I'll just jump right into this one. Medabots Infinity just plain SUCKS.
I can't even picture Medabot fans enjoying this. The graphics are bad,
the controls are even worse. The camera angles work against you in all
the boss battles. The dungeons are all the same and felt randomly
generate. The game has an extremely high difficulty, and this is pretty
bad for a kids game. How are kids suppose to play this game when a 25
year old veteran of crap NES games can't even beat this game?
Leveling up in this game is pathetic. It took about 3 or 4 shots
to kill a spider robot at the beginning of the game, I can't remember
the exact numbers, but 29 levels later and 20 hours into the game I got
to the point where I could kill them in 2 shots. All the boss battles
are pretty much the same, there's rarely any variation. The storyline
was a bit charming, and I wasn't expecting all the twists at the end,
but it's still had pretty crappy dialog. No kid should be put this as
much torture as I have attempting to play this. The only hidden gem in
this game is the dialog scenes and they're nothing to special to begin
with.
----------Battle System----------
Medabots Infinity, at the heart of it all, is a generic overhead
view dungeon crawler RPG. You play as Medabee, who is a robot designed
after a BEE, that I assume is controlled by a boy named Ikki through a
watch. Ikki and Medabee go around a theme park looking for friendly
fights with other Medabots.
You don't gain experience by traditionally killing enemies, since
there's so few things to kill. You actually collect experience points
from breaking barrels, or if you're lucky, killing a robot and points
happen to show up. At the end of each dungeon they give you bonus
experience aswell. You don't gain levels instantly, but rather after
the dungeon is over. The dungeons all have the same goal, go from point
A to point B. They might throw you a mini-boss or a boss at the end.
The boss fights are about as simple as you can get, but they're timed
with 3 minutes for the bout. All you have to do is to knock it out, and
you win, some of them you don't even have to fight since the computer
is so stupid he just runs into the traps for you. The boss fights are
all in 3rd person view and you won't have control of the camera with
the D-pad, so you have to resort to the L button that just moves the
camera in your robots view.
Speaking of the camera, this game has possibly the worst camera
control I've ever dealt with in a game. Most games use the L and R
buttons for the camera, the L will move left, and the R will move
right, sounds like a perfect concept that shouldn't be touched right?
Well the designers for this game thought it would be better to put
those controls on the D-pad, but the problem is, I only have 2 hands.
If I want to change the camera, which is ALWAYS, I need to see if I'm
safe from traps and robots, move the camera with my right hand, then
continue on with the game until the next time I need to change it. The
camera moves in a fix position aswell, similar to Wild Arms 3, as it
will move a certain amount of degrees to the right and until you make a
perfect circle.
Within the dungeons you can find robot parts, and you can even
earn more parts by defeating other Medabots. You can eventually collect
a full robot and start using something other than Medabee to replay
some levels and find new secrets or new parts Medabee otherwise
couldn't reach. For example, water kills Medabee instantly, but there's
a mermaid Medabot that can swim, and a fairy Medabot that can fly over
water. You can even mix and match parts to make whatever you want if
the parts allow it.
Each robot has 4 Life bars, one for your feet, head, right arm and
left arm. If one of these life bars goes to zero, then game over you
have to start the level over. There's no penalty for dying other than
restarting the level again, but it is very annoying when it happens and
it will happen often. There's many many traps within this game, from
bombs, closing in walls, water hazards, rolling boulders and so on.
Most of these traps are instant kills. This game can get completely
frustrating, while it's never difficult to play, if you don't have any
patience to take this game slow, then you'll be dead within a few
minutes. This game was intended for kids, but I just don't see any kid
getting far in this game before breaking the disc.
----------Characters / Story----------
I haven't watched the anime before, so I don't know anything about
the characters before going into this. With said, uh.. the story wasn't
to bad. If it wasn't for the extreme about of backtracking you had to
do to advance the story, then I might of enjoyed this game a little
more. You play as Ikki, and you control a robot (with a mind of his
own) Medabee. You get invited to a theme park called ToruToruLand or
something like that. As you get there you enter a "race" and compete
against your friends. I don't understand why you have to go through a
stupid dungeon before battling your friends but whatever. After a while
you'll meet up with the Rubber-robos, they're a gang that are trying to
steal kids Medaparts. You'll have to backtrack through dungeons to get
rid of them and story their stupid schemes.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are terrible.. just plain inexcusable. This game
wouldn't tax the Nintendo 64's hardware at all. The best thing I can
say is the character models in the game look pretty good during the
dialog scenes, they're celshaded and sharp looking. Other than that
everything is else is just horrible. The dungeons are all squares with
lame boring repeating textures and backgrounds. There's only a couple
traps or enemies per dungeon. You'll fight the same spider robot with
hammer for a head for the entire game and it's the ONLY enemy you'll
fight while dungeon crawler.
This game comes from the same people that brought us beatiful games like Harvest Moon, pathetic.
----------Sound----------
The music is actually kinda good and very lighthearted, but
extremely repetitive. The songs are short and they loop over and over
again. If you're dungeon crawling for 20 minutes you'll eventually get
sick of the same 30 second song that sounds like it was recorded from
the Circus. There are voices in the game, but they're few and far
between. The Mr. Referee has a voice but he starts to repeat himself
early in the game, Ikki might say something at the start of your battle
and Medabee has a few lines, if you beat someone at a medabattle then
they'll have a line at the end, but that's pretty much it. No
non-dungeon dialog is voiced out, and that's the best part of the game.
----------World Map----------
The world map is free-roaming, but you can't really escape the
theme park. There's 5 areas within the theme park, like a Snow level,
Jungle level and so on, with various ports that you can enter that
becomes dungeons / boss battles. The game is basically summed up like
this, you look at the world map, you see where to go next, you go
there, you run through it, you win, you go to the next place. It's even
more generic than that last sentence. The dungeons have a map in the
corner similar to the first Legend of Zelda with a bunch of empty
blocks that don't tell you anything, but it shows where you are in the
dungeon and there's a marker for the exit.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
21:13
I DID NOT BEAT THIS. This is the first review I've written on a
game I haven't beat, that's because it's to freaking difficult to beat.
The final dungeon of this game requires you to fight through 6 boss
battles before taking on the final boss (I think) with the same health
meter and no health regeneration. I can only beat the first 5 bosses.
I've punched my wall and just about threw my controller through my TV
playing this final dungeon. I've had enough of this.
