Zatch Bell! Mamodo Fury Review

To the uninitiated, the intense, off-the-wall style of the anime Zatch Bell! might seem uniquely bizarre, but its premise is really quite simple. There's a cast of hyper, interesting characters backed by a crazy but entertaining plot that basically gives the characters a reason to fight one another. It's a design that works in publisher Namco Bandai's favor because it can just as easily be a video game as it can be anime, manga, or a collectible card game, which makes for seemingly endless opportunities to create effortless adaptations. And that's exactly what Zatch Bell! Mamodo Fury is--a simplistic game built on the notion that fans of the license don't want or need anything more than to see their favorite characters in yet another venue, with no regard for the depth or quality of the experience. To its credit, the game does deliver a sizable cast of characters, a lengthy story mode, and a handful of ancillary gameplay modes. However, there's nothing in Mamodo Fury to instill a greater appreciation for the Zatch Bell! universe, and the fighting is much too shallow and repetitive to be fun.

The story is about as vague as can be in Mamodo Fury. Every 1,000 years, demons known as mamodos come to Earth to duke it out for the title of mamodo king. These mamodos can't fight alone, though. They need a human counterpart to read spells from a magic book. That means that you have a bunch of relatively normal humans, each with a quirky demon sidekick, who randomly encounter one another and engage in drawn-out, overblown battles. For all the time that it takes to fight, the story never goes anywhere, and the fighting accomplishes absolutely nothing.

That wouldn't be a problem if the fighting were fun, but it isn't. Mamodo Fury is essentially a one-button fighting game. By default, you control a human character, and you hold the A button to cast spells with your mamodo. Depending on how long you hold the button, you'll charge up the level of the spells and your mamodo will perform different attacks. Each mamodo has four regular attacks, a defensive spell, and one super attack. However, you'll usually end up firing off the first-level spell because it's fast and usually the most effective technique. That means that the fighting consists of your running around tapping the A button over and over until you finish off your enemy. To make the combat even more tedious, you have a power gauge that determines how many times you can cast a spell. If your gauge is depleted, you have to wait until it recharges before you can attack. As a result, you'll usually end up firing off about three spells, then running around or hiding behind a barrier until your power is replenished, then repeating the same routine half a dozen times. There is a very minor payoff for doing this, because you'll charge up your super power. When you've done enough damage, you'll see an icon appear on the screen. At that point, you can charge up your attack all the way to initiate a super move. You then have a few seconds to press a random string of buttons, and then you can increase the strength of the attack by hitting another, separate, and once-again-random string of buttons. These super moves inflict major damage and are a guaranteed hit, so with any luck, a single move will put an end to the fight as soon as you unleash it.

There are a few ways to mix up the fighting, but they don't make it any more enjoyable. As a human character, you can't attack a mamodo, but you can attack another human character. You can run up to the opposing human character and try to knock the spell book out of his or her hands. If the collision detection is feeling favorable toward you at that moment, you'll knock the book away and your opponent won't be able to cast any spells until he or she retrieves the book. More often than not, you'll get right up on your opponent and whiff time and time again as you try to land a hit, and even if you do knock the book away, it will buy you only a couple of seconds, so it's not an effective way to fight.

You can also take direct control of your mamodo. Doing so leaves your human character immobile and vulnerable, but the benefit is that your power gauge recharges faster, and as a mamodo, you can directly damage another mamodo using the single melee attack you have at your disposal. Again, this technique isn't useful in the average fight, because leaving your human character in one spot is a surefire way to get creamed, and as the mamodo, you'll run into the aggravating problem of spotty collision detection.

The problems of the shallow fighting mechanics are compounded by basic flaws in execution, as well. The game takes place from a behind-the-back perspective, which means that you constantly have to adjust the camera using the C stick. Your view will also often be obstructed by various objects in the environment. In addition to the camera problems, the deficient artificial intelligence is a regular source of frustration. Usually, your mamodo will stay close as you run around each stage, but often it will end up getting stuck behind low-lying barriers or stalwart hazards such as small shrubs or rocks. The enemy AI is no better. Your opponents will often get stuck on bits of the environment or will run in place up against a small obstruction rather than simply jumping over it.

