Well for some reason I haven’t talked about Kairosoft yet, which is rather surprising since their games are pretty much the only ones I can stand to play for more than 2 minutes on the iPhone, which is an otherwise terrible gaming platform (fuck Angry Birds).

So I was thinking which Kairosoft game I’d review, and I figured…. why not review them all? They’re all similar despite having completely different gameplay. So let’s do this!

Read on!

Developer: Kairosoft Co. Ltd
Publisher/Localization Team: Kairosoft Co. Ltd
Date of Release: Various
Platforms: iPhone

Genre: Sim

In General

Kairosoft makes simple management sim games (for the most part, I’ve only played what they have on iPhone for now, their japanese PC games are a bit out of my reach). They all share a very similar menu interface, the same graphical style with very similar sprites for the NPCs (some even multi-task, like King Ackbar). They’re generally quite simple to play, but generally also require proper strategy and management to have your company/hot spring/school/mall live for the required number of years. The menus generally have a lot of different information about whatever you’re managing, as well as menu options to power up various aspects of the company, may it be employees or rooms. The graphical style uses small sprites for the characters, and very simple animations. It’s very basic, but it works great, and still manages to look nice.

All the games include awards of sorts either multiple times a year, or once a year, and each will give you prize money or other rewards depending on how well you place, all depending on your performance. All games also include various types of upgrades to your company and advertising you can do to boost your popularity.

One thing here is that these games are all very easy. You’ll generally have a rough start in each of them (Game Dev Story and Pocket Academy especially), but there’s quickly a point where bankruptcy is pretty much impossible. Game Dev Story is as soon as you become able to make sequels, Hot Spring Story is as soon as you start expanding your territory, Pocket Academy is when you start getting more students and a few money-making rooms (generally 2 classes in each grade) and Mega Mall Story is a cakewalk all the way through.

And finally, all of them are highly addictive. You’ll constantly be thinking “just another (in-game) month!” and you’ll end up playing a whole (in-game) year. Once you’re done with the game, there’s incentive to replay, since you’re scored on your performance so you can try to beat your score, and you generally get a bonus from starting again from the beginning after finishing it (like large baths in Hot Spring Story if you become the #1 hot spring). And, in all the games, you can speed the game up once you’ve finished it once so later plays go by a lot faster.

Game Dev Story

Ah yes, the dream of every gamer, managing a video game company. You start with a tiny office and 2 employees, and you can go up to 4 employees. As you stack up the cash, you will be able to move to bigger offices and hire more personnel. You can only produce one game at a time, or a console (later on), and sales will sustain for the most recently-released game for a few months (eventually you may be able to have 2 games still selling at once, but that’s very rare in the beginning). If it’s really popular, it will survive for a bit longer but the sales will eventually drop completely. Consoles never stop selling, but there’s a point where the sales will be so minimal you’ll barely make any money of them.

Making games is pretty easy: choose a console (if you don’t have a dev kit, you can buy one), choose a genre, choose a theme, and then put in “design points” to determine various aspects of the game, such as depth, how big the world is, the “cuteness” level, amongst other things. When that’s done and you chose a title, employees will start working on it (at various points you’ll have to choose employees to write script, make graphics and make music, and you can hire from outside). Various “points” will pop up from your employees which will add to the game’s stats, including gameplay, graphics, sound and innovation. The higher the ranking for each of those, the more popular the game will be. One of your employees will come to you once per game to try to boost a particular aspect of the game (this cost you research points, which you also get along the other points). You can also buy items to boost game stats yourself, but that also costs research points to use. Near the end of the game, you can either release it fast, or repair all the bugs ( which may increase during the game’s development). Eventually, your games will sell well enough to warrant making sequels, where they’ll keep from the start part of the stats from the previous game in the series. As you level up employees and release more games and do certain trainings, you’ll unlock more genres and types, and finding the right combinations will give you better sales (Action+Ninja, Fantasy+RPG… you know, stuff that works well).

Employee management is fairly simple. You can level up employees using research points, or you can give them various types of training/activities to boost their stats so they’ll give more points to games. Employees get tired and they may leave the office for a very short while when they get too tired, but, if you have the resources, you can buy energy drinks to keep them up a bit longer.

Hot Springs Story

Hot Springs Story is very different from Game Dev Story. Rather than a static screen the whole time, you can move around a map, where you can place different rooms. The main idea is to make a popular hot spring, and to have popular rooms within the hot spring. Room popularity is affected by stats. You can increase the stats by putting items into it, or putting it close to compatible rooms (for example, rooms where people will sleep in won’t be popular if they’re next to noisy rooms like pachinko parlours or karaokes). Here, rather than leveling up employees, you level up customers. By satisfying their needs, that customer type will not only start coming to the hot spring more often, but will also become richer, and also try to convince other customer types to have a visit. There are various upgrades you can do, such as building schools and funding other projects close to the Hot Spring, which will also give you more customer types to serve. As the business gets more money, you’ll also want to expand your territory to build more rooms and various stations, but you’ll also want plants for decoration, which increase certain stats on nearby rooms.

