Girl’s Fashion Shoot (3DS) Review

When the PR Company behind Girl’s Fashion Shoot first sent the press release regarding the title, I was intrigued. After all, who better to review this title than a 33 year old man with two young boys? All joking aside, it was interesting because I figured I could give a different view to it. After all, most PR companies are followed by people who like their usual product, so a positive review is all but guaranteed most of the time. If anyone could objectively review this game, I felt it was me.

I shared this review time with my wife, the one female in the home, to ensure I kept my review balanced. Upon booting up the game for the first time, we were presented with the character creation page, but unlike a traditional “pick your face/body type/hair style” we were given a list of questions to answer that led to our final avatar. This was a little frustrating. After all, parents try to give the “beautiful just the way you are” attitude to their children, particularly their little girls, but we ended up with a basic, wafer-thin model who still ran into issues where she wanted a “slimming” outfit. There’s only one save file, so we couldn’t run back and try again, but image searching online led to screenshots with the same body type in most all of them. Slightly disheartening to see a fashion title not allow the embracing of all body types.

After your character creation, you are given a basic job: you have a magazine shoot that needs to fit a particular theme, and it is your responsibility to choose the outfit, the poses you wish to use, and amazingly enough, you then get to set the layout of the magazine, allowing a bit of editor in chief work to your modeling career.  This gives the game more than just a “be a pretty face” attitude: the player needs to have the know-how to put together a page that will be attractive to the reader. Other than that, there are a few other options of what to do, be it interacting with other models or taking on various little jobs, though this doesn’t turn out to be much more outside of the core game play.

I approached this game review as a parent, and I must say this game needs to be approached with caution. I strongly believe in free speech and expression, and don’t believe that playing a violent video game forces you to take a gun to school and kill everyone you see. I will admit, though, that a game can reinforce an already negative behavior, and perhaps a self-image affecting game could prove more harmful than an imaginative shoot-em-up with realistic gore: the situations you face in this kind of game is indicative of real life. Someone who is sensitive about their body could come out of this game with a negative image of themselves, as they’re not thin enough or pretty enough to do what their avatar is doing. And yet, the empowerment given by the design aspect of the game is liberating: the player gets to choose every aspect of the shoot, from fashion to background, articles to page design.

Overall, the game has interesting game play that an individual who understands their self-worth could seriously enjoy. Little girls tend to focus on these scenarios anyways, and being able to customize your outfits, hair, nails, poses, and magazine design allows for a field of depth I couldn’t imagine as possible in a game like this when I first heard of it. If you consider purchasing this game for your daughter, just do the smart thing: have a talk with her about who she is as a person, and that a game is just a game. While they are busy making their avatar beautiful, just remember to do that parenting thing, reminding her how beautiful she is, inside and out.