LogFAQs > #932384197

#70





Years of release: 2011 (3DS), 2013 (DLC first wave), 2015 (DLC second wave), 2016 (DLC third wave)
Beaten?: To varying degrees

Shit, I knew this list was going to make me sad. Pour one out for a game that will truly only ever be a 2010's experience. It might seem frivolous to even include this, but I have a lot of good memories here.

Your mileage will probably vary on how much use you got out of this. For me, during the peak of streetpassing from 2011-2015 or so, I was getting tags pretty much every day at college - there was a sort of coziness to the ritual of it, opening my 3DS during the day to see who I tagged, seeing a lot of the same people over and over again, people who I never met but I assumed must have noticed they were tagging me a lot as well. At cons, during the height of tagging, you could easily sit down on your 3DS and just constantly go through tags and never actually get through the whole backlog. Unfortunately, they didn't update the game to handle mass taggings more efficiently until 2016, after the craze started to die down. But I was fascinated by going through and seeing other peoples' Miis, trying to fill out as many states and countries as I could. I was never too interested in creating Miis back on the Wii, but with the 3DS's ability to share them, the idea of Miis became 100 times more interesting.

The games here are actually really kind of great though? They're simple, but the whole idea of people you tagged essentially being currency you can use in the games gives them an interesting design space, especially with peoples' shirt colors playing different roles in every game. Mii Force is actually a really legit game, and my favorite of the bunch - a shmup where each Mii you tag is an extra weapon you can add onto your ship. Each of the weapons are super fun, though some are better than others (hello, lime green!), and there's something really satisfying about deciding how exactly you want to orient all your weapons and blow stuff up. It's a concept that I think could actually be used to great effect in a real game, but Mii Force is genuinely fun and challenging and worth someone's time to play, although it'd be a lot harder now without the ability to easily get 10 tagged people.

Find Mii was also a classic - really simple but I still liked the little tactical things that went into it, and how every different Mii had different magic to use in battle, although some battles were annoying because you really needed to get specific shirt colors to advance. I liked the monster mansion game too where everyone gave you puzzle pieces that you had to put together which would create a maze to navigate through - another really clever game concept that was simple here and could be really interest put into more complicated practice I think, but I got a lot of time out of it. Even the flower-growing minigame is kind of fun! I got most of the flowers, but not all of them. I think my mom actually completed her flower library, the madwoman.

Sadly, I think my puzzle library will probably go incomplete, and many of these games unfinished. It's not impossible for me to still get some tags just at home between our 3DSes, or to complete the games with play coins now, but it's not the same. The time for StreetPass Mii Plaza has passed, and I'm really sad the Switch doesn't do anything like this - it may be a portable system in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways it doesn't quite capture the magical essence that the 3DS had as a portable system. The 3DS really defined this decade for me in a big way and I'm sorry to see it go, and all the awesome little Mii games with it. RIP.

(For some reason, this game was the hardest to find a nice screenshot for yet)