Spectrobes - Almost, but not quite.

[Dexie Oblivion]

The year is 1996. An obscure Japanese game developer by the name of Nintendo creates two games for the handheld Game Boy system, entitled Pokemon Red and Green. The games were were minor successes for the company, and developed a small, loyal fanbase.[/sarcasm]

Fast forward ten years down the road. Nintendo announces and prepares for the launch of the fourth generation of Pokemon titles, Diamond and Pearl. However, the success of the franchise has had a careful eye kept on it by Disney. And 'lo, the Mouse wanted in on the monster catching genre of games. So, they enlisted the help of Japanese developer Jupiter (Best known for their work on Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, an absolutely amazing game, from a technical standpoint) to create a game for them.

This game is Spectrobes, a DS title that, like every Pokemon-clone that has came before it, falls short of the series it's trying to imitate.

Let me get this out of the way first...the game has some neat ideas, it really does. But sadly, it has a lot of really bad ones too.

The game stars a pair of space ranger type kids, a boy and a girl. The game's story is mostly blah, so I'll just cut to the chase...the evil Krawl, being of darkness, are going to devour the galaxy, so these kids must enlist the help of the beings of light, the Spectrobes, to fight them....but there's one problem. The Spectrobes are extinct.

This is where the game's first problem comes in. You find Spectrobes in the form of fossils on each planet, fossils you have to find by having a baby Spectrobe scan for them. They can also find minerals (used for raising Spectrobes) and Cubes (Which unlock various extra features in the game) by scanning. This leads to a lot of wandering each planet, stopping every few steps to have the baby scan, then having to go through the boring as hell fossil digging minigame. It's fun at first; you have different tools to dig with, and have to try and recover the fossil without causing too much damage to it, or else it will break. After a while though, it just gets too repetitive, especially when it's only taking you 3-4 seconds per fossil.

Not to mention there's not a lot of variety with the various fossils. There are only...20, 25 different fossil types, I think? Which leads to another problem: There are only 76 kinds of Spectrobes total, and the vast majority of them have really generic, uninspired design to them. When the mascot creature for the series looks like this...



...you know there's a problem somewhere.  It's the flaw in most Poke-clones, to be fair. The character designs just flat out suck.

There's another flaw in most of them too...while Pokemon has a deep, engaging combat system, most Poke-clones have a lame, badly put together one, and Spectrobes indeed lives up to this legacy of crap.

Battles are a 3-on-3 affair, the game's hero and two Spectrobes against three Krawl. You stay in a straight line with your Spectrobes as you most around on the battlefield. You have a sort of ATB meter, and when it charges fully, you can have one of your characters attack. If no Krawl is in front of you, congratulations, you just wasted an attack.

Also of note is that the battlefields are slippery...think Phantom Brave if you need an example. It's not uncommon to smack an enemy and watch them slide all the way across the field.

There are also supermoves and such, as well, but they're so much of a hassle that they don't come into play much.

The game's graphics are decent, not the DS's worst, but not the best either. The music is all fitting and doesn't annoy you to listen to over and over, but it's not anything you'd track down the OST for.

Closing off here...really, I can't recommend this game at all. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl is out in two weeks, and all the GBA titles can be found for twenty bucks or less, so give those a shot instead, if you're in the mood for a monster catching title.

[Dracos]

Frankly, you could've posted the picture and 'it sucks'. =)

Dracos
Curtness rules

[Dexie Oblivion]

True, true. :)