DS Review: Flash Focus

Casual, ‘Minutes a Day’ training continues on the Nintendo DS. After the tremendous success of brain training games worldwide, Nintendo takes a stab at a new gaming approach; vision training. Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day is intended to enhance your perception and observation skills through short daily exercises, much like the Brain Age titles aimed to train your brain. If you have played either Brain Age title you should know what to expect, seeing how extremely similar this title is to them. Unfortunately, this means that Flash Focus shares the downfalls that the brain training games suffer from. Continue reading to find out just how Flash Focus is like Brain Age for your eyes.

Flash Focus hardly get any more similar to the Brain Age titles. The same foundation is retained; exercise daily for just a few minutes to improve your visual skills. The game offers an Eye Age Check, which consists of a series of five short vision-training mini-games, after which your results are analyzed and your eyes are given a numerical age. The lower your Eye Age, the better your visual perceptions, with the lowest age being 20. You can also try the game’s Recommended Training mode, which gives you some more exercises to practice based on your Eye Age results. Also, you can always decide what exercises to try and how many times to do so via Custom Training mode, although your daily scores are only recorded the first time you try a given exercise. A single copy of the game can hold profiles and performance graphs for up to four players, and the game’s Quick Play mode is perfect to show off to friends and family as a demo, which you can also send wirelessly to other DS owners.

Yes, Flash Focus is Brain Age for your eyes, but how exactly does it work? The game’s exercises revolve around, or at least try to relate to, sight-related circumstances such as peripheral vision, hand-eye coordination, and momentary vision. A certain game has you tapping red boxes as quickly as possible, another shows you a series of numbers on the top screen for a fraction of a second and asks you to input that number on the touch screen, and many of the game’s exercises revolve around sports. For example, Baseball challenges you to tap the ball’s passing margin with perfect timing, and Boxing has you training your punches as quickly and accurately as possible. Everything in the game is well handled via stylus input, and thankfully there’s no frustration with bad handwritting or voice recognition. As you progress through the exercises, the speed and difficulty increases, making things more challenging but also increasing your score. Some of the mini-games are fun on their own, but after a few days of continuous daily training they really start to feel boring and repetitive. As you play daily you unlock more exercises, but having to repeat the previous ones will seem tedious, and you will be quite tempted to tweak your DS’s calendar system to unlock the game’s extra content quicker. You just might enjoy the game more this way rather than having to go through tiresome daily training.

Although some of the games do seem to challenge you visually, some really don’t. A few of the exercises focus more on memory and quick reflexes, whereas other, more inventive exercises could’ve been used. Not only that, but there is little to no improvement through daily vision exercise; it is very likely that you will perform very well on your first shot at a given mini-game, thereby blocking most further challenge save for the Hard difficulty of the mini-games. The game’s graphics are on the basic level, with a simple interface and presentation that feels right for a budget title casual game, but only just. Not only that, but the game’s lack of multiplayer is quite unfortunate; it’s nice to be able to send a demo to a fellow DS gamer, but multiplayer Boxing and Table Tennis would’ve been quite fun.

Flash Focus isn’t much of a vision training game; it’s more of a short mini-game collection that revolves around fast reflexes. It’s fun for a day or two, but the lack of challenge and the repetitiveness of the exercises end the game’s fun factor quite quickly. There’s no multiplayer or a visual equivalent of Sudoku to keep players coming back, either. Casual gamers might enjoy the game’s lack of replayability and challenge, but no one can deny that Flash Focus is a not-so-well-made rendition of Brain Age for your eyes.

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