REVIEW: Imagine Figure Skater

I'm not sure if I should be comforted or not that the game begins with a disclaimer that "rules and techniques have been changed from real-life." It's not an auspicious beginning. One wonders what they got right and what they got wrong... and how annoying it will be. But, I soldier on.

First, I choose a skater. All choices are girls in the large-eyed, cute anime style. I'm going for the pink-haired pixie with the pony-tails. Her response is an annoying, high-pitched, "I did it!" Now, I get a coach, a young anglo-looking woman with green eyes and wavy brown hair. Her name is May Summers. She's a world-class coach and is strict, but not tough without a reason. Summers introduces some of her famous, former students, causing my first cringe of the game. One student was the first in the world to ever complete a "Quadruple Spin Jump." Perhaps this is just a translation error (this the literal translation of the term used in Japanese). I'll let it slide for now. Now Summers introduces my avatar, saying she's been skating since she was 3 and is very talented and hard working.

It appears from the top screen that I'll have weekly goals and a monthly competition. The first one is the Town Competition. The first week, the goal is to increase stamina and learn a double toe loop (incorrectly capitalized as Double Toe Loop). The coach cautions you not to just skate. You must interact with people to "grow as a person and become more expressive." You must win competitions to earn training money. As you earn training money, your KP increases--don't ask me what KP is other than Kitchen Patrol. Maybe I shoulda read that manual! Oh now, wait, with KP, I can... go shopping?!?!? Say WHA?

After this long speech, the interface dumps me out next to the ice surface. I click on the Coach's Office and once inside, Coach Summers explains that the best way to raise my stamina is to play mini-games. She also wants me to visit the Training Center. Back out in the hall, I click on the Rink and trade small talk with the rink owner. That was pointless. Trying the Exit puts us on a cute map of the town. You can scroll right and left with the pink arrows at the bottom.

Next, I go to the Training Center to meet my square-jawwed and OH SO HOT, conditioning coach Kline. But it's the annoying Julie, making fun of how weak I am, who shows me the conditioning game to increase my stamina. She explains how a skater has three basic attributes: Stamina, Coordination, and Artistry (Presenation!). Without Stamina, you can't complete your program. You collapse at the end if you have too little Stamina left. The more difficult the move, the more Stamina it uses. Coordination improves your items. The game simulates this by reducing the amount of time you have to input your moves. Artistry improves your spins. You need both Coordination and Artistry for steps (footwork) to improve. Also, you're limited to raising each attribute a maximum of one level per week, which I suppose encourages you to become well-rounded as working extra hard on Stamina won't help you beyond that first point. Wish you could make skaters do that in real life!

The first mini-game is pretty easy. I have to eat sushi to raise my Stamina. OH HURT ME! Mom, make 'em STOP! They're making me eat SUSHI! I got my first Stamina point. And back in town, the School building has little sun-rays coming from it. I go there and find two people at the School Gate. Julie is there, mean as ever, so is the adorable Kevin. Whoops! My avatar is blushing. Kevin's got a crush on me! Julie is not amused.

Back in town, there's someone standing by My Room so I go in. Mom gives me money, tells me my wallet only holds 9990 KP and that I should come home any time to save.

At the rink, I get on the ice to learn the double toe. First, I get to change into my practice outfit. I have three choices of hairstyle, but only one dress. Fair enough. I guess this is the point of shopping, you get to buy dresses and accessories and other... stuff. (The choosing of clothes before practice gets REALLY OLD about half way through the game. There's not enough cool clothing either, you run out of things to buy.)

Now dressed and on the ice, Coach Summers explains what a toe loop is (correctly!) how the jumping system works. To do a jump, a pattern appears on the screen. You have to trace it with the stylus the required number of times. For a double toe loop, I have to trace a circle two times. I'm not a terribly coordinated person, but I'm able to do it okay after
a couple of tries. Each time I do the jump correctly, I get the option
to practice or leave the rink. As the jumps get harder, the patterns get more complex and supposedly more difficult. As with real skating, the harder jumps are sometimes easier for some people. I STILL can't do a double toe loop, but can toss off quad Axels with aplomb.

Back in the coach's office, she gives me my next week's assignment. I have to increase my Coordination and learn an upright spin. When I get out of the coach's office, I find a cute little doggie outside the rink. I take him to the skate shop since Mom is allergic to dogs and Mr Kelly agrees to keep him--nice bit of narrative there. Then its back to the rink to do the Coordination game which requires me hurl Curling rocks at penguins on the ice. COOL!

After that, it's time to practice learn my upright spin. For some ODD reason, the upper screen shows this as a "stand spin," (a Japanese term) but, oh well. The spinning controls are pretty easy. You scrub the stylus back and forth within a defined space to control your spinning speed. When I have raised my stats, learned my new item and visited pretty much every available place in town, I'm prompted to go see the coach who congratulates me and introduces my new tasks for the week.

The game goes on like this week after week. There are six mini-games: sushi eating, penguin squishing, cake decorating, poster puzzles, snow-flake catching, and locker matching. Unfortunately for me, I suck at half of them, so I was able to use only three of the six mini-games to raise my stats. Suffice it to say, the mini-games got old about half way through (it took about 15 hours to finish), and none of them got really difficult until the last quarter of the game--and then they got freaking impossible! Though in general, that's more due to my lack of eye-hand coordination than it really is to the difficulty of the game. My fast-twitch teen daughter does just fine with both the mini-games and the competition. My middlest, age 8, does less well. She has trouble both with the mini-games and the competitions... the game might be a bit too "old" for her... not that it's going to stop her from playing, just that it creates a bit of frustration.