Overall Hot Springs Story is quite fun, it’s interesting to try to find good room combinations and trying to get as popular as possible to unlock more customers and more rooms to build.

Pocket Academy

Pocket Academy really reminds me of Hot Spring Story. Here you manage students, various school facilities and teachers (who are almost entirely useless). You start the game with 2 students and one class, and you get more as you progress (there are 3 grades at the school, and, as far as I could see, up to 3 classrooms per grade). Here you can power up the teachers, which is useless (teachers will teach classes once per semester, and then they’ll just walk around school doing random stuff… maybe the teachers’ stats change the students’ stat growth, but that’s hard to tell, and doesn’t matter), but the main point is raising your student’s knowledge so they perform well at the semester and final exams (you get money if they do). Also, raising their knowledge raises the chances that they’ll get the career they want after school (the better the career, the more money you get from them leaving school, and you can get items to choose their career). Students can also interact with each other and become friends/lovers. Them interacting gives you points (reading, PE and science) which you can use for special classes (hint: use these a LOT), items, buying new types of rooms to build, etc. Students also have points like attention, athletics, attitude and such which… I’m not too sure what they do really, but those can be upgraded at various facilities. Better/more facilities and the number of teachers you have can influence more students to join the school.

Money is a big problem here, since your monthly spendings (salaries, each of the rooms, actually building stuff in the school) will almost always be as high or higher than your revenue, until you get a lot of students and a lot of bonuses. You can get extra money from various facilities, like animals to take care of (chickens produce eggs, cows produce milk, rabbits produce toys (what?)), a cafeteria, a small store. You can also pay for students to pass certain tests, which will increase interest in your school and the monthly fee for the students (they never leave your school or get sick or anything so this revenue is fairly stable).

Pocket Academy is easily the toughest of the bunch, since revenue is a bit tough to come by, but it’s quite interesting, and still as addictive as the rest.

Mega Mall Story

This is the most recent release from Kairosoft on the iOS platform. Here the view is changed from the standard isometric view to a side-scrolling-ish view. The goal here is to build a successful mall. You do that by putting in a variety of stores and other rooms such as rest areas in the mall. You can do publicity too publicity (rather than being a set amount of money like in the other games, here you have various options to choose from and they have their own monthly value (they do stack)). The point is to increase the star rating of the mall (every star has a different set of requirements, such as monthly revenue, number of stores, number of regular shoppers, etc) which gives you access to more stuff. You have only a set amount of space per floor in your mall, but you can eventually expand the mall to get extra floors and a basement. You can build a bus station, a subway station and elevators (and stairs) in your mall, increasing the number of people coming in and making travel within the mall faster. There IS employee management, but it’s fairly simple (not much beyond hiring them and giving them a monthly salary, they just increase the quality of stores on their assigned floors).

Stores increase their stats (quality, reputation, stock (all stores have limited stock, so getting more stock basically means getting more sales)) by getting more customers, but there are also upgrades you can buy, in the form of “new services” for the store. Some increase reputation and quality, others increase stock in various amounts. Customers who are satisfied with certain types of stores will become regulars (sometimes giving more money, or introducing someone else to the mall, or giving you access to a new kind of store). Like in Hot Spring Story, you can invest in the neighborhood’s 3 areas (residential, commercial, park) to increase your reputation, but also to get more customers and unlock more upgrades. Some upgrades to the neighborhood require certain shops in the store, so sometimes you’ll be stuck without an upgrade in certain areas until you find the customer that gives the store you need. Trying to take your business is rival malls, who will appear out of nowhere and take a chunk of your customers. Just continually doing well should get rid of them, but you can help yourself out by investing in the areas where the rival malls are taking your customers from.

Popularity is also different here from the other games. Here, it serves as a sort of “special bar”. Once your popularity reaches 100, you will go in “fever mode” and your store will skyrocket in visits and sales, customers will be trying to basically make every shop sold-out as much as they can. This is very useful for money, of course, but also to reach the required goals to get an extra star for your mall. There are also a few “sale months” where more people will come by, and you can start sales at any store you want from time to time (though there is a cost).

Mega Mall Story is probably the easiest of the bunch, but I find it to be the funnest.

Overall

Kairosoft is one of the only companies out there that actually bothers releasing good games on the iOS platform… but, then again, all they’re really doing is re-releasing their old japanese-only PC games to the iOS platform, so they barely count as an iOS developer. They have TONS of games in their back catalogue, so I will keep supporting them as long as they don’t start releasing crap, and I suggest everyone to try their games out.

Check their stuff out!

jobocan Games