It's a shame that the gameplay is so unfulfilling, because there's plenty of it to be found in Mamodo Fury. There are 20 playable character combinations in the game, as well as a decent number of stages to choose from. Unfortunately, just about everything other than story mode is locked at the beginning of the game, so you have to put in a lot of time to access all of the content. There's the standard arcade mode and versus mode, as well as a very lengthy story mode. There are more than 30 stages to fight your way through in story mode, with an impressive variety of enemies to fight and special conditions to meet. In some of the story modes, you simply have to defeat the enemy before time runs out, but occasionally the game mixes the formula up by giving you specific conditions for completing a stage. You might have to knock the book out of your opponent's hands, use a specific attack to defeat your foe, or simply survive for a set amount of time. These stages do break up the tedium of endless one-button fighting, but they still aren't fun or interesting, and they suffer from the same underlying problems that persist throughout the game. There are also a handful of minigames to play, where you take control of Zatch and do activities like sneak past guards to enter buildings, collect pieces of lost candy for a friend, or retrieve a stolen toy from a playground bully. The minigames require slightly more input than the fighting, but once you play each one a couple of times, you'll be ready to move on.

Mamodo Fury does support up to four players, but not in the way that you might think. Instead of having four-player versions of the normal versus battles, you get a couple of lame minigames to play. For example, in one game you have to run around and try to kick your opponents' books into a fire, and in another you have to be the first to collect a number of fish. If you want to fight, you're limited to two-player versus battles. In these battles, the screen is split down the middle, but otherwise they play exactly as the other battles in the game. It's a little bit more interesting to play against a human opponent, but the action is so repetitive that you'll quickly get bored.

If you didn't know any better, you could easily mistake Mamodo Fury for any number of other anime-inspired fighting games. The characters are all faithfully represented, and the stages are generic, but they're large and filled with breakable objects. The story sequences are ridiculous but occasionally worth at least a chuckle. Unfortunately, a good deal of charm is lost in the translation from the bright and busy 2D animated show to the flat 3D cel-shading of the game. Some of the spell effects are flashy and interesting to see, but since each character has only a couple of spells, the effects get played out almost immediately. The audio is especially disappointing in Mamodo Fury. The English-language voice cast is on hand to lend its talent, but that is the only highlight of the sound. The music sounds like a throwback to the 8-bit console generation, and not in a good way. The sound effects during battle are all distorted, as if they were rerecorded sounds from old cassette tapes. The most annoying aspect of the sound design is the noise the characters make each time they cast a spell. Each character has one battle cry for each spell, but since you'll usually be using the same spell over and over, you'll constantly hear the same annoying phrase from your character. It goes the same for the enemies you face, too, so during the average three-minute fight, your ears will be continually assaulted by one cringe-inducing voice clip after another, and you'll likely be scrambling for the mute button within the first few minutes of playing the game.

With its sizable cast of characters and lengthy story mode, Zatch Bell! Mamodo Fury offers a lot of very familiar content in one package. However, the gameplay is far too shallow and frustrating to be satisfying. If you're unfamiliar with Zatch Bell! this isn't a good place to start, because it provides no context for the license and does nothing to appeal to those who aren't already intimately familiar with the series. The result is just another perfunctory anime-inspired fighting game that fails to distinguish itself beyond its license.

Custom Robo Review

Robot-on-robot violence seems to be at an all-time high these days, but the trend is nothing new. From 2D robot fighting like Cyborg Justice to 3D robot gunfights like Virtual On, robots have been beating the crap out of other robots for decades. Nintendo is contributing to this hot-button election year issue with Custom Robo, an action RPG of sorts that allows you to customize little robots and bring them into real-time battle. While the level of customization is nice, the RPG section of the game and the actual combat leave a lot to be desired.

