Between still processing what happened in Connecticut last month, and dealing with a lot of personal questions stemming from my first forays into performance art (a story for another time and another venue), please accept my apologies for having to break the discussion of “important stuff” and do a blog on the problems with the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic game that came out this past autumn. I promise that I’ll get back to politics later (especially if conservatives decide to put us through another crisis with the debt ceiling), but for now I need to gripe about the biggest video game letdown since Final Fantasy 8. (Yes, I went there.)

Shortly after I got my Nexus 7, Gameloft released a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic game for free. I’d heard about the game a bit, but from what I’d heard I thought that it was only being made for iOS, not Android as well. When I found I was wrong, I was all too eager to download the game and give it a shot. Now, keep in mind that, apart from exergames, I really haven’t been much of a gamer this past decade; once I went back to college, and then after I graduated, I just didn’t have time for gaming, and a lot of gaming news and trends passed me by. It probably didn’t help that during my undergraduate years I heard horror stories of other college students flunking out because World of Warcraft sucked up their time like a sponge; I’ve kind of put a healthy distance between myself and gaming trends since then.

As such, although I’ve certainly heard of Farmville, I never played it, or any of its clones, until the MLP game. At first I found it an interesting take on the RPGs and city-building games I liked to play when I was younger. The graphics are nice and colourful, and most of the animations are done very well (although Fluttershy doing a Running Man-style dance is absurd to say the least). The fact that they got the main voice talents from the show to do voices for the game is also a bonus, and my first impressions of the game were very positive. As I kept playing, though, these strengths became completely overshadowed by a game design that is nothing short of insidious.

Although I was aware of Farmville-style games, I was not familiar with the idea of a “premium currency,” or an in-game currency that requires you to spend real-world money to acquire. In the MLP game this currency is called gems, and some parts of the game force you to spend gems in order to get to the next tasks. The game gives you a paltry allowance of gems; if you play the game every day then you get a total of three gems every five days, plus you can occasionally get bonus gems from other in-game activities. At the most, though, players should never count on getting more than about ten gems in a week. Some of the game’s tasks require you to spend hundreds of gems at once. This means that unless you spend your real-world money, you can literally be waiting for months to advance in the game as you slowly accumulate gems. (In my current game I need 1,300 gems to advance to the next tasks. Unless I want to wait, I will have to spend nearly $100 of my money to get past my current in-game assignment, and I wouldn’t spend that kind of money on a game even if I had it to spend.)

Now, in addition to purchasing gems, the game does let you earn gems through special offers. Some of these just ask you to install and run another application, but these also give you one or two gems at a time at most. Other offers require you to buy things at other stores, like Barnes and Noble or Old Navy. I can’t even download some of the apps because I’m playing the game on a tablet, not a phone, and the apps require phone access in order to run correctly. Worse yet, some of the offers are not exactly what I would call appropriate for the target demographic of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic television show, and I’m pretty liberal when it comes to the concept of age-appropriateness. Yes, the show has attracted a fandom that spans traditional age restrictions, but in addition to the more laughable offers like getting gems for becoming an AARP member, a lot of the apps you’re asked to install are for mob-themed games with lots of violence. The worst one I’ve seen yet is for a Korean dating simulator, where the title screen is a photograph of a young Korean woman in a bikini eating a banana in a way that … yeah. Obviously I’m not bothered by that sort of stuff, but as open-minded as I am when it comes to sexuality, I don’t think that’s the sort of thing seven-to-ten-year-olds should be seeing as they try to get to the next tasks in a My Little Pony game.

All of this would be bad enough by itself, but the game finds other ways to mess with you. Many of the game’s tasks require you to wait for a period of time — sometimes minutes, usually hours — but you can skip waiting periods for many tasks by spending gems. Given how expensive and/or time-consuming it is to acquire gems, most players aren’t going to spend them to speed up a task when they can just come back to the game in a few hours. Unfortunately, the pop-up menus for speeding up the tasks come up too easily, and the “press this button to spend gems” buttons don’t have a confirmation screen. This means that one errant tap of the screen with your finger can take gems away from you for something you didn’t want to do. Earlier this week I lost 25 gems this way, with a single tap of my finger, which works out to about half a month of “work” getting them through normal channels. That is ludicrous, and I find it hard to believe that this wasn’t a deliberate design choice by the game designers just to extract more money from people.

Perhaps the most insulting part of this is that, should you have the perseverance and/or spending money to get to the game’s ending, not only is the ending as underwhelming as the typical Nintendo game’s conclusion, but it doesn’t even make sense. The introductory sequence to the game makes it clear that it’s supposed to take place after the events of the television show’s introduction, but the ending dialogue only makes sense if those events never took place. The story is okay for a game of its scope, but it’s hardly as well-written as a typical episode of the television series, and to get a too-brief, non-sensical ending after putting in so much effort and/or cash is incredibly infuriating.

The only way I was even able to finish the game was to take advantage of the fact that you can visit your friends’ games to see what they’re up to, and one of my in-game friends has a save file that keeps getting glitched, so that every time you visit her land you get some items, including gems, for free. Without that glitch I would never have had the patience or money to play the game to the story’s end. (Even after the story ends it still gives you a few tasks, although given the 1,300 gem requirement staring me in the face right now, I think I might as well forget about completing the tasks, especially when there are no more story elements left to see.)

I’m hardly the first person to criticize Gameloft for the game’s ludicrous requirements in terms of gems. Gameloft has said that they give away the game for free (which is true, but they do have banner ads in some menus) and they need to make money some other way. I can appreciate their need to make money, but expecting people to spend hundreds of dollars to finish the game on any sort of reasonable timetable is ridiculous, especially when state-of-the-art video games retail for $60 at the most. Despite its strengths, the MLP game has the gameplay and graphics of video games from fifteen to twenty years ago, and I can’t see how anyone would want to spend money on the game if it didn’t have such a compelling licence. They’re basically counting on people not realizing how much money they’re spending to get gems in order to take a game that would sell for $10 elsewhere and wind up spending hundreds of dollars on it.

Part of the reason I don’t often play video games these days is because I can get the storytelling aspect of games by watching videos of others playing games on YouTube now instead of having to buy and play through the games myself. (Even though I spent a lot of time playing games back in the day, I was never particularly good, so getting to game endings was always a chore for me.) In order for me to feel like I’ve spent my money wisely on a game, it either has to offer me something unique and beneficial (like the exercise I get through dance games and Wii Fit and the like), or the actual gameplay and story have to be exceptionally compelling. After getting to the end of Gameloft’s MLP game it felt like a huge waste of time and money. Even though I didn’t end up spending much money on those special offers to get more gems, it still felt like far too much when I finally got to the game’s ending.

I know how popular Farmville-like games are, though, and if this kind of game structure is going to be the new norm in gaming, then I think I’ll gladly hang up my controllers once and for all. These games have a very scam-like feel to me, and I have more important things to be doing with my time and money anyway.