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Spare me your definitions; I know Brain Age is not a role-playing game. There is no leveling up, no grinding, no random battles, no experience points, no job system, no hit points, and certainly no mana.
Or is there?
Upon firing up Brain Age for the Nintendo DS, I am greeted by Dungeon Master Ryuta Kawashima. In fact, every time I start the game, the good DM will greet me. But for our initial encounter, he asks me to create a character. Sadly I am limited to writing my name, which feels slightly 8-bit, but once I reach a high enough experience level, I supposedly can customize my "stamp."
With character creation out of the way, and a tutorial briefly glossed over, I check what starting level or "Brain Age" my character is. 47! Glorious, I was expecting a pathetic 1. Oh wait, it says here that a lower level is better. And levels are capped at 20. Hmm, capping levels is so World of Warcraft and this game doesn't seem like an MMO thus far. When I get to that bridge. Enough delay, it is time to enter the "world map."
Here I see three locations, Calculation x 20, Calculations x 100 and Syllable Count. A non-linear adventure, excellent! There are also a number of mysterious places marked with ?s waiting to be discovered. I select Calculations x 20 and steel my sword. It is time to battle.
6-0, 7x9, the mathematical monsters fly at me, but I smite them all with a flick of the wrist. When the last wave has been solved, I await my gilded reward. No rupees, instead a high score of 19 seconds. Curious, I wonder how the game tracks experience points. But leaving my wonderment unanswered, I plunge on.
Next, I choose to battle the Count Syllable. This beast takes the snakelike form of sentences, sentences I must defeat by numbering its parts. I've defeated segmented bosses before, the key is to compartmentalize and then conquer. In no time, I have literally hacked through its permutations. But again, no gold, only a high score. I retired to my bed, having slain enough foes, and needing to rest my weary mind. Little did I realize the nefarious random battle that awaited.
When I resume the quest, DM Kawashima immediately challenges me to draw. This was unexpected, and with no run option, I had little choice but to press on. Three missions awaited me: a koala, a kangaroo, and the entirety of Australia. It is no aggrandizement to say they were quickly dispatched before any damage could be inflicted on my person. That is, until the monsters rose up in their "true" forms attacking my very drawing style. The cruelness lasted long after the images faded from the screen.
Over the next weeks, I revisited previously conquered dungeons, occasionally unlocking additional monsters, such as the fiend I called "Reading Aloud" or the shifty, bewildering Stroop. As always, nary a gold coin fell from their carcasses, only high scores. Where would the experience points come from? If anything, my high scores were getting lower. And perplexing images of a person walking, or biking were replaced by trains, planes and even a rocket ship. DM Kawashima refused to answer when I asked him the meaning of his rewards. He is like the demented offspring of a 20-sided die and a magic eight ball that only rolls ask again later. At least I could measure my dropping Brain Age level periodically. But where was the endgame? Where was my Foozle?
And then it dawned on me!
I was Foozle, and I had to slay my own ignorance, my own inabilities and deficiencies. Here was a plot twist greater than the first KOTOR, a Pokémon I never would have dreamed of catching, and just when I had thought the writing was poor and the main character a sloppy stereotype. It's true when people lament RPG stories take forever to get exciting. But you'll have to excuse me; I'm going to start up another game using the name Zelda. Maybe it'll unlock a second quest.
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