What is really engaging about the game is the narrative. Your avatar gets her jumps, but she also has to navigate multiple skating and romantic rivalries, including two boys who both like her. She also struggles with her school work, finally succeeding through hard work and extra studying. There's even an adorable stray dog named "Milk." The constant flattery from the other characters was a bit syrupy, but I think it might build self-esteem for girls in the target age range. Anyway, the story is a delight and the characters have much more depth than you'd imagine. I also like how you never really come to like Julie. It's not very American for there to be people you simply don't like--seems like everyone's got to group-hug at the end, ya'know?

The competitive framework isn't too bad. There are multiple competitions. Each level has its own set of rivalries. You get a choice of three program "patterns" one of which you can make yourself. After you choose a pattern, you can have the coach choose your jumps and spins or you can choose them yourself. I did notice that coach often chose an easier set of jumps than I would have--making it much harder to win, as the scoring system is a variant of Code of Points (CoP). So after the first comp, I chose my own jumps, though I often used one of the pre-made patterns. It would have helped if the game showed some more information about the items, specifically: Stamina cost, Stamina remaining, points earned, and total points for the program so far. But, it's not the the most difficult thing in the world to make a decent program that will win, just choose the hardest items which are always towards the bottom of the screen. For the world comp, you can eschew combinations in favor of quad jumps, there's no Zayak Rule to prevent you.

You get one chance to run-through your program before the competition, and that brings up one of the major game-play flaws. The ONLY time you get to practice combination jumps, is in the run-through. It takes practice to get the timing right and it's impossible to know if you can complete a particular combo before choosing it because you can't practice it. And you don't get to rework the program before the competition if you happen to choose (or the coach chooses) a combination you can't do. Fortunately, if you don't make the cut (3rd, 2nd or 1st depending on the comp), you can go back and re-skate from the long, the short, or the beginning of the month. I ended up reskating a fair amount, at least once for every competition beyond Regionals.

The music will be familiar to most rabid skate fans. In fact, for 15 hours, I racked my brains trying to remember where I'd heard "Nobody Sleeps," one of the first songs you can skate to along with Bolero. It wasn't until I was getting in the shower after finishing the game that I thought, "Nessun Dorma! I'm such an idiot." While you run out of music to buy half way through the game, most skate fans will be happy to know that Maleguena didn't make the cut and does not appear, nor does Paint it Black or On the Waterfront. The music is tinny and repetitive, but you have to give the developers props for choosing the most hackneyed skating music on earth. It proves they're paying attention.

Of course, one wishes they actually WATCHED some skating before they did the animations. Things have not just been "changed." I can cope with the misspellings and poor translations. I can cope (barely) with the sexist remarks about the restaurant run by women. I can cope with the minor changes to point values. I can cope with the fact that there's no Zayak Rule. I can cope with the Technical and "Artistry" marks. I can almost but not quite cope with the high pitched "I did it" every time your avatar lands a jump (majorly annoying). What I can't cope with is that they got the animations wrong.

All the spins are entered from three turns. Three turns. Yeah, me too. I have literally NEVER seen a spin entered like this in ice skating. In roller skating, yes, but only camels. On ice, NEVER. There's no butterfly on the Death Drop. It's just a sit spin. The Flying Camel doesn't fly, but the traveling camel, which should be entered from three turns, has a flying entry. The Back Scratch spin is just a medium-fast upright with the foot held high instead of being down near the other skate. The Cross Foot Spin is actually a Back Scratch not a Cross Foot. They also have something called an "Upwards" camel, which looks like an inverted (from roller skating) or a very extreme Harding spin. It's something basically almost never seen in ice skating. The layback position is bad: poor back position, poor leg position, poor foot position, and it never improves.

Worse, though the coach's description of the jumps is mostly correct (only mostly), the jumps themselves don't look all that different from one another. You never see the feet to tell, only the mid-body--shades of NBC's skating coverage. Jumps are often under-rotated or worse, rotated fully and landed on the wrong foot! Your skater visibly changes feet. No deduction is made.

Footwork is a similar travesty, though they got the straight line, circular, and serpentine correct. Your avatar never does anything that really looks like footwork and at times, often appears to lose her balance. When you finish the simple puzzle that makes the footwork happen, your avatar just strokes through the rest of the pattern.

One thing they did do fairly well was the spirals. Spirals don't require you to do anything. They are a resting section. Rather than using a standard arabesque position spiral, they use the peeing-on-a-hydrant side spiral position. Kind of odd. But, there's also a Beillman (really a half-Beillman) and an absolutely lovely Ina Bauer. It's so beautiful, you get the feeling that Shizuka Arakawa posed for it. Of course, they usually have the Ina Bauer on an edge or curve, something you never see in real life.

Much of that sounds very damning, but it really isn't. Educated, rabid skate fans and former skaters aren't really the target market for this game. The target market is girls ages 8 to 12. Most of these girls are not skaters themselves and wouldn’t know a Lutz from a layback. The inaccuracies in the skating scenes didn't bother my daughters in the least. They didn't know any better.

No, I'd say the most important measure of a game like this is, "is it fun?" The answer is a resounding, high-pitched "YES."

Imagine Figure Skater was fun--loads of fun--fifteen whole hours of fun. My daughter was addicted immediately and so was I. I loved the narrative. I like the interface for the most part. I even got nervous when I was "skating" in a competition. It was so much fun I considered asking for a Nintendo DS Lite for myself for Christmas!

Imagine Figure Skater is a delight. Buy it for the tweener girl in your life. I'm sure she won't tell if she catches you playing it.