PXBM: Fossil Fighters review
Hello and welcome to the Post-Xmas-Blogging-Mania, in which I review every game I got recently. Tonight we are reviewing a member of an underpopulated genre.
Fossil Fighters
Platform: Nintendo DS
Genre: Mons. As I noted before, there aren’t that many mon games about– the only two that I can really think of right now are Dragon Quest Monsters and, naturally, Pokemon– but they essentially boil down to acquiring creatures of some sort (in this case ‘vivosaurs’, reanimated prehistoric creatures) and using them to fight by proxy.
Plot Synopsis: INSERT STANDARD MONS GAME PLOT HERE, up to a point. On the surface, it’s just some dude collecting dinosaurs to fight other dudes with dinosaurs, and eventually INSERT NAME OF EVIL TEAM HERE “The BB Bandits.” However, it manages to throw in a couple of pretty damn good plot twists, and is not above indulging in the occasional bit of metahumor.
Gameplay Score: 17/20
Interestingly, the gameplay is divided among a couple of activities. Obviously, there is a heavy emphasis on leveling up your vivosaurs and battling others; however, what is particularly interesting is the way that vivosaurs are obtained. Essentially, you go to an area and use sonar and a pickax to dig up rocks containing fossils, which you then clean with a hammer and drill in order to get to the fossil itself.
The fights themselves start out nail-bitingly tough and require quick tactical decisions; however, somewhat curiously, the difficulty actually begins to ramp down as the game progresses and you begin to work with greater move pools. This eventually reaches a point of absurdity when you face off against the wildly overrated Saurhead, who “lets you win…” and then later challenges you to five matches in a row, with the last against his strongest vivosaurs, and you naturally pound him into the ground. The main failing is the A.I.: Once you get to a certain point, the commentators on the top screen and every opponent you face spontaneously become idiots.
The fossil-cleaning process is, while fresh at first, quite tedious in the endgame as well. Luckily, a while into the game you can just hand off any fossil you’ve cleaned at least once before onto a robot, who will clean it to a quality proportionate to how many times you have cleaned them manually. Except some of them. Long story short, good at first but peters out, especially once you hit the brick wall I like to refer to as “post-plot content” which rarely entices me enough to actually go for it.
I couldn't find a picture of Saurhead or the robot, so here's Dr. Exposition. I mean Diggins.
Fairness Score: 8/10
You will note I changed the name of this category. To elaborate: the Fairness Score is the willingness of the developers to be evil to you in the sake of difficulty. “But how can this not have a ten out of ten?” I hear you cry. Simple: The fossil cleaning. There are certain fossil rocks that are very tough and require you to use the hammer to break their outer shell (Dark Fossils), and other fossils that are simply very resistant to any attempt to clean them. There are other fossil rocks that clean very easily, and if you keep your drill on for a millisecond to long will instantly leave you a pulped fossil. Then there are fossil rocks that require the hammer– a very clumsy, incredibly powerful tool– and are incredibly brittle. I have no further comment, and since google image search continues to fail me I cannot post an image.
Figure One: "Google Image Search Sucks" produces that bean sculpture in Chicago.
Plot Score: 8/10
The plot starts off fairly cliche, but holy crap is it worth it. When it’s not breaking the fourth wall, using downright surreal humor or just being silly for the sake of being silly, it manages to weave a story that– if not particularly good– is quite self-aware and manages to have an actually decent surprise thrown in! I must offer my kudos. It also stays consistently good throughout the game, which is a plus.
Music Score: 4/5
The same problem I have with the gameplay I have with the music. It’s very good, varied, and catchy at first but by the time you reach the end game you really don’t care for it anymore.
Graphics Score: 4/5
Like 3-D DS games tend to be due to the graphical limitations, the graphics remind me of an N64 game while the player is drunk, playing on a mountaintop, has a fear of heights, and has just overdosed on allergy medication, but artificially unblurred using… uh… photoshop eyes.
Pictured: Photoshop Eye.
That said, the graphics get points for being, if nothing else, incredibly distinctive (I refer you again to Professor Tealhair), and all character sprites are pretty damn fun to look at. Especially the vivosaurs.
Spinax is notable for Auto Counter, a balanced skill set, and looking god damn awesome.
Bonus Points
I AM GIVING OUT BONUS POINTS AND YOU CANNOT STOP ME. HAHAHAHA.
Underused Genre: 3 (Seriously, why are there so few mons games?!)
Final Score: 44/50
While by no means a perfect game, Fossil Fighters stays entertaining for quite a long time, and it gives a fresh breath of air into a fairly monopolized genre. I highly recommend buying it, if only for the sheer awesome hypothetical of fighting a T-rex with tiny little plant eaters and winning.
