Ah, Medabots. For those that don't remember, the concept was simple. Kids had robots that ran on medals that were placed into a slot on the back of their torsos. The medals were esentially the soul of the medabots. These bots could have parts of their body changed so that they have different abilities, like shooting lasers, setting force fields, firing lasers, melee weapons, etc.
Making a turn-based RPG based on this was a no-brainer, and in light of the anime briefly catching on with international audiences, fans got two versions of the same game to play, a la Pokemon. Medabots: Rokusho and Medabots: Metabee - with the former, you get a speedy protagonist medabot that uses melee weapons, and with the latter, you get to shoot your opponents down in multiple ways, including missiles that never miss.
If it sounds like I'm a bit biased towards the Metabee version, that's because I enjoyed that one much, much more than the absolute disaster that was the Rokusho version. You may wonder why that is, since these games are ultimately the same. Much like Pokemon, each version has differences. With Metabee, you start with a good medabot that is very much capable of defending itself. Sometimes, Metabee is even capable of beating teams of 3 by himself. With Rokusho, you are given a very fragile protagonist that takes critical hits at random, or at least it feels that way. Not only that, but with 20 HP on each arm, it is pathetically easy for you to lose one of its two weapons, while Metabee comes with 3: a sub-machine gun arm, a rifle arm, and missiles from its head.
Let's back up a little bit: Medabots themselves are set up with parts like the legs (counted as one part), two arms (each has its own amount of HP), and the head. The medal controlling them can be leveled up with each battle. Each medal in the game has its set specialty, and thus, you will need to pick the medals for your bots carefully.
The protagonist you control is Ikki Tenryou. You can set a different first name, but no matter what, your last name will be Tenryou. His story starts off with him wishing he could have a medabot, and he has a friend named Erika, who works on the school's newspaper. The main characters are essentially still kids, but that doesn't really matter. Something wacky happens when Ikki is given money by his mother - he essentially gets a medabot forced onto him by Henry, a clerk at the store near Ikki's house. Mom gets pissed because she didn't give him money to just waste it on the medabot, but the dad is cool and gives Ikki a medal. Somehow, the father doesn't question why a masked man on the street gave him a medal, but whatever.
From then on, it's up to you to go on an epic adventure which will surely require you to get your medabot to be stronger over time via robattles. The battle system is odd, yet ultimately simple. You can choose up to 3 medabots for your team to face an opposing AI team. The first one you pick will be the leader. To win, all you need to do is defeat the leader. The battle field is one where there are three tracks and one median, with each medabot running towards that median to perform the action they were told to do by the player.
What's odd about this? Well, you can't pick who you will attack, or help (there are actions that don't involve attacking an opponent, like shields, healing, etc.) with each part - I guess this is because, in theory, if you could choose, you could just end a battle early by always attacking the opponent's leader. I get that, but then there are the melee medaparts where the game does not even tell you who your attack is aimed at. You just pick the action and hope that the opponent you want to attack will get hit. That's kind of a problem when you don't know who your protagonist medabot (Rokusho, in this case) will attack each time you tell it to use one of its arms.
Now, there are questions that should tell you how much of a problem this is: Can't you upgrade Rokusho's medaparts so that they're not so weak? Nope. You have to beat opponents and hope that you're given arms that can take hits better.
Are you always forced to have Rokusho as your leader? No, but for the early parts of the game, you are forced to use him, since he's the only full medabot you have. This makes the beginning of this game hell on newbies, who will be forced to save after every battle. See, like other RPGs, you get random battles by just walking around on a lot of areas.
Can't your medabots just dodge? Yes, but it doesn't happen often with most leg medaparts. Leveling up your medals can help, unless your opponent has medabots which disable dodging.
The legs are an essential part to your medabots because they determine what weapons are strong against them. Think of it like Pokemon taking super effective damage. If you have Air legs, anti-air missiles will be the bane of your existence. If you have Sea legs, torpedoes will ruin you. Hell, the game will automatically aim weapons keeping that in mind. There are other weaknesses like that, but you get the idea.
Rokusho is a two-legged medabot, and in theory, nothing is really super effective against him by default. However, there are battles where it feels like the opposite is true. The only kind of justification I have for this is his head: it improves the aim of your whole team, and increases the chances of critical hits. Perhaps the developers figured this is really powerful later in the game, so they decided to nerf him by making his parts really weak.
Either way, it's a bad idea. Players could end up relegating the protagonist medal down the pecking order as they go through the game, or worse, they might even stop playing altogether because the game is too difficult early on.
As you make your way through the story, you can go back to the lab where Ms. Nae is located and every now and then, you can pick up a new medal. I highly, highly, recommend getting the bat as soon as possible, so you have a partner that can shoot. Even then, you'd have to know this to really make good use of that medal as soon as possible:
- You have to know that there is a two-legged medabot that can randomly appear at school, with a Krosserdog.
- You have to know that it's somewhat rare to come across him, and thus, you may have to spend a long time trying to find him.
- Because of the way the game works, you can only take one of your opponent's medaparts at a time after winning. And yes, your opponent can be a dick and decide to give you a part you already have. You don't get to choose what you won.
- Your AI opponent takes a part from you if it wins, so be very careful, because if you lose one of Rokusho's parts, game over.
It's just ridiculous. You have to keep in mind that this is only somewhat annoying today since there are guides online. Back when this game came out, ha, good luck figuring this out on your own if you were a child playing this.
Oh, and on top of what I mentioned earlier about new medals from Ms. Nae - you are not told by the game about the times when a new medal is available. You just have to keep remembering to check after you do something in the main story.
I could go on spoiling everything in the story, I could complain about how you can't skip battles without using a rubberobo medal before a robattle begins, I could talk about the vehicles you can use much later into the game, but none of this really matters. The beginning of this game is made so tough that it's honestly not worth trying this game, unless you really want a hard challenge after playing the Metabee version.
I haven't even touched upon the medaforces: you get them after reaching certain levels with medals. They can be very damaging attacks, they can help your team, etc. - again, this doesn't really matter in the Rokusho version until you get past the awfully tough start of the game.
With all of this complaining, you might wonder why I'm not giving this a 1 out of 5. The fact is that the soundtrack is solid, and even features the American anime opening. Graphically, this game is good as well, and fans who saw the anime will be satisfied with how the medabots look in the game. Will they be satisfied with the gameplay? That's a different question...