Though you can dive right into the versus mode, the game won't be very exciting until you've played the RPG section of the game long enough to unlock enough parts to make for a varied battle. The single-player RPG puts you in the role of a teenage boy who is setting out to make his missing and assumed-deceased father proud by fulfilling his last wish--to become a commander, someone who is able to control custom robos. Custom robos, the highly customizable robot fighters, are only around 30 centimeters tall, but within the society found in the game they're used to solve conflicts and fight crime. You quickly join up with a bounty hunter outfit known as the Steel Hearts, and get right into the thick of things by stopping some crooks from stealing a new robo called Ray 01. From there you'll be sent around to several locations in the city, eventually uncovering a more insidious plot involving an autonomous robo that seems to be leaving a trail of bodies around the city.

More importantly than the silly short story found in the RPG, is that as you battle in this mode you'll be unlocking new robo parts and, eventually, new stand-alone modes and options. These things make the other parts of the game playable, because you can't really have interesting battles without a wide selection of parts to choose from, and the game won't let you play exhibition matches against computer players until you unlock that option from the RPG side of the game.

The real point of the game is to battle. Fighting is done in small, varied arenas. Your robo can be customized in five different areas, and the body type governs how a robo moves. Some types allow multiple air dashes, and others have different movement speed, different defensive capabilities, and so on. Each also has its own charge attack. You can select your main gun, which starts out as a simple blaster, but you'll quickly earn a three-way cannon, a flamethrower, and around 50 more weapons. Bombs tend to launch a large rocket up and over the arena--over 30 of these are found in the game, and they also have different attributes. Your final offensive ability is your shoulder-mounted pod weapon. The default pod is a slow-moving ground-based rocket, but you'll soon get faster pods as well as pods that are better suited for defensive maneuvers, such as the caboose pod, which fires two rockets behind you, covering a quick escape. The last custom part is a robo's legs. Different legs affect hover time and things of that nature.

Combat plays out in real time with up to four robots skittering around the small arenas, unloading their three different weapons as often as possible. When you have more than one available target, a wrestlinglike lock-on toggle lets you select at which robot you want your shots aimed. The main strategy is to split your time between hiding behind walls in the arena to dodging shots and popping up over the walls to fire at your enemies. Battles tend to be over fairly quickly, especially against the computer-controlled robots, once you've figured out how to properly dash in to attack and dash away to dodge enemy fire. All told, the combat feels a little shallow. Despite options like tag-team battles, four-way free-for-alls, and so on, there isn't much strategy to the game beyond making sure that you're firing as often as possible when you aren't hiding behind something.

Graphically, Custom Robo looks fair, at best. The battle arenas are small and, for the most part, nondescript. The robos themselves are designed reasonably well, and some configurations look pretty cool. But the game rarely gives you a clear view of your robo once the battle has already started, and you'll spend more time focusing on the health numbers and other status information that appears around each robo than anything else. The RPG section of the game looks OK, but the character design and various locations are pretty bland. The game's sound is similarly dull, and there is not much in the way of standout audio. The music is fairly boring, and the text in the game is accompanied by an annoying prattling noise that is meant to simulate human speech.

When you add it all up, Custom Robo for the GameCube doesn't really have enough to it to hold most players' interest for long. While you'll probably have some multiplayer fun with this one after you toil through the boring RPG section to unlock some parts, the payoff isn't really worth the effort. Fans of multiplayer combat may want to rent this one just to mess around with it, but it isn't worth too much more than that.

Small Arms is a four-player side-view combat game that puts a great deal of importance on collecting and using a bunch of heavy weaponry as often as possible. Or to put it in more common terms, Small Arms is Super Smash Bros. without the Nintendo characters and with a much heavier focus placed on weapons. The focus on weapons, which are constantly running out of ammo, makes the game feel quite different from Nintendo's Smash Bros. games. But it also means that you spend too much time hunting for new weapons and not enough time using them. The result is a neat, but flawed game.

