AMN's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day is the next in Nintendo's line of training games. With Brain Age and Brain Age 2, your goal is to work on developing a faster, more efficient mental response. The goal with Flash Focus is to help you increase your visual capacities and learn to see things better. Much like the Brain Age series, the game tracks your progress over time and encourages you to train daily.

What's Hot
Some of the challenges in Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day are pretty fun. At times it almost feels like you're playing an action/shooter game as you are required to make quick reactions to tap objects that appear with your stylus. The presentation is clean and straightforward, something you would expect from the Training series. Even though you might feel like you're not exactly improving your eyesight, you might enjoy the exercises for what they offer in terms of gameplay.

What's Not
Flash Focus suffers from an issue that the Training series has managed to avoid so far: it doesn't seem to help. Gamers have expressed that the Brain Age series has legitimately improved their ability to deal with numbers, remember things, and to focus a bit more clearly. With Flash Focus, the games just feel like a light gun game converted to the DS with a neat and spiffy interface. If this game was promoted as a mini-game collection, it might make more sense, but as a vision trainer, it really doesn't hold up at all. Even after several days of continued exercises, the improvements you make in the game don't seem to translate to the outside world very well, if at all. Sure, the game is presented well, and there are some enjoyable exercises, but isn't the entire point of this thing to improve your vision? If so, then unfortunately the game fails.

Final Word
We don't have an issue at AMN with the continued release of so-called "non-games" and trainers on the DS. In fact, we believe that they are helping to expand the gaming market and open new doors for a new faction of gamers. Brain Age was a huge hit because it did well what it advertised to do. Vision Training, on the other hand, is really a stretch. The game isn't a complete throwaway or anything from a gameplay standpoint, but if you are serious about using the game as a training tool, it won't help enough to justify a purchase.