Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
One would probably think that as a girl gamer, I would be excited about the idea of games that are aimed at females. And while this may be the case with more casual games like Fashion Solitaire for instance, when I come across ones that reek of the old stereotypical female roles of “cooking, cleaning and dressing up to impress men”, it’s enough to make me cringe. Unfortunately Lovely Lisa falls into the latter category.
Lovely Lisa plays as a sort of checklist for what are supposedly the proper tasks every girl needs to learn how to do in order to be successful in life. Comprised of various mini-games, the overall gameplay here consists of Lisa becoming a “nice young lady” by helping to do the chores at home, learning to play the piano and to sew, and of course, how to put on makeup, because we all know six year old girls (the game’s admitted target audience is 6-12 year olds) need to wear makeup.
Each section of the game, from Lisa’s home to the local career center contains enough gender stereotypes to make even the strongest of men turn their heads in disgust. From helping your mother do laundry or vacuuming up the mess left behind by your younger siblings, everything about the “Lisa’s House” portion of the game screams of 1950’s television shows when men were expected to read the paper and mow the lawn while the women took care of everything else. There is one small mini-game that asks Lisa to help her father with his woodworking in the garage, but even then, you are stuck with the simplest of tasks like bringing the pieces to your father in a certain order, so it does little overall to help the game out.
Furthermore, while the “Career Center” portion of the game should, in theory, contain the exact opposite of tasks, showing that women can do anything they put their minds to, again the game offers stereotypically female positions like nursing (a game that has you giving shots to patients using the stylus), working at a nail salon (where you use the stylus to paint each nail a specific color depending on customer requests), or being a florist (where you pick flowers based on customers’ orders).
Rounding out the trio of bad mini-game sections within the game is the “Charm School” that teaches you how to play the piano in a Simon Says mini-game that has you repeating a certain set of notes after the game plays it, and also teaches you to be a seamstress by using the stylus as a needle and following the pattern presented on screen to create various pieces of clothing that can later be worn at the Fashion Studio within the game.
This fashion studio is where things really get disappointing. After each mini-game, you are awarded a certain amount of Lisa Points, the game’s currency, which can be used at the fashion studio to buy new clothes, hairdos, accessories, and shoes. Almost every item available to choose from has some shade of pink or purple as either a main or an accent color, and most have some sort of lacey, frilly addition as well. Once you purchase an item, it is added to your closet, allowing you to mix and match any number of items at will, if you care enough to do so.
After all of this, the game culminates in Lisa’s entering a “pageant-with-a-difference” that is supposed to judge your success at all of the mini-games throughout the title, and not just on looks alone. While this very well may be the case, young girls probably won’t notice, as the only real gameplay that takes place during the pageant proper comes in the form of putting on Lisa’s makeup and afterwards controlling Lisa’s walk down a runway as she stops to do various poses and moves to impress the judges.
Aside from the disappointing gameplay, the technical aspects of the game are just as bad. Most of the graphics lack detail, and are instead comprised of every single shade of pink conceivable to man, and are overall anything but extraordinary. One particular thing to note is the design of Lisa herself, who stands like a mannequin with her arms stretched out to her sides as if she were having a fitting at a tailor’s. I would presume this is due to the fact that lots of Lisa’s clothing consists of fluffy bell skirts and other large ensembles and the developers didn’t want her arms to disappear within the fabric, but it’s still an odd situation.
Furthermore, the sound department, while comprised of upbeat instrumental music that isn’t too terrible, also contains sound bits from Lisa herself, who often chimes in with phrases like “I want to become a nice young lady”, and “Make me look pretty”. At this point, do I really need to go into how I feel about that?
In the end, Lovely Lisa continues in the terrible trend of magazines, teenage television shows and various other video games that express a woman”s “need” to be little more than a beautiful object, useful at taking care of the home or everyone else’s needs. And while reading magazines and watching television shows about such topics is one thing, requiring young girls to actively interact with the idea that women have to know how to clean the house and do the laundry is tantamount to brainwashing.
Now, granted, I am sure that there are thousands of women out there who are perfectly content being “Little Miss Homemaker”, and for them, this game is perfect. However, in today’s society when women are becoming just as powerful and intelligent as men, it is so disheartening to see something take such a large step backward. If I haven’t made it obvious already, please steer clear of this one. Even the best of clearance prices doesn’t justify putting anyone through this…
Special thanks to Adrienne Borgstrom and TOMY for providing a copy of this title.