Medabots Infinity is one of the worst RPGs ever made.
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.