It’s no big secret that I liked Earthbound, so when I saw a preview for a game that featured a guy that looked suspiciously like a character from Earthbound, I immediately took notice.
Turns out that not only is this game not much like Earthbound, but it’s not very fun either.
What it is is an RPG, in which the Earthbound-like character (he’s rendered in 2-D) pilots a spaceship that crash-lands on a 3-D planet. He then enlists the help of the first random kid he sees to help get back his missing pieces so he can fly away or some such. I stopped caring about this game pretty quickly.
There are two things about this game that I didn’t like, one is the combat. When you get into a fight (the crux of any role playing game) your little guy goes on autopilot. You just kind of sit there while the fight plays out. You get to be in charge of pulling off the occasional special move and healing, but the rest of the fighting is totally automatic (read: ‘boring’). Your stats go up depending on how you do in battle. Get beat up enough, and your defense goes up, things like that. Sounds familiar somehow.
The other thing is the stupid little suits you get to wear. You find outfits occasionally that give you special powers, special powers that you need to advance. Problem is that you can only have one suit on at a time, and to change them you have to go back to crazy professor guy’s ship, which is typically located inconveniently-far from where you are.
I suffered about three hours into this game before I just didn’t care anymore. Odds are pretty slim that it’ll ever make it back into my DS.