The Conveni DS
The problem is that, as the game’s subtitle (“Management Training for Adults”) claims, the game is supposed to simulate the day to day running of a convenience store. However instead of making you play the manager of such a store, you’re rather set up as the owner of a company that manages a bunch of Lawson franchises. What that means is that you set up the franchise, pick the merchandise, hire a manager and some workers and then basically sit back and watch the money roll in. The Conveni is the most boring game I’ve played all year because there’s simply nothing to do once you’ve set things up right.
Gameplay for most stages goes like this: first pick a store location, ideally away from a rival store. Fill it with the basics of life: beer, sake, wine (according to this game Japanese people drink a lot), toys, fruits and vegetables. Pick the smartest manager you can find and hire two employees to help him. Make the store run 24/7 and put a 120% markup on all products. Set up some regular advertising. Sponsor a few new facilities in your area depending on what you want to sell, e.g. apartments if you want to sell household goods. Relax for the rest of the game because you’re basically untouchable.
If you’re really slow, this will take all of 1 year to accomplish. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that later missions force you to keep playing for 5 years! In practice that meant 4+ years of leaving the DS running on my desk while I got with my life. Unless you mess up in the early days by opening too many branches, you won’t run out of money ever. Your stores will always be profitable, no disasters will ever occur, suppliers will never fail you and you will never need to step in, ever.
But of course once you realize that The Conveni is just an extended advertisement for the Lawson store chain then you understand why everything is so easy. After all, they want people to think well of Lawson, so they can’t make the game frustrating or the stores too unprofitable, can they? As a matter of fact your rewards for clearing a scenario is usually the ‘right’ to sell real-life products like Karaage-kun, Sapporo Beer and Famitsu magazine in your store. And these will usually sell pretty well because how dare you suggest that Lawson products might be unpopular?
In addition to the boring gameplay, The Conveni is a double chore to play because the controls are awkward and the graphics are SNES-level at best, and that’s me being generous. If I have to sit and stare at a screen at all day, at least make it nice to look at! I’m all for simulation games and I would love to play an actual convenience store simulator, but this isn’t much of one.
Now, before I forget, why did I suggest the game might be sexist? It’s because of the employees you can hire. The game advises you to hire the smartest people you can find as store managers, but the only options available are middle-aged men, never women. They have education stats around 85 while the smartest woman you can find has education of max 76. Said woman is also elderly, a slow learner and absolutely terrible in every other in-game stat.
And it’s not only the managers: the best regular employees you can hire are also men. They’re not always smarter, but they’re usually stronger and have the best growths in the long term. Sure there are some decent female employees, but on average the guys are much better at everything. I am not a gamer who goes around looking for sexism under every rock, but believe me when I say the difference really stood out.
So is The Conveni being sexist? Or just reflecting the truth of society? Or both? It’s a basic fact that only 9% of Japanese managers are women. And it’s fairly well-documented that Japanese women face a huge uphill struggle combining careers with raising a family. Daycare is expensive and hard to find and many companies continue to flaunt the law by not offering paid maternity leave. Plus even if they do get maternity leave, women frequently come back to find themselves snubbed, demoted or quickly fired for flimsy reasons. They call it “maternity harassment.”
In other words, the most likely reason why you can find only male (competent) managers in The Conveni is because that’s the reality of Lawson’s employee situation. Mr. Taro Suzuki can afford to be a middle manager because Mrs. Suzuki quit her job to take care of the house and the kids.
Well okay, that explains the managers, but what about the male and female employees? Coincidence? A programming error? Or more ‘realism’? And come to think of it, even if it’s true that most of Lawson’s managers are male, did they really have to reflect that in game form? If they were simulating an imaginary store chain that would be one thing, but since they’re telling us this is how Lawson actually operates, perhaps in the interest of consumer-friendliness they could have… lied a little? Or did they just not give it much thought?
In any case I only had time to notice and ponder stuff like that because the game was so bad and so boring. I would totally have closed my eyes to the employee situation if The Conveni was even halfway good, but as it is that’s just another nail its coffin. Avoid like ebola unless you’re a fan of the series.
So, the industry that stuffes games with half-naked lolis and single-handedly created jiggle physics suddenly cares about realism? Now that’s ironic… 😛
If they cared enough to use a real-life store chain (in return for some money, no doubt) I figured NIS would also care enough to make Lawso seem like a caring and progressive organization, but maybe sugar-coating the truth costs extra.