I ended up just buying the game now to support Kairosoft and because I know it will definitely be worth it. This game feels a lot shorter than the other ones. I am already on year 5 and it feels like it's going by really fast. Is there any incentive to replay the game like Pocket Academy where there are different maps and different building types. Or will it just be exactly the same on your second run through.
If you have played Yoot Tower (I played the bejesus out of it on a Quadra 630 too many years ago) and *that's* the game you're looking for, this isn't it. Yoot Tower involves many complex things like number of elevators, tweaking the speed of each individual elevator, positioning of residences and businesses "just so", etc. This game is nowhere in the vicinity of that sort of complexity. (As another aside, if I could play it on a 640x480 monitor in the 90s, why is my 4G touch verboten in the 10s? :/) On the other hand, it's a lot deeper than the oft-compared Tiny Tower in as much as a builder strat game goes. In Tiny Tower your decisions are basically down to what kind of business to build, and optimizing the placement of workers, everything can broken down to simple and repeatable patterns. With MMS there's little splashes of the elements you find in other Kairosoft games. For example, one of the things you need to do is recruit visitors to your Mall and induce as many of them as possible become "Regulars". You can see the thoughts of the non-regular visitors and get a hint on what you'll need to accomplish to make them a regular (e.g. one person might be as obvious as saying they like Pet Shops and need a store of quality 40, others might just have something vague about liking food establishments). You need to consider positioning of higher demand stores relative to transportation to capture impulse sales as shoppers walk past other stores. You invest hearts into unlocking more advanced store features (which becomes easier to do as you level the stores up), etc.. It's no Yoot, but it's deep enough that it pulled me away from all other forms of entertainment yesterday.
Game Impressions This game is so much fun! I loved Game Dev Story, but didn't like Hot Springs Story that much. Mega Mall Story is much closer to Game Dev Story than Hot Springs Story. The game mechanics are easy to understand (some stuff in Hot Springs Story was too confusing for me) and overall this game is definitely worth the money.
Have you built facilities? You get hearts from those when people use them, early in the game I placed 2 facilities to each floor, later 4.
When I had extra money and not enough hearts to unlock new stores, I bought more than one store of each kind (for example clothing shop and cafeteria were really popular, so I bought additional ones). Later in the game I deleted those additional stores to get room for other stores. I placed escalators in the middle, one elevator to the right and one elevator to the left, and it seemed to work nicely. Place enough facilities, 2-4 for each floor. The second service in each store is 'stocks up'. Try to unlock that and the stores stay open longer (you don't have to unlock services in order, you can skip the first one if you don't have many hearts to use). When you see that some stores are really popular, move them to the upper floors. Buy every transportation item as soon as they're available. Advertise. In my game I always put the advertising options on as soon as new options became available. New combos can be bought and unlocked in the beginning of new year, so keep some money saved for those when the year is ending.
Well after taking over my life yesterday and most of today I'm up to 12 years. I'm really enjoying it though my favorite game of theirs is Pocket Academy. MMS does seem like a shorter game and it doesn't have quite as much to do as PA but it's still a blast.
Any word on how it looks in 2X mode? Someone may have asked this but I didn't bother to read through the thread.
How do I hire a new staff. It says that a certain person was available to hire but I cant find the option anywhere
Been playing almost all of kairospots game on my ipad2 including this one but except Dev story (played that on my IP4) and since am not too picky about using 2x in my ipad i must say that this is ok to play with the ipad but ofcurse an ipad version will be much better since we can appreciate the details a lot more ( and there are tons of great small details to appreciate) Question : how do i carry over all the things that i have unlocked on my 1st playtrough? I almost unlocked all that is needed including the combos and the high end stores like casino/planetarium/museum and i have 100m cash at the moment been 1st place since year 13 iam now in year 16 didnt received the notice that i have finished the game like in dev story... Used elevator on both sides with easy to the eye escalator format 2 per floors and TBH have not bothered too much with combos since i thought that ill just perfect my store on my second playtrough i just put the most popular store on the upper floors and always add the 1st and 2nd service on all stores (the easy ones)just completed all services on the high end stores since hard one always fails slim chance for succes since i dont use the save then restart tactics...
