Handheld
(DS) Spectrobes
By James Rinehart
Apr 18, 2007, 7 :29 am

I’ll cut to brass tacks here, Spectrobes for the Nintendo DS is quite boring. About the only thing it does well is the perceived sense of value you get from opening the case and discovering the hefty 80-page manual. The manual, however, only repeats the information you will get from playing the game. Hence, “perceived” sense of value. It’s a shame too, because the game could be a lot more interesting if just a few things in its design were tweaked with.

Developed by Jupiter, a Japanese development house based out of Kyoto, and published by Disney Interactive Studios Spectrobes is the spawn of the same people responsible for the GameBoy Advance’s Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, as well as the Mario Picross titles for Super Famicom and the original GameBoy. At first glance Spectrobes is little more than just another Pokemon clone, but other than the fact that both games involve collecting cutesy little monsters that can evolve into bigger, slightly meaner looking monsters the two really have nothing more in common.

The game starts you off as Rallen and Jeena, Planetary Patrol Officers, responding to a distress signal on a nearby planet. Rallen soon discovers the source, the wreckage of an old escape capsule housing an old man whom we later learn is named Aldous. Aldous speaks of an attack on his home planet by a vicious horde of creatures known as the Krawl. Being a scientist, he was able to identify an extinct species of creatures called Spectrobes as the natural enemy of the Krawl and, using the power of science, comes up with an item called a Prizmod that can harness their energy. Just one problem though, Rallen has to find the Spectrobe fossils buried on the planets throughout the galaxy. So begins out little adventure of discovery, danger, and the defeat of the Krawl.

Going from planet to planet you use the D-pad to control Rallen along with a baby Spectrobe that, when activated by pressing the R button, can sense whether there is anything buried within a certain radius, be it Spectrobe fossil, mineral, or power cube. Digging up the items is a bit of a chore but novel, as you have to tap and scrape the touch screen on the DS to dig through the layers of dirt to reach the prize at the bottom. Do it quickly and you get a small point bonus of sorts, do it too roughly and you might break the fossil you’re trying to unearth. Once found, a fossil can then be taken back to Rallen and Jeena’s ship, where it can be placed in an incubation chamber and “reawakened” by yelling at the DS in the right tone. This part is a bit silly, though I found that just blowing into the mic works just as well as yelling. Once the little Spectrobe is hatched he or she or it can be taken into battle with or fed minerals that have also been found through the excavation process to increase basic stats like health. Power cubes are Aldous’ foray, and the way in which the game unlocks its extra features like Wifi. That’s right, if want to use Wifi with this game you have to find a little cube hidden in the game first. Not that the Wifi features are anything to write home about, since you can’t pit your Spectrobes against someone else’s. It’s mainly there for upgrades and such through the official website.

When you’re not wandering around a given environment looking for fossils and such you’re being attacked by the Krawl, who only seem to come in groups of three. Battles take place in an enclosed arena with you and two of your Spectrobes vs. three Krawl. The Spectrobes and Rallen all stand in one line, shoulder to shoulder, moving in tandem and the left and right buttons are used to make each respective Spectrobe attack. Rallen’s attacks are pretty much uselessly underpowered, no matter what kind of weapon or equipment you have on him, so it’s up to the Spectrobes to do much of the fighting. Each Spectrobe has one basic attack, with a few seconds of recovery time in between, with most Krawl going down after four or five hits. There is a charge attack, where you hold the A button until a meter is filled and then press both the left and right buttons to unleash a powerful special move utilizing both Spectrobes. However, you’ll probably never find yourself in a battle challenging enough to make all the effort worthwhile, as Spectrobes is quite easy.

Visually, the game takes place in 3D with both screens on the DS being used to show you as much of the environment as possible, with some 2D art thrown in for dialogue scenes amongst characters. The 2D art is okay, if a bit mediocre, and the 3D is surprisingly passable for the DS but suffers from terrible art design. Environments are largely generic and empty, save for the Krawl lurking about, and are really there to give you more places to look for fossils. There is no in-game radar so you’ll find yourself scraping the walls of a given level just to keep from getting lost. As far as the music goes the overworld theme is nice if ultimately forgettable and some of the sound effects can be genuinely annoying.

That the game is so mediocre in all these areas is frustrating because looking for fossils is actually kind of fun at times. Though there are over a hundred different Spectrobes for you to discover and train, I mean “evolve”, they all come from about a dozen different basic fossils. This means you’ll find the same fossils over and over again, with the payoff being delayed until after you can get them into the incubation chamber to see if the Spectrobes that pop out are any different than the ones you already have.

Overall: 5/10