New StreetPass Mii Plaza Games on the 3DS: Surprisingly Addicting

Miis have been Nintendo’s go-to avatar system since the Wii, where we discovered that very simplistic sprites could be made into pretty believable people like ourselves or maybe Stephen Colbert, Santa Claus or Jesus. At first Miis weren’t particularly good for anything but being cute or maybe wandering around a Pokemon Ranch. But with the advent of the StreePass feature of the 3DS, Miis got a bump in usefulness. A default feature of the 3DS is the StreetPass Mii Plaza, where you can gather StreetPass-tagged Miis in sort of a Facebook for random people you’ve passed in the world that also like Nintendo games. The 3DS Plaza also comes with two simple games in the Plaza; Puzzle Swap and Find Mii.

Puzzle Swap is barely a game and really more tedious collecting – most Miis you meet have puzzle pieces for various Nintendo scenes. Sometimes when scenes are completed, you get a nice animation, but it’s not particularly enthralling. Find Mii is more fun – collected Miis team up in an RPG-style adventure to rescue your Mii who is captured; and will be continued to be captured, over and over, after you’ve completed the game the first time and want to play again, then if you want to play the sequel, Find Mii II. Find Mii adds a little bit of complication – Miis’ shirt colors (chosen when one creates a Mii and picks a favorite color) give them special abilities like fire attacks or blinding light, and Miis in the same colors or similar colors can team up to perform special attacks or magical spells.

Find Mii and Puzzle Swap, while simple, were great time-killers and a fun way of using Miis for something other than simple avatars. A few months ago, a 3DS update added the opportunity to buy four new, much-improved Mii Plaza games at $4.99 for per game or $14.99 for a bundle.

Flower Town
A garden sim game in which your Mii is a citizen of Florafield, a town that some how exists with EVERY SINGLE PERSON’S LIFE REVOLVING AROUND FLOWERS. You harvest seeds, grow flowers to fill out a large journal of flower species and take on orders for specific types of flowers to sell to the townsfolk. Your StreetPass friends come by to help you water whatever you’re breeding, helping to cross-pollinate for new breeds and grow flowers queued to shirt color. Using Play Coins nets you more friends to water your plants – it takes a few waterings for a plant to bloom.

MiiForce
A cute little top-down shoot-’em-up in which your Mii is a stalwart member of the elite MiiForce, keeping the galaxy safe and sound. Your StreetPass friends show up as little modules that you plug into your small space craft, with each shirt color offering a different style of weapon, from heat seeking missiles to bombs to high speed bouncy balls. Play Coins can be used to hire more friends to act as your modules/weapons.

Warrior’s Way
A big battle simulator that operates off of a rock-paper-scissors system. Your Mii is King or Queen (or in my case, GOD-EMPRESS, as I refuse to acknowledge any other title) of a kingdom attempting to take over the world! Your StreetPass friends show up with all of THEIR StreetPass friends as an army to join your cause or battle. As your army grows (and they do grow, the world record armies cap out at 9,999,999 troops), you progress by fighting game-generated armies. Different amounts of Play Coins hire you mercenaries, the number of which differs with your rank and includes a small percent chance that you’ll get more (or even MANY more) mercenaries than you hired.

Monster Manor
A pretty awesome ghost-house explorer/puzzle game, Monster Manor is my favorite game out of the lot. You explore a haunted house floor by floor, by placing colored puzzle pieces given to you by StreetPass friends. Puzzle pieces uncover rooms with either various monsters (everything from a possessed ‘Barrage o’ Books’ to armored ghostly knights) or chests with look like weapon upgrades. The more same-color pieces you put together, the larger rooms you can make and the better the loot gets. Play Coins hire more investigators to give you puzzle pieces, though beware! The less you’ve met some one, the smaller the selection of puzzle pieces you have a choice from, making filling out each floor harder and harder.

Various events, successes and achievements in the Plaza games will give you plaza tickets, which can be spent on hats for your Mii, because apparently Valve is contagious.

These games are surprisingly addicting. None of them are particularly complex – Flower Town, with its very specific jobs, or maybe Monster Manor, with its weapons upgrading system, are about as fancy as they go. But they’re all really cute games, easy to get into and fun to play and watch, especially in the 3DS’s excellent 3D. Being so reliant on the StreetPass feature does suck – especially in games like Warrior’s Way where advancement really depends on increasing your army, which means getting more StreetPass tags. The use of Play Coins (generated by the 3DS’s pedometer) does help, especially in Flower Town or Mii Force, but coins cap out daily at 10, which makes it slow going.

These games absolutely shine at conventions – there’s a seemingly endless stream of Miis coming through to play with and it’s a very fun way to kill time while waiting in lines. Surprisingly the new Mii Plaze games are also really fun on a regular basis, even if you’re just playing with occasional StreetPass tagged Mii or using Play Coins – they’ve really encouraged me to drop my 3DS in my bag when I hop on the bus, head to work or drop by the comic book store. The games are cheap, fun and easy, and if you’ve already got StreetPass turned on, I recommend picking up all four new Mii Plaza games.