Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree

 

    The Brain Age games were some of the most important titles on the DS during its heyday. Based on the research of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, who appears in the game as a polygonal floating head (truly the form we all aspire to be), it sounds pretty boring in concept, just a collection of minigames focused on math problems, brainteasers, the sort of thing most people would associate with homework. However, something about the way it gamifies those aspects – the pacing of it all, being able to write out answers with the stylus, the fantastic sound design – it somehow coalesces into something both fun and helpful. It won't make you smarter, as some were misled to believe, but it can help keep your brain more active in general. On that note, Big Brain Academy is also a series that exists.
    The whole concept of Big Brain Academy is somewhat perplexing, especially considering the original DS entry came out within months of Brain Age's release. It's based around pretty much the same concept, playing some minigames each day to help train your brain to be sharper, and doesn't seem to do a whole lot different on the surface. It is more colorful and cartoony than Brain Age, granted, and perhaps the intent as some point was to make it more game-like than Brain Age ever was. The thing is, I think doing that without adding much to the idea to make it more different highlights how wafer-thin the entire experience is. The one I played, Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, ends up feeling like something of an unhappy middle ground between Brain Age and WarioWare.
    Doing one of the tests, you'll find five categories: Analyze, Compute, Identify, Memorize and Visualize. They're all roughly self-explanatory, Memorize has you remembering patterns and faces and such, Visualize has you do some forward-thinking, and so on and so forth. Once you complete all five categories, it gives you a “brain mass” based on how many you completed correctly and the speed at which you completed them. Here's where the crux of the issue comes in: each of these categories has only three minigames each (four in one of the multiplayer modes), all of which can be completed in mere seconds. They all charitably require slightly more thought than your average WarioWare microgame, but they still aren't that much more substantial. It makes it so the amount of stuff to do runs dry very quickly, and the game knows it, since it expects you to practice and play the same minigames over and over again.
    This even extends over to the multiplayer mode, which has three different modes in Mind Sprint, Mental Marathon, and Brain Quiz. Mind Sprint has two players completing a set amount of minigames the quickest, and Mental Marathon requires players complete as many of the minigames as possible without messing up. The one unique mode is Brain Quiz, which presents the minigames in a game show format. Each player take turns flipping over a tile with a minigame category on it, getting assigned a difficulty level when they flip it over and the amount of minigames they complete awarding them points. I guess Brain Quiz could prove to be fun for a bit, if only because it frames the minigames a bit differently, but you'll still end up wondering why you aren't playing other party games with more to offer.
    That's my main issue that I hope I've managed to get across, is that Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree suffers from a lack of content. It doesn't really work as an alternative to Brain Age, because while that game is light on stuff to do also, the puzzles it presents are longer and more involved, it has basis in actual scientific research, and it has a sudoku mode if you're one of those freaks that likes sudoku. In comparison to WarioWare, the comparison is unfavorable as well, as even with Brain Quiz adding one more game to each category, the total number of minigames only comes up to twenty, which puts it about one-tenth of a typical WarioWare game, not counting any of the unlockables. Even considering other Wii games with a small amount of content, like Wii Sports or Wii Play, there's still a fair amount of depth you can find with what's included. While all of it functions as intended, it's just incredibly insubstantial, and you can find more fulfilling options than Wii Degree elsewhere.