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Winx Club: Join the Club Review
2 out of 15
The Winx Club franchise just doesn't belong on the PSP...
Date: Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Author: James Fudge

The game is loosely based on the Winx Club cartoon that is part of 4Kids TV's Saturday morning animated cartoon block. The cartoon follows the adventures of six teenage fairies that use magic to defend themselves and protect the Realm of Magix from evil. The show is targeted at young girls and tweens, though is has managed to garner a small following of adult viewers as well. Knowing that this is a game aimed squarely and you girls, it is hard to understand why Konami would even consider putting this game on the PSP given its mostly male demographic.

The game itself is basically a collection of mini-games sewn together with some animated scenes, music and light voice acting from the show. These mini-games aren't all that compelling no matter who they are for a number of reasons. The foremost reason is these mini-games are just too simple. The games range in variety from racing to match games to some light puzzle solving mini-games, but all of them are pretty easily beat and don't offer all that much of a challenge.

As you go through these mini-games, you unlock all kinds of items that you can use to decorate your room or your characters. These unlockables mostly consist of furniture and clothes, and would be great rewards for young girls still fascinated with Bratz, Barbie and Polly Pocket. The problem with that, of course, is that the demographic for this game just isn't there for the PSP.

The game also features some cinematic moments from the show, some light voice acting and music from the show. While these scenes are implemented well enough, they don't make a lot of sense if you don't follow the show.

But the real deal breaker for Winx Club Join the Club is a very familiar problem for PSP owners: load times. Players will spend more time watching the game load than they will actually playing the game. And these load times are ridiculously long. For a great game you might be able to muster the patience to wait the 60 - 90 seconds it takes to load portions of the game, but when that content is average it's just not worth the hassle. To be fair, Winx Club Join the Club isn't the first game to suffer from load time problems on the PSP, and we're quite positive it won't be the last.

For the sake of argument, even if you had a PSP and a youngster to play this game, it doesn't make much sense to buy it when Konami has released plenty of other Winx Club games on more suitable platforms like the Nintendo DS. Add to that ridiculously long load times at every turn and it's a real deal breaker across the board. Winx Club Join the Club is a game you should simply avoid.

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