Mega Mall Story

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 55 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, while Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income.

When Mega Mall Story was released on mobile devices in the US in 2011, with ports to Nintendo Switch in 2019, PlayStation 4 in 2021, PC in 2022, and Xbox One in 2024, its closest point of comparison to earlier titles would be Hot Springs Story due to the way you get to choose the layout of what you’re placing, though here for the first time Kairosoft has ditched the isometric perspective in favor of a side-view, resulting in something similar to games like Sim Tower and Project Highrise, though still with a focus on serving customers rather than attending to the needs of tenants.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals, but not in an isometric view. The 2D pixel art of their earlier games transitions well to simple side-view visuals, and still retains Kairosoft’s usual cute art style. These visuals have been paired with repetitive, annoying music and I found my enjoyment of the game improving after I muted it.

The gameplay in Mega Mall Story has players placing stores and other facilities in their mall and gradually upgrading them while investing in the surrounding area. Every store has stats for the quality and quantity of its products, as well as its popularity, and as the store gets shoppers, it will level up and allow you to add points to improve the first two stats, which influence how many products shoppers buy when they visit the store, and how many products that store can sell before they need to close up shop for the day due to being out of stock. You can also spend research points (represented by hearts) to attempt to upgrade a store before it can level up, with different upgrades having a different chance of succeeding.

As for the third stat determining popularity, you can raise customer interest by adding facilities to the same floor as the shops you want to draw attention to, though you’re warned not to add too many of these facilities, since on their own they don’t bring in much revenue. You can also bring in more customers overall by investing in local housing and businesses, and you can improve interest in specific stores by designing your mall’s layout so customers have to pass the store in question to get to a more popular store.

One of the other clever things this game does is to have hidden combinations of stores that boost the stores’ stats when they are adjacent to each other, such as having a greengrocer, butcher, and fishmonger next door to one another. Players can find these combos on their own through guesswork, or occasionally buy them, and they’re one of the primary reasons players will want to be careful in deciding what goes where.

Once you get a feel for the game’s mechanics, it’s all pretty simple and straightforward, yet immensely satisfying. This game does a great job prodding players to play just a little more, unlock that new shop type, upgrade a store to have more stock so it stays open longer, get that new upgrade for your mall to allow you to build higher, and so on, and just when you think you’re ready to wrap it up and turn the game off, the local interest in your mall reaches a fever pitch resulting in a temporary shopping frenzy that will have you mesmerized as a multitude of customers storms your mall.

When it comes to complaints, I’ll start with the main one I have for many Kairosoft games: some of the mechanics here aren’t exactly clear, and the game doesn’t do the best job of explaining them to you. It’s better than some earlier Kairosoft games in this regard, but still lacking. Also, as per usual for a Kairosoft game, this one doesn’t let you mess with the details – aside from a few mall managers you won’t be managing employees, and you won’t be setting prices or choosing products for stores, as that all happens automatically based on the store’s stats.

For a complaint specific to this game, the “research” resource I mentioned earlier is a huge bottleneck here – there doesn’t seem to be any way to ensure you can earn it faster, and multiple important upgrades require it, both for improving individual shops and for unlocking new shops.

Still, while it’s far from perfect, it’s hard for me to be too negative about Mega Mall Story, given that this is a game I just could not put down for hours at a time. It may still have some of Kairosoft games’ usual problems, but even so this is an absolutely delightful Management Simulation, and for only $12 this is an easy pick up for any fan of the genre.

tl;dr – Mega Mall Story is a Management Simulation where players manage the placement of stores within a mall and guide those stores’ growth, with gameplay that’s sorta’ like a combination of a Theme Park-style customer service Sim and a side-view single-building placement Sim such as Sim Tower. While it’s not without its problems, the gameplay here is surprisingly compelling, and well worth the $12 price.

Grade: B+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}