The characters in the game cover a good deal of "cute little guy" territory, starting with the ever-scowling Marky Kat. There's also a ninja, a dinosaur, a robot, a chicken, an evil-looking mutant tree, and more. They're OK but don't really offer much personality, unless you count the sentence or two of descriptive text that each character gets for a background story. There are 12 characters to choose from, though four are locked when you first start playing. The difference among the characters is their starting weapon. Each weapon has two firing modes and can be aimed at any angle using the right analog stick. So Marky Kat's chaingun fires like a chaingun but also has a shotgun blast as an alternate fire. The crossbow can shoot exploding shots, the ice arm can shoot either machine gun-like shards or a freezing cloud, and so on. Though the weapons cover fairly standard territory, they're the most interesting part of Small Arms.

Unfortunately, you don't spend quite as much time shooting as you might like. The weapons all run on an energy meter that drains rapidly when you fire. So instead of focusing all your attention on the savage act of murdering your opponents, you also have to spend a lot of time looking around the level in search of batteries to recharge your current weapon or new weapons to grab. Because the melee attacks aren't very potent, remaining fully armed is really your only chance at survival. Your movement options include a double jump and a dash move that you can use for an extra vertical boost if needed. Some of the game's levels have tricky platforms that can be tough to reach if you aren't good at moving around. Additionally, a few of the levels feature forced scrolling. This gives you another thing to think about while immersed in a fight that's taking place on top of a fast-moving train.

The main mode has you go through a series of stages to fight against increasingly difficult foes, and you'll get a simple boss fight at the end. Challenge mode is a fighting game-style survival mode, where you have to face off against enemies over and over again until you finally fail. Shooting range lets you play a quick bonus game, where you have to shoot paper targets as they move by, but this one doesn't ever change and isn't much fun at all. As you might expect, the real action is in the battle mode, where you can play with up to four players either locally or over Xbox Live. Ranked games are limited to two minutes, but in player matches, you can configure more of the options for scoring and decide whether players can join in the middle of the match. You can also play any combination of local and Xbox Live players. So you can start a game with two other players locally, then invite a fourth from the Internet. That's pretty cool.

The setup for Small Arms and the options it gives make it sound like a great game, but unfortunately, the payoff isn't quite potent. The gameplay's focus on weapon hunting means that you have to be careful with your ammo, which isn't much fun at all and plays against the rest of the game's frantic action. The characters are small on the screen, which makes it easy to lose track of what's going on when two or three players get into a bunch. Also, when you're playing online, the camera sometimes focuses specifically on one of the other players and occasionally goes so far as to scroll you all the way off the screen. That's incredibly annoying.

Graphically, Small Arms has a good sense of futuristic-but-furry style to it, with some decent level designs to go with it. But the game is short on graphical effects and good weapon blasts, which brings it down a notch. The sound is also standard and devoid of personality. You don't get any voice clips from the characters. Instead, you get standard explosions and a decent soundtrack that is complete with a catchy, shuffling drumbeat to accompany the main menu.

The achievements in Small Arms are good, with many easy ones that you'll get for simply playing. But there are also plenty of tougher ones, like scoring five kills without losing a life. Small Arms also has a neat viral-style achievement that you get for playing online against someone who already has the achievement. The idea is that only members of the game's development team started out with this achievement, so it works its way through the Small Arms player base over time. But most people seem to already have it, making you wonder if it's not working properly or if there just aren't many people out there playing Small Arms. Either way, it's a zero-point achievement, which really neuters it.

When it doesn't strike out on its own in an interesting way or duplicate the game it's trying to clone more effectively, Small Arms has just enough Smash Bros. in it to disappoint you. While it does have some interesting online options, the gameplay doesn't hold up well enough to make it a worthwhile purchase for its midlevel $10 price tag.