Arc Style: Girls' Soccer 3D (3DS)

 This is a game I'd long thought I'd never get to play, but it seems that there are almost no lost 3DS games at this point, which is nice. It's a mostly normal soccer game, and it's also the Japan-only sequel to Arc Style: Soccer 3D, so you know, the series now covers both genders: default and girl. In seperate games, for some reason. It's also a nice, simple game, played with just directional controls (you can use the D-pad or the analogue stick), and three buttons: pass, shoot, and special move.

 

It's pretty fun to play, too! The game itself is just regular old soccer, and there's no superpowers or items or any kind of fantastical elements to make things more exciting, but it's still well-crafted and fun to play, and it doesn't fall into a trap I've seen in a lot of team-based sports games. That trap is the binary difficulty curve: in a lot of sports games (the ones I've played, at least), it seems like you can easily get through a few matches in single player mode against teams who put up a pathetic amount of resistance, until at some point a switch is flipped, and you face a team with all-powerful attackers and an impenetrable defense. Arc Style: Girls Soccer 3D, though, does things a little more smoothly, and the teams you play against in tournament mode gradually get more competent, and if you do get beat, it geels like you were beaten by a better team, not annihilated from orbit by cosmic sport gods.

 

The real draw, though, is the creation mode. It's no Soul Calibur VI or Fire Pro Wrestling, but it is a lot more versatile than I had expected, and there's not much competition on the 3DS for creation modes. You get to create your team's uniform, choose an emblem from a small selection, and then make the appearances and choose a special move (stuff like powerful shots, headbutts, overhead kicks, etc.) for each of your players. You'd expect a sports game to be limited to "normal" items and settings, but you can totally make a team of demons, robots, aliens and other demihuman types. It was also a nice surprise that there's a few body types to pick from for your players, too.

 

I'm not sure if it's even still possible to buy this game, and it was only released in Japan on the one handheld that Nintendo made the insane decision to region lock, but if you want a cute little sports game with a surprisingly decent character creation mode, this is a game that fits that description pretty well, and I'm sure most people still regularly using a 3DS can figure out a way to get ahold of it.