Whenever a monster collection/battling game is mentioned, the behemoth Pokemon is usually mentioned. For good reason, the game is consistently good, sporting excellent play mechanics that keep fans coming back again and again. However, the clones in this market tend to be missed because of the huge shadow that those little pocket monsters cast. One of those games is Spectrobes, a new intellectual property developed by Disney.
The basis behind Spectrobes is similar to that of Pokemon. You go out in the world, collect various monsters and do battle with them to raise their stats. They can evolve by satisfying various requirements (usually level, though stats sometimes come into play) and you use them to battle a hokey enemy bent on some evil means. This is where the similarities with Pokemon end.
Spectrobes changes the rules somewhat by altering the means you obtain your little critters. Rallen, the main character, is a member of a police organization called the Nanairo Planetary Patrol. When investigating a crash on a planet with his partner, Jeena, Rallen’s arm accessory absorbs a power from the crashed vessel, known as the Prizmod. An individual, Aldous, is also in this vessel and explains that Rallen must use the Prizmod to save the Nanairo system from the Krawl, which wiped out his own home system. There are enough plot holes and inconsistencies to warrant our second “You Can’t Be Serious” segment and will actually be saved for that little rant.
Anyway, Rallen uses his keen powers of paleontology to dig up the Spectrobes, who have been fossilized after being long extinct and uses the Prizmod to revive them. The Spectrobes are now used to battle the Krawl or locate other Spectrobes and minerals that can be used to enhance their stats.
Unfortunately, the interesting premise is bogged down by the insistence that each and every feature on the DS be used. That is right, every feature is used in gameplay. Spectrobes ranks as a game that anyone with any inhibitions would not want to play in public.
The first feature is the touch screen. The touch screen is not used too frequently and is the least irritating feature of the game. The touch screen is used primarily in the archaeology mini-games. It is used to dig up the fossils from the ground. This is, however, stupid easy. Spectrobes offers a number of specialized tools to excavate the fossils, however, I found out that the heavy drill can be used exclusively. All the player has to do is rapidly tap the pad. There is a damage meter that fills up if you drill the mineral or Spectrobe which can remove any special items the Spectrobe may have as well as completely destroy the mineral or fossil. Because it takes a half-second to start registering damage, quick taps over the fossil will quickly clear away the rock, making all other items useless. The stylus is also used for spaceship navigation. Otherwise, it is useless as you cannot move your character with the stylus. The player has to use the D-pad to do this, which is not something I am fond of since the DS tends to give me cramps.
The second feature is the microphone. This is the feature that makes playing Spectrobes in public an exercise in embarrassment. To activate a Spectrobe, you need to go into a special lab screen where you, and I am not joking, talk to it through the microphone. The talking simply consists of you keeping your voice at a certain volume and pitch for three seconds keeping an indicator within a bracketed area. This can be accomplished by blowing on the microphone (as demonstrated in their TV ads) and just moving the DS closer or further away to regulate volume.
Combat, the single major part of this game, is outright awful. Combat consists of Rallen, who basically is useless as a combatant, and two of his battle-ready Spectrobes running around in a real-time field. Spectrobe attacks are activated by using the shoulder buttons, one for each Spectrobe. The irritating part of this is your Spectrobes are stuck in a permanent flanking position. You can have them hold when they reach the evolved state, but this tends to be a worthless effort as you are unable to see them. They always face the same direction as your character and only attack in straight lines. This means you have to line Rallen up, usually in range of an attack, to allow the Spectrobe to attack. To make things worse, there is the ability to use a team attack. By charging up a power bar, you can order both Spectrobes to attack in tandem, damaging every enemy on the field for a reasonably large amount of damage. This makes most of the game a breeze as all you have to do is run around, avoiding attacks, then loosing two or three power attacks (bosses take a few more). I ran into a total of one boss throughout the game that this tactic did not work effectively against.
The overall difficulty of Spectrobes is easy, with the exception of this one boss. This boss is able to shoot around the field rapidly and hit you with a tentacle from long range, making your power attacks difficult to get off since you’re getting hit frequently. This forces you to utilize your Spectrobes the “normal” way, making this fight absolutely unpleasant. I almost decided to give up entirely at this point since it was so absurdly hard given the rest of the game’s ease.
The problems are further compounded that the overall story is weak. While I’ll save all the gaping plot holes for the special rant, I can say the story does nothing more than tell us to go to point A, fetch an item, return to point B and get our reward, no questions asked. Many key items don’t require anything more than just talking to a person, who gives it up without asking for anything in return. There simply is no challenge to further the story (except for the above boss).
Visually speaking, the game feels, well, like the art staff didn’t care. The most immediate issue is the chintzy character portraits. When turning around to face the other direction, all character portraits are just mirrored. This means accessories on the right hand get switched to the left. It would be funny when the character talks about an item on their right hand when the picture shows it on the left if it were intentional, but I get the feeling it wasn’t. The world graphics are muddy and look worse close up. The only real effort went into the Spectrobes themselves, which look quite good for a DS game. They are varied and well animated. Battle effects are alright though some of the tandem move effects are buggy and will flicker off and on mid-animation.
Sounds are reasonably well done. Music is interesting and battle effects are, too. Nothing too spectacular to report other than they are there.
A feature that makes the game far too easy to play is the ability to buy minerals via the online portion of the game. Each week, you are allocated 10 points to spend buying minerals or Spectrobes. The minerals are usually high quality ones that boost your Spectrobe’s stats drastically. Handing them out essentially for free isn’t a good idea when the game is already this easy. Furthermore, the handling of it is bugged as you can just forward the DS’s internal clock a week at a time and the game will give you another 10 points each time.
Ultimately, Spectrobes doesn’t come close to matching the quality bar set by Pokemon. While filled with numerous, excellent ideas, the mish-mash handling of the development destroyed the potential. Had Spectrobes not been developed by attempting to use each and every feature the DS offers, it may have come out a little better. This is, of course, assuming that the game design was more fluid in building the challenge level and not entering game-breaking super moves that can be used almost at will. I fully suggest not wasting your time with this one.
