Kira Kira Pop Princess (Nintendo DS) Review

Based on the Pinky Street figures that are so popular in Japan, Kira Kira Pop Princess, as the name might suggest, is a game aimed solidly at the pre-teen girl market. As Gaby, a blonde moppet with no talent for dancing whatsoever, your aim is to set the streets ablaze with your performance prowess - not an easy task given that you have no talent. Luckily for you, one of the best dancers in town is about to set off to spread their musical magic around the globe and leaves you in charge of her dance studio for reasons that aren't quite fathomable; she sees potential, but decides to just leave you on your own running the place. We hope she had the place insured...

Being a game for girls, excuse us for being cynical while we tick off the list of the criterion included that make sure it appeals to the fairer side of the market. Lots of pink? Check. Shopping? Check. Clothes? Check. Big eyed cute characters? Check, check, check. It's almost like the developers got a grab bag filled with stereotypical things that girls like, swiped out a few fistfuls and smushed it altogether before adding a musical side to things. Luckily for them, the whole things hangs quite well together.

In your quest to be the best, you take Gaby around a number of districts in the girl-dominated area to learn their dancing styles. - i.e, beat them in dance-offs. Enter these matches and you will be asked to turn your DS onto its side, book-style. The top screen displays the girls doing their moves in time to the music as well as a metre which shows who the audience is preferring in the dance-off, but you're not really going to be looking at this too much. The musical action we're interested in is all set on the touch screen. Three horizontal bars fill the screen and light up in numerous ways to tell you to tap them (simply light up their colour), drag across them left or right (left or right arrows in the bar's colour go across it) or vertically strum over all three of them (a big arrow - surprisingly - goes vertically over the bars).

That's about the complexity of the system, but while other music games have a simplistic system but excruciatingly difficult patterns as you go further into them Kira Kira Pop Princess has had the traditional music game extreme difficulty nixed in favour of a child-friendly game. While it's a fair amount of fun, we wish there was a bit more depth and challenge to it, as the potential is there. It isn't really going to hold the attention of anybody older than the age of ten, sadly. The music isn't particularly memorable either; good enough to get into while you're playing them and let you tap your finger a little bit, but other than that, nada. The whole thing could have turned out much better if the tunes you danced to were more interesting.

Other than the dancing sections, you can spend your well-earned coins in shops to buy new clothes and items, or spend it on capsule machines. That's really about as far as the game goes, as well as a quirky little extra where you can take photos of your character and the opportunity to have dance-offs with other players over DS wireless link, but to be totally fair to it it's probably enough to entertain the audience at which it's aimed. The visuals are surprisingly decent, particularly in the dance-off sections (though you don't really get a chance to get a decent look at them unless you want to fail - and that'd just be embarrassing given the difficulty level), with a clean chunky chibi-anime style. Some of the dialogue is even rather funny in a bizarre Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, though the slapstick jokes fall flat on their faces.

Overall, Kira Kira Pop Princess is an alright little game for youngsters, but anybody expecting any more depth than a cycle of 'play simple rhythm game, buy some clothes, repeat' is kidding themselves. It's not bad, what's there is done quite well, but there just isn't enough to it.