Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals – The Geekscape Review

For about a year during college (oh, man, that is sadness) I could have been considered a closet Pokemaniac. I was about 20 years old and single, in college, and I had two mewtews. Wait for it. Do you know what this meant back in the simple days of Pokemon Red, Blue and (ultimately) Yellow? With two Mewtews… I was a god. Throw in my Gyrados and my Pokemon game was nasty. Real nasty. Or it would have been… had there been anyone else my age to play with besides my buddy Kevin.

I was a lonely, college-aged Pokemaniac. Sometimes, I’ll catch myself longing for those days, wondering what might have been had they released Pokemon ten years earlier, when I was in the grip of another portable addiction: Tetris Fever. Could I have ever caught them all? Or was I doomed to always act my age?

This is why I was so excited this July when Disney Interactive sat me down to show a press build of their DS monster-collecting, sci fi game Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. The game reminded me a bit of Phantasy Star from the old Sega Master System but it had Pokemon, monster collecting aspects and life action RPG elements. For someone with a deeply hidden hunger for monster collecting, action based RPGs and frequent DS mini-games, this second game in the original Spectrobes universe held a lot of promise. I couldn’t wait to run around multiple planets, Metroid style, and collect and battle my Spectrobes, all the while uncovering mysteries, playing mini-games and trying to build the best team!

I bugged Gilmore for weeks about getting a copy of the game. Weeks turned into months. Then finally, last week, the game arrived. Yeah. My mothafuckin’ Spectrobes. Hell yeah. I swore that I would wait until the weekend to fire it up. But I couldn’t. I barely lasted 24 hours before I was switching on the DS to see what lay in store. Could this be the road to monster ranching redemption I had been waiting almost a decade for?

To get right to the point: no. Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is NOT the ultimate monster collecting experience I had secretly wanted all these years. Now, having logged almost five hours worth of playtime on the game, I can’t even guarantee that it’s much more than an excessive amount of tutorials and frustratingly endless dialogue scenes. I have literally only killed about 40 bad guys. In FIVE hours. This game, like my road to redemption, has proven elusively slooooow.

On top of the fact that it’s hard to get into a rhythm with this game while constantly being interrupted by tutorials and prolonged character interactions, I feel like I have yet to really crack into the story of the game. Keep reminding yourself that I’m five hours into the game. Even with the long game intro to Twilight Princess two years ago, within five hours you were knocking on the door of your first temple. I have yet to feel like there’s a bigger goal out there for me.
The action and game play are as truncated as the flow of the story. A with other games with a similar mold, the player in Spectrobes is tasked with finding items or unlocking switches and basically following points A to B while unlocking other areas of the universe to explore. It’s pretty standard adventure and RPG stuff. Where this game falls flat though is in both its combat sequences and its over-world encounters. In games as old as Dragon Warrior and right up to current RPGs (including the Pokemon games), over-world encounters were always handled at random. There were times, while running low on health and items, that I was afraid to take another step in Final Fantasy Legends out of fear that the next random battle would be my last. Even in Pokemon, your walking around, grinding your monsters up several levels, and part of the fun was in hunting the other types of creatures that were out there, waiting to be discovered. There was a clear risk and a clear reward. In Spectrobes, you SEE the bad guys coming. They show up as giant swirling tornadoes that are just as easy to avoid as they are easy to overcome. You can probably work through the whole game without hitting one.

But of course you want to, otherwise your baby spectrobes will never level up to become full-on powerful spectrobes. This is where the game battles come in. And they aren’t turn based like a lot of RPGs. No way. These sequences are full on action… for about 20 seconds. It’s crazy. You know the sense of accomplishment that you get in other battle based encounters when you’re down to your last hit points, your potions have all been exhausted and THEN you land that final blow? Well, if you ever get to that point in Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals, you’re officially the worst videogame player on the planet. These battles are easy and they are quick. Strategy here doesn’t extend beyond a simple iteration of rock, paper and scissors that has been done several times better in other games. In reminding myself that I’m probably too old for this kind of material, I can’t help but feel that someone 20 years younger than I would still feel apathetic towards the game play. There’s really no work involved in winning, and after a few encounters you find yourself just wanting to skip as many as you can to move the story forward. But when moving the story forward involves running your character headfirst into the next invasive tutorial or mind numbing dialogue exchange, you really just find yourself wanting to turn the whole thing off and play something a little more immediately satisfying.

Are there positives to the game? Yes. The graphics and animations are some of the best I’ve seen on the DS. I was blown away by the work in last year’s Phantom Hourglass and the level of visual design work is at least as good here. Just wandering around the game is entertaining, but you grow weary of running into character interactions about as much as you would running into bad guys with a depleted party in another RPG. Some of the mini-games are worth trying as well and sometimes I found myself excavating minerals and fossils (a huge part of the game if you want to find new spectrobes) for an extended period of time just to work on my experience and score. Some of the mini-game pieces do feel like they’ve been thrown in just for the sake of being there but for the most part, these sequences do help to break up the monotonous story and uneventful game play while still using the touch screen and microphone features of the DS effectively. On a technological level, Spectrobes is a pretty impressive game.

Still, at the end of the day, it appears that my hunt for redemption must continue. Like Kane from Kung Fu, I must continue my journey, in search of balance. Maybe it’s something that I am way too old to ever be able to attain. Are there 30 year olds who collect monsters in portable games who are satisfied with themselves? Is it an impossible contradiction? Is it the very NATURE of these types of games to NEVER be satisfied with your current roster of monsters and ALWAYS be hunting for more? What is it about these monster-collecting games that promise to fill the holes in our lives? Regardless of the questions, I am sad to say that the answers, whatever they may ultimately be, are not found in Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. If anything, you will only find yourself desperately wanting more.