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Recordkeeping: RoboTrek INCOMPLETE
Jun. 29th, 2017 10:01 pmI distinctly remember saving my game all the way up the clock tower, past the second boss fight, with a final save on the Tropical Island ruled by a volcano god. Unfortunately my emulator disagrees and plunks me back about 6-8 hours, and I really really do not feel like going through any part of this game twice.
In a way it's a massive shame. Robotrek has a number of very interesting ideas, all of which are unfortunately gated behind THIS GAME. You're a begoggled kid fighting a dangerous army of Hackers with your home-built robots. Your adventure takes you all over the world, into weird and varied situations and even through time and space. It's intensely creative ... but all the humor and weirdness is kind of blocked by a godawful translation job.
I do still love the one dude who earnestly informs you that "Evil is good. Evil is the job."
The combat system is unfortunately pretty weak too. Your robots can do a variety of special moves (which don't really work against bosses) and level up their weapons (which is either expensive as fuck or time-consuming as fuck as you either pay for extra copies of said weapon or grind in battle until you get weapon-leveling capsules)... and you can only have one robot in combat at a time, which is frustratingly anti-diversification. Why not just have one basic "robot" with three layers of hit points?
I want to say this is like a stunning betrayal of my nostalgia or whatever but really I don't remember having a lot of patience for Robotrek the FIRST time around either, when I was young and playing it on the SNES. It would be a great beginner RPG if not for how clunky and god-awful SLOW everything else. It would be a great comedy RPG (the Japanese title is Slapstick, after all) but the jokes are too mistranslated to actually be funny. As it is, it isn't a great ANYthing and that's a great shame.
It does let you play as a mouse for a while though. That's pretty fun.
In a way it's a massive shame. Robotrek has a number of very interesting ideas, all of which are unfortunately gated behind THIS GAME. You're a begoggled kid fighting a dangerous army of Hackers with your home-built robots. Your adventure takes you all over the world, into weird and varied situations and even through time and space. It's intensely creative ... but all the humor and weirdness is kind of blocked by a godawful translation job.
I do still love the one dude who earnestly informs you that "Evil is good. Evil is the job."
The combat system is unfortunately pretty weak too. Your robots can do a variety of special moves (which don't really work against bosses) and level up their weapons (which is either expensive as fuck or time-consuming as fuck as you either pay for extra copies of said weapon or grind in battle until you get weapon-leveling capsules)... and you can only have one robot in combat at a time, which is frustratingly anti-diversification. Why not just have one basic "robot" with three layers of hit points?
I want to say this is like a stunning betrayal of my nostalgia or whatever but really I don't remember having a lot of patience for Robotrek the FIRST time around either, when I was young and playing it on the SNES. It would be a great beginner RPG if not for how clunky and god-awful SLOW everything else. It would be a great comedy RPG (the Japanese title is Slapstick, after all) but the jokes are too mistranslated to actually be funny. As it is, it isn't a great ANYthing and that's a great shame.
It does let you play as a mouse for a while though. That's pretty fun.
