Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first session has the unmistakable novelty of using a DS for something it was never built to do: stare at yourself, follow a facial pose, and let a cartridge-mounted camera judge the result. Face Training asks for simple movements such as widening your eyes or turning and tilting your head. Each exercise is held for a count of five before you slowly relax, giving the routine a deliberate, almost calming rhythm.

The camera accessory is the whole point. Rather than merely listing exercises, it tracks your expressions, takes snapshots, and overlays cues showing where your technique needs work. That feedback makes the routine feel more interactive than reading beauty advice from a screen, though it also means you need to be comfortable with the software repeatedly freezing your face at its least flattering moment.

This is built for short daily visits, and it is better approached as a habit than as entertainment. There is little room for the kind of escalating challenge or replayable variety you expect from a conventional DS game. What starts to click is the low-pressure ritual: open the system, follow the instructions, make a few ridiculous faces, and be done. If you need a strong game-like reward loop, frustration will set in fast.

Graphics

The most memorable pictures are your own camera snapshots, marked with visual guidance to show how to improve a pose. They make the instruction practical, but they also give Face Training its faintly comic edge: this is a beauty routine delivered through candid DS-camera photos rather than glamorous imagery.

Story

There is no narrative to carry you from session to session. Fumiko Inudo’s beauty-expert consultation supplies the framing, but the focus stays on the immediate task of exercising and relaxing your face.

That plainness fits the format. You are not working toward a plot twist or meeting characters; you are following a guided routine intended to help maintain a healthy-looking, wrinkle-free face.

As a result, the only real sense of progress comes from returning to the exercises and refining how you perform them. Anyone wanting a story-driven reason to keep opening the DS will find very little here, while routine-minded users may appreciate the lack of distraction.

Overall Experience

Face Training is a fascinatingly specific piece of Nintendo DS software: part wellness guide, part camera experiment, and part daily reminder that technology can make you feel self-conscious in very small doses. Its strongest quality is that it uses the hardware’s camera attachment for direct feedback instead of treating the facial exercises as a static checklist.

The payoff depends entirely on your patience for repetition and your interest in facial exercise. Give it a chance if a few guided minutes of posture and expression work sounds useful, and if the oddity of being photographed mid-pose feels amusing rather than embarrassing. It is much harder to recommend as a game in the usual sense.

For the right person, the limited scope is a virtue: it is quick, focused, and easy to fit into a day. For most gamers, though, the novelty of the peripheral and the humor of the snapshots will be the main draw. An unusually earnest curiosity from the Touch Generation era, it works better as a personal routine than a lasting plaything.

Retro Replay Score

5.5/10