Cerise Magazine

Not long ago, I played my very first Barbie video game, Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses for the Nintendo DS. It’s a platformer, and though I am notoriously bad at jumping and generally loathe platformers, I actually enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed the storyline, which featured a princess saving her sisters and her father through the use of special dancing shoes which represented the unique interests and skills of the princesses.

So I was pretty excited to play the most recent Barbie video game, Barbie as the Island Princess. Unfortunately, it was a major disappointment.

Gameplay

Barbie as the Island Princess is essentially a collection of minigames. The game is divided into four “locations,” with three minigames in each. When you complete each minigame, you earn up to three stars (depending on how well you do at the game). After you’ve collected nine stars, you’re rewarded with a short cutscene and progression to the next location. You can also earn new dresses and accessories to use in “The Dressing Room,” a sort of virtual paper-doll feature that I found utterly uninteresting, but which might appeal to more hardcore Barbie fans.

Some of the minigames make use of the DS’s stylus and touchscreen, while others are based around the directional pad and the A and B buttons. There’s enough variation between the tasks required in the minigames to make them all interesting, and I found most of them to be genuinely fun, even though I’m (theoretically) not as easily entertained as the target audience for the game.

My biggest complaint about the gameplay itself is the brevity. I completed all of the mini-games within about two hours, and while I enjoyed most of them, I wasn’t captivated enough to want to replay them. If the game had a versus mode or a high score-recording function, I could see myself spending more time with it. As it is, the entertainment provided hardly seems worth the price of the game.

Atmosphere

The art in Barbie as the Island Princess is very appealing, and makes good use of the Nintendo DS’s capabilities. The music is pleasant enough, but the encouragements offered up by the main character, Rosella, and her companions, delivered in gratingly perky tones, get old fast. After the twelfth repetition of “I love dancing!” I was ready to hurl the game at the nearest wall. Fortunately, it’s possible to mute the sound effects while keeping the music.

Plot

The plot is where Barbie as the Island Princess really falls short. I am reliably informed that the direct-to-video movie on which the game is based features several exciting moments for the once-shipwrecked and subsequently raised-by-animals Rosella, such as when she rescues Prince Antonio from crocodiles, or saves all of the animals in Antonio’s native kingdom from drugging by the scheming Queen Ariana. Rosella also discovers who her parents are and that she is a princess, and apparently tells Antonio that he should do the honorable thing and stay with his fiancé even after falling in love with him. In short, there’s a lot of plot.

In the video game version of Barbie as the Island Princess, almost all of the plot has disappeared. There are vague references to it in the setups for many of the minigames and cutscenes, but it’s made clear that the only important part of the story is that portion concerned with the attraction between Rosella and Antonio, culminating in their marriage. Romantic love is the driving force pushing the player through the game’s locations, and marriage is, evidently, the goal.

It’s not a plot that would interest me much in any game, though I could understand how it might appeal to others, but in a game based on a story with so much more, it’s a total letdown.

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Barbie as the Island Princess

February 2008 Issue

Features

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Gameplay

Atmosphere

Plot