has packed up and left, and so do all the residents, leaving the town to fall into a state of abandonment and disrepair. You arrive in the town, and meeting the cheery Mayor of (whatever you want to call your town), she charges you with bringing the town back from a zero-star ghost town to a five-star village of pleasantness. To attract citizens, you’ve got to build them a house, presumably one that suits their individual style (though I’m pretty sure if you build the stereotypical goth chick a fluffy pink paradise, she’ll still live there and think you’re nifty). Once they move in, they get whiny and want you to build them more stuff like beds and bookshelves and chairs. Build more houses, decorate their houses with stuff you build, and do it over, and over, and over again.

Where this game really shines is its building mode. If you’ve got a creative spirit in you, then this is where you get to have the most fun. For in-house decorations, most Sims give you a blueprint for what they want, though thankfully you only have to barely follow it, and you can add to it however much you want. They’ll give you a general outline, but if you want to add extra pillars and unnecessary sections to it, go right ahead. As long as you meet the requirements, the Sims for whom you are building will be ecstatic. Unfortunately those requirements usually include Essences. What are Essences? Well have a seat and let me tell you a story about how a promising game like MySims turns into a real bore pretty quickly.

Essences. Oh, Essences. They’re essentially collectable objects that you can turn into paint to colour your furniture. What’s unfortunate about this is that there are tons of kinds of them ranging from “Red Apple” to “Happy” to “Video Game”, and as time goes on residents of your town request furnitiure painted with more and more of them. You can get essences by talking to people, shaking them down from trees, fishing them out of water, and digging them up after searching with a metal detector. It’s an aspect of the game that’s much like a treasure hunt, but it can be really challenging trying to find them, and then finding enough of them to meet the requirements of the Sim that asked you for it. You’ll find you will spend the majority of the game looking for essences, rather than enjoying the terrific building mode, which ruins a lot of the game’s fun, unless you’re the type of person who enjoys mindless walking around and searching. It’s a real grind, and becomes the main detracting feature of this game, something which a rich and deep social aspect could feasibly make up for, but unfortunately doesn’t exist.

This game is apparently just another Sims game (albeit with a visual style dripping in overbearing cuteness), but aside from the characters speaking in incomprehensable Simlish, the option to “be nice” or “be mean” to people, and the friendly green diamond shape that appears over things and characters you can interact with, there’s really not much Sims in there. You don’t have to eat, you don’t have to sleep, you don’t deal with money at all (your only thanks for your mind-numbing searching and thumb-numbing building is the joy withing the hearts of your patrons), and the relationship-with-the-townspeople aspect is incredibly shallow. If you’re looking for a life-sim, this isn’t it. Go try Harvest Moon, or heck, just go play the original The Sims.

The game controls pretty well, they’re very basic and child/non-gamer friendly and well-suited for the feel of the game. The nunchuck controls your character’s movement, and the A and B buttons let you interact with people and objects using the Wii IR to control an on-screen hand. Motion controls are very limited, which is a very effective choice, using them only for small things like shaking trees and fishing. The building mode, as I’ve already mentioned, is superb, and bears a very strong likeness to playing with LEGO. In fact, customisation in general in this game is superb, as you can dress your character in a wide variety of clothing and mix and match with many different variations in both male/female facial features and hair (reminds me an awful lot of Miis…). Just in case you get confused, though, like I did, no, you can’t select their gender, only the pitch of their voice, so your characters can be quite adrogenous if you so choose.

While on the subject of gameplay, another major fault in this game is the frequent and lenghty load times. It just doesn’t make sense how often this game needs to load things. You will be staring at a loading screen for 5-10 seconds every time you enter a building, exit a building, go into a new area, go into a menu, or basically do anything else. When you are doing something else, the framerate drops an incredible amount. It is a very variable-heavy game, but I think it shows poor development to have these load times so often. Though granted, the Wii hardware doesn’t have much RAM, but when you look at games like Zelda or The Godfather which has huge areas and progressive loading, with only the occasional pause on a black screen, it makes me think that this game could have been made without so much loading. It’s incredibly distracting from the experience, not to mention throw-the-controller-against-the-wall frustrating.

As for the other stuff, the graphics are clean and crisp, and the cutesy chibi-like style is over-the-top, but manages not to become annoying. It fits very well with the style of game that this is, and is very inviting. The music is cheerful and there’s plenty of variety in it (except for the loading screen music, which you’ll wish you didn’t have to hear so often). It changes depending on what buildings you’re near, so it really adds an extra level of involvement into the game. It’s too bad, though, that there’s not too much to be involved in.

MySims is one of those games that didn’t live up to its potential. If you’re a fan of task-oriented repetitive gameplay, and if you enjoy spending hours just designing houses and furniture, and have a high tolerance for cuteness, then this game is for you. If you get bored easily, if you’re looking for something a little deeper, or if long loading times just pisses you off, then there are plenty of alternatives that are more worth your time and money. It’s an admirable attempt at combining The Sims with Animal Crossing, but instead of being both, it ends up being neither, and doesn’t quite live up to the standards set by either of those amazing games.

Score: 7.0

Reviewed by Chris.