One of the frequent complaints about Nintendo is that they produce a number of games that are released in Japan and are very good, but never make it over to U.S. shores, for whatever reason. This trend arguably began with Super Mario Bros. 2, which Nintendo determined was too difficult for American gamers; our Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a modified version of a completely different game called Doki Doki Panic. The trend has finally begun to reverse in recent years, with American releases of exclusively Japanese games such as Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing, which were received to high praise.
Of course, not every game that Nintendo produces for the Japanese market is a smash hit. Custom Robo is one of those examples, and as far as I’m concerned, it could have just stayed in Japan.
Custom Robo takes place in a city on a futuristic world, where small toys called Robos are a fixture in every household. These Robos consist of a number of interchangeable parts, and are used for battling in “holosseums”, both for sport and in place of weapons like guns and knives. (Think Pokemon, only less cute and with more guns.) The player takes on the role of a boy who receives a posthumous message from his father, instructing him to become a Robo commander. To this end, he joins the Steel Hearts, a bounty hunter organization, and through his missions discovers that something is not right in his quaint, futuristic home, and he may (of course) be called upon to save civilization itself. In case it’s unclear, the story is something you’ve likely seen a thousand times before, and it is fairly predictable and generally gets in the way of the gameplay.
At first, Custom Robo seems like a fairly standard action-RPG. There is an overworld map, and the main character must talk to people to advance the story, until a Robo battle occurs, and then the cycle repeats. However, Custom Robo is so painfully linear that referring to it as an RPG would be extremely kind. There are no puzzles of any kind to overcome in the Story Mode (unless you consider having to speak to every person in a room before the game will allow you to continue to be a puzzle), and the game will not even let you go to anywhere on the overworld map other than your intended destination. Custom Robo may as well control everything in between battles, because there’s very little that the player can do unless the game wants him to do it.
So clearly, the focus of the game is on the Robo battles. The battles take place fighting game-style; two, three, or four Robos enter a holosseum and beat each other up until all but one Robo (or teams of Robos) has run out of hit points. The battles begin with all the Robos being launched into the arena, and they then emerge from their cubes after a counter elapses; since the counters start at different numbers, one player gets a head start in each battle. The players then fight it out in a manner not unlike Capcom’s Power Stone games; each player can roam freely about the arena in full 3D, and use walls and other obstacles as cover. After a Robo has taken a certain number of hits, it goes down, at which point it is completely vulnerable for a couple of seconds, and then is “reborn”, at which point that Robo is completely invulnerable for a few seconds. This continues until one Robo is taken out completely.
To facilitate the carnage, the Robos have a number of weapons at their disposal. Each Robo comes equipped with a gun, a bomb launcher, a pod (which is an independent projectile that moves around the holosseum until it explodes), and a dash move. All of these weapons are customizable by installing a new body or part for your Robo, and Custom Robo boasts 250 different parts to choose from.
This all sounds great, until you realize that a number of the parts are really the same part with slight variations, like a gun that shoots to the right instead of the left. Furthermore, if you have a good gun, you can get through most of story mode without ever using the rest of the weapons. Custom Robo goes on at great length to describe all of its strategic nuances, but I found that jumping around the arena and hammering on the A button (to shoot the gun) got me through about 90% of the battles in the story mode. I mean, sure, jumping around like a grasshopper on speed and emptying your gun into your opponent is fun for a little while, but it gets old quickly. The only thing that makes the battles more difficult is that pesky head start after the Robos are launched; it is entirely possible to lose a quarter to a half of your hit points in that first few seconds with no way to defend yourself. This is what we who review video games on a regular basis like to call “poor game design”.
What if you actually do manage to lose a battle, you ask? No problem, my friend. You just get to start over exactly where you left off, with absolutely no penalty for losing! (Well, I suppose having to play this game for even longer is something of a penalty.) That’s right, if you lose, you just get to start all over again, and you’ll keep trying until you get it right. The game is so linear that even losing a battle would deviate too far from the storyline, and Custom Robo won’t have that. This makes the story mode rather pointless; there is no real tension in any given battle, because you know that you can keep trying as many times as you want with no repercussions.
To be fair, there are some additional modes in Custom Robo that are a bit more tolerable than Story Mode. There is a tournament mode in which you can battle for more parts and trophies, and the tournaments occasionally change up the rules by imposing restrictions like only allowing parts to be used in one battle. There is also the ability to play against the computer or friends in random battles, which could be fun if you got the right mix of people in the room, as well as a first-person mode, which provides a fresh way to play through the battles. The problem with all of this, however, is that most players won’t ever get to see these modes, because Custom Robo forces you to complete the awful Story Mode before any of this, with the exception of multiplayer. The game won’t even let you practice against the computer in a random battled before Story Mode is complete. Why the developers would keep 75% of the game behind lock and key until you’ve slogged through a thoroughly unentertaining Story Mode is beyond me.
Graphically, Custom Robo won’t be a game you use to show off your GameCube’s capabilities. The graphics are, at best, functional. At worst, you have the battles themselves, which often look more like a wireframe demo than like a video game. There aren’t any serious glitches to talk about, but the game looks extremely bland; even Pokemon Colosseum’s story mode looked better than Custom Robo.
Sound manages to be even worse. The music is the same loud guitar rock that was found in last year’s F-Zero GX, only here it seems out of place. The effects sound fake, and recognized that some of them were swiped directly from Animal Crossing, which wasn’t exactly known for its stellar sound effects, either.
Finally, the voice acting is, well, completely nonexistent. Not to get on a rant here, but it’s 2004; there’s no excuse for any console game to not have at least the major scenes be fully voiced. What’s worse, there’s a lot of conversation in this game (most of it rather pointless), and it would have been much easier to tolerate if it were at least spoken and I didn’t have to sit in front of my screen and page through it all. In fact, one scene toward the end is so long that the game actually saves twice in the middle of it so that you won’t have to endure it again. Custom Robo does attempt to make up for the lack of voice by presenting still anime-esque portraits next to each line of text and give each character a different text “mumble”, a la Animal Crossing, but the result is that it still feels like an anachronism, and a bad one at that.
I was really surprised by Custom Robo, mainly because most of Nintendo’s first-party games are so consistently good, and this game just bored the life out of me from the second I put it into my GameCube. There are so many problems with Custom Robo that it amazes me that Nintendo was willing to publish it in the first place. If you absolutely need to play a robot fighting game, try Gotcha Force instead. In fact, just try anything other than this game. There might be some fun locked away inside Custom Robo, but it is locked away so tightly that you may as well find a different game, preferably one that is actually fun from beginning to end.
