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Aiming straight for the Achilles heal of the young gamer, Disney unleashes Spectrobes, a delightfully interactive Pokémon-esque RPG that narrowly misses the mark. Leading seemingly boring lives as planetary patrol officers, Rallen and Jeena just happen to stumble across a race of evil, planet-destroying creatures known as the Krawl. Luckily, a grizzled, floating space traveler named Aldous knows just what it takes to dispatch them. The solution just happens to be buried layer upon layer under the ground of planets scattered across the universe.
Playing as Rallen, Spectrobes is a much a game of digging as it is a standard action RPG. And therein lies the rub--should you settle for a very clever use of the hardware that ultimately (and sadly) dissolves into a very short and unsatisfying adventure with a real-time battle system that will have you avoiding confrontations at all costs? Perhaps my question was a bit too rhetorical, but it is important to dwell on how close Spectrobes comes to being a great and addictive franchise.
Aiming straight for the Achilles heal of the young gamer...
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Discovering creatures, items, and cubes, and the ways in which the game uses the DS' hardware, are amazingly well done. Using search spectrobes--basically unevolved creatures that aren't yet ready for fighting—you will run, run, run yourself through level after level of generic, dual screen overhead environments in hopes of finding valuable allies and stat boosting items, or even better yet, cubes. Fossils are essential as they can be awakened to reveal creatures whose designs fall within the spectrum of Zoids, Digimon, and Pokémon (though not as inspiring as any of the 3) that can aid in searching and battle. Minerals are used to boost their stats and help in evolving them, and cubes provide essential system functions such as enabling wireless play and card input.
Excavation is handled with the stylus and involves breaking through layers of ground until you get to the item. From there, you must choose the proper tool to remove the item within a certain timeframe. You can blow on the microphone to remove dust and scan the item for its shape (this helps determine what tool to use in the excavation process). Once excavation surpasses 95 percent, the item is up for grabs.
Before getting to the action, we need to cover the pampering process of this whole operation. First comes the awakening (it sounds much more dramatic than it is!): using the microphone and maintaining a certain volume level within a certain range (it varies depending on the creature), you will awaken the fossil. Once they're hatched, it's time to make them useful.
Remember those little key chains with virtual pets in them? Feed, pet, and clean up their poop and it's just like having the real thing? Well, Spectrobes doesn't take it quite that far, but after awakening fossils, it's necessary to take the babies and throw them into an incubator, feed them some stat boosting items, pet them to speed up the evolution process, wait a little while, and voila, you get a battle ready creature. Keep a couple together long enough and they develop friendships that open up combo attacks.
For those with packrat tendencies, rejoice in the almost infinite amount of time you can spend stockpiling powerups and dispensable warriors. Sadly, the action isn't intuitive enough to offer an outlet for all the goodies you've horded. You will most likely spend a lot of time avoiding swirling tornados that once touched, initiate real-time battles. Though it's possible to deck out Rallen with weapons like guns and swords, as well as take 2 spectrobes into battle, there isn't much fun to be had. Battle consists of attacking with one of your allies, waiting for the action meter to recharge, and doing it again. Your spectrobes move the same way you do, so because of the overhead angle of the camera, positioning them for an attack can sometimes be tricky. Special attacks add a little diversity, but mostly it's about running around a circular screen and chipping away at lame and easily dodgeable enemies. Oh, and not to worry if you die, everything is saved.
As an experiment in hardware use, Spectrobes does an amazing job of using the touch screen and microphone to their fullest. The problem lies in combat and level exploration. Battle is real-time but clunky and incredibly boring. As a playground diversion, having the wireless trading and fighting is a must. There's also a card input system where you put Spectrobes cards over the screen and use the stylus to activate a code (holes cut into the cards) to unlock extras. Yet another great idea that fails because the action is so uninspiring. I'd love to see more action RPGs, whether kid-focused or not, use the DS as deftly as Spectrobes. With a battle overhaul and a bit more level flavor, a sequel could very well be just what kids (of all ages) are looking for.
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