Vimm's Lair: DS Reviews - My Friends

Nintendo DS
My Friends

Graphics:
Sound:
Gameplay:
Overall:
4.00
2.00
3.00
3.00
Votes: 1
Reviews: 1


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Reviewer: Gormless George Date: Jun 15, 2023
Do you want friends, even though you're too unlikeable to make any? Do you also happen to be 9 years old? Well, there are much better options than this. The 2-megabyte file size should tell you all you need to know about this game's level of quality.

Graphics: 4
These graphics are serviceable, but downright ugly; they actually look like they were designed by a 63-year-old man pretending to draw like a toddler. The characters you create all look like reanimated corpses with their unnatural expressions and abhorrent body proportions; the menus look generic as all hell, and the environments look unfinished. That's not even mentioning the inconsistent framerate that plagues the whole entire game.

Sound: 2
These "sound effects" are one big assault on your ears and your sanity. When the menu sound effects aren't being generic like usual, they're being cut off too early, being used in the wrong spots, and the list goes on. The one actual song in this game is forgettable and sounds like it was composed by AI. Not to mention, the instrument samples used in the songs and jingles are all super crusty; like you're listening to the whole game through a window fan. The children you play as/with have about 10 voice lines total. On the topic of children...

Gameplay: 3
Well, what did you expect from a game called "My Friends", and nothing else? You play as a custom-created child and you play with at least 2 other children (the tutorial forces you to make 2, more on that in a bit), playing a collection of games which all just boil down to variations of Tag. You can unlock more areas to play in and shove friends in, but that's about all the replay value you can get from this game. Around the area, you can find objects (such as someone else's sandwich) to give to your friends and hopefully make them happy. Or you could let them wallow in depression; there's no punishment for doing that. You can also send the friends you made to another player (if you can even find someone who plays this garbage), but you can't actually play WITH that other player. Weird.
Finally, the tutorial for this game SUCKS. It instructs you to create yourself in the game, which takes like 5 minutes to complete since there's so many inputs; not in customization features, of which there are few, but how it asks you a bunch of questions at the end, like your preferred music genre (assuming you've actually developed music taste by the age of 9), favorite color, or favorite animal. Also, you HAVE to fill these out; you can't just say "I don't have a favorite". Once you have done ALL THAT, you do it again for your first friend. And then one more time for an arbitrary second friend. That's the tutorial; you're left mostly on your own from there on out. The tutorial itself has no right to be so time-consuming for what little you can really do in this game.

Overall: 3
This game is the definition of "unnecessary"; you could just GO OUTSIDE. Under no circumstances would you actively want to play Tag on your DS when you can just GO OUTSIDE. You shouldn't need to literally create digitized friends in the screen when there's a better way to introduce much more friendly and capable people into your life; just GO OUTSIDE. Why listen to this game's hopeless squawks for sound effects when you can hear something much more pleasant when you GO OUTSIDE? There's a better way to "make friends. Play games. Have fun"; just GO OUTSIDE!

Whatever you end up doing, just make sure you don't end up playing this.