Little Rocket Slime is a very likable hero, deserving of his own game.
At GameCrazy, two advertisements caught my eye:
1. Contact DS
2. Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
Ironically, the posters that advertised the games were nothing more than enlarged cover shots of the boxart.
Contact had yet to release, being as it was in October (which I later ended up purchasing the day it released), and Rocket Slime had a release date of one month prior to Contact. So I decided to wait and go for Rocket Slime. The choices at the time were rather limited, because Advance Wars Dual Strike, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, and Trauma Center had only seen a first round of prints, and were extremely difficult to find.
Because my gaming history was so limited, I had no idea what the Dragon Quest series was, or who Rocket Slime was. Even much later into my career, my history's a bit fuzzy.
Rocket Slime is the first game that I did not put down until I finished. Starting a game is always the hard part for me, but waiting in an airport terminal for over an hour for my flight to leave, I figured, "Eh, why not?" and popped it in. The cellophane wrapping was still on the game.
And on a fully charged DS Lite, Rocket Slime took me from Long Beach, California to my first layover in Denver, Colorado (2 hours), then straight onto Washington D.C., where my parents lived. It occupied my time during the ride from Dulles International, all the way into my temporary room for the next two weeks in Rockville, Maryland.
18 Hours. Straight. And my DS died only once.
Rocket Slime is a charming game, a 2D RPG much like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Although there is no touch-screen capabilities in the game, it does well to get by without them.
The presentation is such:
A world/mini map at the top screen.
The playable character and the environments on the lower.
You go around as a little slime, collecting monsters and saving the residents of Slimenia, in a rather simple and easy plot to follow. Rocket goes around stretching and slamming into baddies and objects, carrying them on his head, and launching them to wherever necessary.
At the end of each stage, and also a very large secondary feature of Rocket Slime, is the tank battling, which I found to be the most fun aspect of the game. You get these large tanks, and launch weapons that are doled out by your arsenal at a steady rate and try to destroy the opponent's tank. Once one of the tank's HP bar reaches zero, the opposing player can go into the heart of the opponent's tank and destroy it. The arsenal and ammunition used can constantly be changed, as you receive more types of ammo and recipes to build different kinds of ammo as the game goes along. You can also select baddies to be your crew members to dole out the punishment.
All in all, it was a delightful game to play. The music was pleasant, the visuals were spot-on, the colors vibrant, and the gameplay addicting.
My only complaint would be the depth of the game, and the ease with which the game was finished. Replay value was low, as I was able to go back and complete everything, finish my libraries, the formulas, the baddie collection, etc. all under 20 hours. It would have received a higher score from me had it not been for this.