Contact was short, so there wasn't much of a chance to flesh things
out. I did spent 11 hours on it initially, but atleast 4 of those was
straight up power leveling up. There's only 9 Islands and only a few of
them are big enough to hold a dungeon. There just wasn't enough content
in the game to really hold the interest in the RPG fan inside me.
Overall, my first initial run was fun, but I still feel a little
gipped about things. The music was good, the graphics were good, the
controls were ok, there just could of been more to accomplish.
----------Battle System----------
Contact is a top-down-view dungeon crawler MMO-styled RPG. You can
only play as Terry. You hope from Island to Island helping various
characters out while trying to retrieve green gems that powers the
Professors ship. He can equip suits, these suits give Terry different
abilities and attributes to use in your journey. For example, a Monk
can dig holes, and has extra Earth resistence and powers, while the
Shadow Thief costume can pick locks and treasure chests. Terry can also
equip a ton of different weapons, including a knife, sword, mallet,
fishing pole, pan, etc. Some weapons can only be equipped with certain
costumes, for example you can only equip a pan by the Chef or the
fishing pole by the Fisher King.
When you get near a monster, you have to hit the B button to get
Terry into attack mode. Terry attacks by himself, you control where he
walks, but it's up to him to swing his attacks. Once you're in attack
mode you can use special attacks for Terry though. If you hit the Y
button you can scroll through all your special attacks. Each Special
Attack will use EP points, you can only hold 5 at a time and you can't
recharge it with food or healing items either. Everytime you kill 2
monsters without using EP attacks you gain 1 EP point. So it's wise to
save these for the bosses.
Terry gains experience not by killing monsters, but by doing
actions and skills. There's over 20 different things to level up in
this game, and you can max out each up to 100 levels. Everytime Terry
swings his sword he'll gain experience for his strength and sword
abilities. Everything he cooks something he'll gain cooking experience.
Each costume and weapon (sword, hammer, knuckle) has 7 abilities to it
also. Once you reach to a certain level in each category you'll gain a
new ability.
The biggest flaw in Contact is gaining the abilities, the goals
are to unreachable at the start of the game. Leveling up takes way to
long, and even if you stick to one type of weapon and one type of
costume you still will only learn a few abilities until you beat the
game. There's isn't much reward for maxing out your skills either.
The level designs are short and rarely do they have any type of
puzzles in them. I was expecting atleast fun puzzles in this game, but
the whole goal is to make it from point a to point b without dying.
There's challenge in that sure, but nothing a little power leveling
can't fix. This game doesn't take brain power, it takes pure patience.
The fun of the game mostly consists of collecting each type of weapon,
food and item.
----------Characters / Story----------
The simple story goes like this, the Professor and his faithful
companion Mochi first meet you, yes this game actually makes you as a
character. They don't really use this as much as you would think
though. After the initial set up, the professor is looking for green
crystals, and happens to find one that next to a kid, the kid is Terry
the main character in the game. Terry is a silent hero like Link for
the most part. They talk and Terry gets on his ship and they sail off
until they get attacked by the CosmoNOTs. After this attack they lose
all his green crystals that power his ship, so Terry ends up going on a
quest to find all the missing pieces and to stop the CosmoNOTs plan.
The plot was good enough for me, it's just has weak dialog for the
most part. While the game was wacky, I was expecting even wackier
stuff. For the most part, the game was a typical RPG.
----------Graphics----------
While I loved the graphic style of the game, the level design for
the dungeons and caves were very bare bones, repetitive, and pretty
short. There's a ton of blacked out areas in the dungeons, and re-used
backgrounds and graphics, it's almost a bore to look at. On the other
hand the areas where you are side scrolling have beautiful backgrounds,
and in some of the beach areas look great also.
----------Sound----------
The music is excellent, all the songs fit the levels perfectly.
The sound effects were ok at best, the most annoying was when Mint or
any other main female in the game had dialog and they would
repetitively giggle with each line. Mouchi would also repetitively meow
all the time too. At the begining of the game there was voice over of a
very distorted phone operator but that's the only thing in the voice
over department of things.
----------World Map----------
The world map is displayed by an actual globe sitting by Terry's
bed. When you click on it you can rotate it in any direction with the
stylus or d-pad and pick which island you want to hop to. Once you pick
your destination you have to go to sleep or wait until the ship
arrives. This is the most annoying thing about the game actually.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save before final boss)----------
11:07
After you complete the game you gain 4 new items, and you can
continue from your last save. If you don't save before fighting the
final boss, then you'll lose all the experience and items gained since
your previous save. When I beat the game I only saved at the first save
spot in the Castle and ended up losing a ton of things.
There's new sidequests, fetch missions and minibosses to fight
after the game is complete. The main quest is rather short, but if you
complete the game 100% you can get into the 50 hour range, maybe even
more.
