Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo Switch

Genre: Puzzle / Sudoku Puzzle / Misc.

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local), Online Rankings

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Review:

The Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training series is probably better known in the United States as Brain Age, with the first game in the series being released on the Nintendo DS in 2005 in Japan and elsewhere in the world in 2006. The latest game in the series, imaginatively titled Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo Switch, was released in Japan in 2019 and brought to Europe and Australia the following year, in 2020. However, the game remains, at the time of this writing, unavailable in the US. We can only speculate as to why this is, but many point to the game’s dubious claims about improving “brain age” of players as a potentially legally actionable claim to improve health, although I’m unsure about this – plenty of mobile games make similar claims, and such claims haven’t prevented this series from releasing in the United States previously.

In any case, players in the United States wanting to play this game will either have to purchase the game off of a foreign eShop, or buy a foreign version of the game off of a retailer like Amazon. There’s at least a little incentive to buy the physical version, though – that version comes with a capacitive stylus included in the package. For the record, I tried out the physical version of the game, and the stylus is surprisingly sturdy and heavy, but beyond its weight and the Nintendo logo lightly embossed on its surface, it’s nothing particularly special or noteworthy.

As for the game itself, the presentation here will seem very familiar to those who played prior entries, as it’s pretty much the same thing, in higher definition – extremely simple black text on white background, with the titular Dr. Kawashima’s stylized polygonal head talking you through the exercises and what they supposedly mean for your wrinkly gray matter. This is paired with a simple, plucky soundtrack in menus, and simple noises of your interactions in the “exercises” themselves. There’s absolutely nothing noteworthy here, but I suppose it does at least get some credit for having a clean interface that’s easy to process.

As for the “gameplay’ itself, the game is divided into two main sections: Quick Play and Daily Training. You should know a few things right off the bat – firstly, this game does not work with Pro Controllers at all. Secondly, of the two main game modes, only Quick Play works in docked mode, and Daily Training is intended for handheld use only.

Quick Play includes pretty much all of the game’s local multiplayer content, and it is the most shallow, disposable part of what’s here. This mode includes six minigames. The first three (Rock Paper Scissors Test: Quick Brain Age Check, Handy Brain Training: Finger Calculations, and Handy Brain Training: Finger Drills) are all extremely simple single-player exercises that use the right Joy-Con’s IR camera to detect how many fingers you’re holding up. Meanwhile, the latter three are all two-player competitive mini-games that I seem to recall being in 1-2-Switch – one has players using gyroscopic motion control to move a Joy-Con like a semaphore flag, while the other two have them tapping the shoulder buttons as a counter to denote how many of a type of object is on-screen.

If this sounds extremely simple and extremely lame to you, that’s because it is. I’m sure most players will try the Quick Play minigames once to check them out, and then quite possibly never touch them again.

The Daily Training section, on the other hand, has a little more substance, although not as much as you might hope. Much as with the Fitness Boxing games, Brain Age tracks these activities on a calendar, and encourages you to make them a part of a regular routine. Players who played earlier Brain Age games will be familiar with this stuff – it’s much of the same sort of content you saw in earlier games, with simple math problems, simple word puzzles, that sort of stuff. I hesitate to even call these minigames, as they’re more like timed grade school tests, but I suppose that if you buy the pretense that this stuff is making you smarter, you might be willing to suffer through them.

At the very least, this game does have actual videogame content, in the form of unlockable minigames. However, these games are handed out in a miserly fashion, requiring players to eat their metaphorical vegetables to earn their dessert, so to speak, playing through the exercises on a daily basis to gain access to them.

One such minigame, for example, is Germ Buster, which is a game that plays like a stripped-down version of Nintendo’s free mobile game Dr. Mario World (itself a touchscreen-controlled variation on the classic Nintendo Entertainment System game Dr. Mario). The game lets players select a difficulty level, but there aren’t any other options, and the game only works in single-player mode.

There are just over a dozen of these games, so you’ll undoubtedly have access to them after two weeks or so, but that’s still two weeks of pushing through some pretty mundane and rudimentary exercises just to unlock minigames that are, at best, simple and lacking in features.

There is one bright spot here, however – sudoku. As with prior Brain Age games, Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo Switch includes an exceptional version of Sudoku. Well… exceptional if you want to play the game in handheld mode using the touchscreen (the only way the game works). This game uses handwriting recognition to recognize the numbers you write, letting you easily tap a box on the screen and jot down a number to enter. The recognition software isn’t perfect (it didn’t like my 3s and 4s), but players have to tap a confirm button before entering anyway, so there’s less of a chance of a misread negatively affecting you.

The downside to this game’s Sudoku? As with Germ Buster, it’s low on features (you can choose to have the game confirm entries, which automatically removes notes that are de-confirmed… and that’s it), and there appear to be only 100 puzzles (at least I think so… as with most things in this game, the later puzzles need to be unlocked). Suffice it to say, it’s really disappointing seeing what is arguably the best-controlling version of sudoku in such a feature-poor, content-poor package, shackled to such a lackluster package and then forcing players to play through the rest of that package to gain access to everything. Plus, the game is currently selling on Amazon for $35, and while that’s certainly a better price than, say, 1-2-Switch, it’s more expensive than pretty much every other Sudoku game on the Nintendo Switch, while having only a fraction of the content.

There are hints of greatness in Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo Switch. With a little more fleshing out, this game’s version of sudoku could be the absolute best videogame version of sudoku on the Nintendo Switch. And some of the other minigames here would also be worthwhile if they had more content and options. However, all the wishing in the world doesn’t change that what’s good in Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo Switch is lacking in content, and is not only drowned out by mundane crap, but that players are aggressively pushed to play the mundane crap before getting access to much of the fun stuff. Perhaps if you’re the sort of person who believes that the so-called “brain age” is a thing, and that this game will make you smarter, you might find it worthwhile to import a copy of the game, but I tend to think that if you shell out hard-earned cash to be forced to do boring grade school homework just so you can play a few decent minigames, this game may just be counting on you being dumb enough to buy it.

tl;dr – Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo Switch is the latest game in the Brain Age series, and as of this writing it is not available in the United States. We’re not missing out on much. While the version of sudoku included here has possibly the best interface a videogame version of the game has ever had, it’s content-poor, feature-poor, and surrounded by a bunch of tedious grade school homework the game forces you to play through to unlock what little fun content there is here. There’s fun content buried in this package, but it’s not worth shoveling through the mountain of crap to get to it.

Grade: C-

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