What could have been a successful, innovative game instead absolutely fails to impress
One of the game's initial problems is its plot; at least Game Freak had the decency to omit one if they knew they were going to bungle it. The dev team, however, decided to include the plot despite the fact that it really is completely unengaging. The setting is sometime far in the future, where two annoyingly young space soldiers (they're given another name, but I just don't care enough to remember it) stumble upon a mysterious man and eventually learn the secret of Spectrobes, prehistoric monsters that are preserved in fossils. So you've got to use said creatures to save the world from an evil alien race, y'know…like you've read/played countless times before. The dialogue honest-to-god stinks -- it's completely contrived and the characters is totally one-dimensional and uninteresting. You're got the reckless hero who gets in trouble for his "monkey business" (in fact, it's the subject of 50% of the dialogue at the beginning of the game -- his monkey business and how all three of the other characters react to it), the pretty girl who's a beacon of common sense, the brave leader of some random army, and a mysterious old man. Boring.
But, following the instructions of the old man, initially named Mr. X, you embark upon a quest to uncover the Spectrobes and defeat the menacing Krawl, who threaten to overrun the galaxy. You've got a nifty little device that essentially lets you store up to two Spectrobes with you as you walk around, and you can have another one following you (this is the creature that you'll use to find buried items). As you walk around, you can tap the creature following you or just hit R while standing still and a small circle will grow from around the immature Spectrobe (interesting word choice, huh? I'll explain in a moment). If there's something underground, a sparkly little dot will appear -- touch it to enter into the digging minigame.
The digging game is simple and fun at first, but quickly grows monotonous because you're essentially doing the same thing every time and there's very little skill involved. You've simply got to drill down a few layers into the ground, done simply by tapping the screen a few times, and then you'll see a bit of whatever it is that you're digging up. You've got a few tools at your disposal, but none of them are all that impressive just because, for the most part, they're really not all necessary. Anyway, you just scrape around the buried object until it's completely visible, and you'll automatically pick it up and add it to your stock. Pretty simple, right?
At a time like this, I'd like to be able to say something like "Wrong. Because, …" and go on about the complexity of this minigame. But honestly, I can't. When I say "Pretty simple, right?", I actually mean it. It's pretty annoying, because this is a huge focus of the entire game and it's just so freaking boring. In order to beat the game, you're going to have to find a lot of Spectrobes, as well as different minerals and cubes to help your creatures in battle and make the more powerful, respectively. So, much of the game becomes this huge, monotonous, immensely boring scavenger hunt that fails to capture the players interest and will ultimately result in you tossing aside this game in disgust.
The other big part of the game, and the one that doesn't fall flat on it's face, is the battle mechanic. As I already mentioned, you have two Spectrobes in your party, and these are the ones that will participate in battles with you. Enemies appear as swirling vortexes in the field, and running into them initiates a battle. Once there, you have control of the main character, and the Spectrobes automatically follow him. The monsters are controlled with the L and R buttons -- obviously, the one on your right with the R button and vice versa. Hitting the Spectrobe's respective shoulder button will allow them to unleash their attack. Depending on the Spectrobe, obviously, you'll get a different attack; some are quite powerful but take a while to power up, and others do little damage but can be executed quickly.
However, the sense of customization that was such a huge part of titles like Pokemon is just nowhere to be found. A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that you can only have two Spectrobes in your party at a time, so there's not a lot of mixing-and-matching that can be done in the first place. Secondly, each of the attacks are all pretty similar, regardless of little differences in power. The Spectrobes, to be blunt, are boring and forgettable, and as a result this interesting, intuitive, and genuinely innovative battle system pretty much loses any worth that it had.
And even what little creature interaction it has isn't all that interesting. When you find a Spectrobe, you can go back to your ship and use the Lab System to awaken it. You do this by speaking (or, if you've got some sense of…modesty and don't want to be seen in a public place speaking to your DS, you could just blow into the microphone) into the microphone. There's a spectrum shown and it fluctuates based on how loudly you're speaking; there's a certain range that you've got to keep your voice for three seconds, so in actuality you may end up just making some noise and holding it, almost as if you're singing. Afterwards, you've got to let the Spectrobe mature, and this is a simple and uninteresting matter of putting it into the incubator and occasionally interacting with it.
Both graphically and musically, Spectrobes is decent. The visuals in battle are fine, but a lot of this has to do with the fact that you're fighting in a very confined area and so the developers didn't have to worry about putting much detail into anything other than a space about the size of the bottom DS screen. The field graphics look decent, I suppose, but are rather blurry and pixilated at times. The music is fine, but it's not very extensive and as a result is very repetitive. Needless to say, this gets pretty annoying quite quickly, and so you may just end up playing with the volume off. As far as I'm concerned, it was a missed opportunity to lend some credibility to what is nearly a broen game.
To say that Spectrobes is disappointing would be an understatement. I truly had high hopes for this title, and there was an opportunity to prove that just because a game is about raising monsters doesn't mean it's a Pokemon knock-off. And, while Spectrobes doesn't quite do that, it does prove something equally poor: that any creature-collecting game that isn't Pokemon downright sucks. I'd highly advise keeping your distance from Spectrobes -- unless you'd like your heart to be broken, that is.