Medarot Navi Kabuto/Kuwagata

I think my experience with this game is one that other Medabots fans had - I played the Medabots Metabee game on the GBA, the one that had the TV anime's theme song. After finishing that, I got curious to see if there were other Medabots games and stumbled upon Medarot Navi. Since I liked Metabee in the other game, and its medal was Kabuto, I went with Medarot Navi Kabuto.

Through playing this game, I found out that instead of 3-on-3 battles like in Medabots Metabee, you can have teams of up to 5 medabots. 5-on-5 battles are possible in this game. Unfortunately, more doesn't always mean better.

Full disclosure: I do not know Japanese aside from some nouns. For all I know, the plot is a masterpiece that I, a non-Japanese speaking pleb, do not understand.

I can, however, comment on the gameplay, graphics and sound. Graphically, this game is fine - nothing great, but I like the designs of the characters and the protagonist medabots - enemy medabots and even a bunch of the allies have lame motifs that lead to rather ugly designs. The soundtrack is solid, and a Youtube user named Translation kindly uploaded it to Youtube, so you can check that out if you're curious.

As for the plot, I could only gather the premise via Medapedia:

This game features a different protagonist from previous entries in the series: Kasumi Asano, a bespectacled boy who discovers an alien Medarot, Mistral, underneath the auditorium of an abandoned school. A field trip to the Cluster space station goes awry with the "exile" of the class to the various modules and the reveal of the Space Robos!

With that out of the way, let's get down to business: the gameplay is a slog. You start by choosing Kasumi's medabot, and then you choose your partners. Allies provide you with their signature medabots as you make progress, so you do not have to repeatedly battle people to get all the parts of some bots. This is kind of a welcome change, but then you get into the battle and realize this game was a mistake.

On paper, the system isn't bad. The teams are distributed in such a way that your medabots are on the left side and the AI opponent is on the right. You have a tiled map where the medabots can move and actions can be chosen, whether that is to attack, simply move away, assist an ally, etc. - there are a few problems with this. All you have to do to win is beat the leader of a team. Thus, if you manage to gang up on the AI's leader, battles can be stupidly easy.

There are medaparts that act as shields to allies, but the AI doesn't make much use of those, and frankly, there aren't many of those parts out there.

On the other hand, if the AI decides to gang up on your leader and you aren't ready with a shielding ally, that's going to suck. Luckily, the AI isn't that smart a lot of the time.

Something else that bothers me about the battle system is that there isn't a very clear indication of what causes your attacks to get stronger or weaker. In a game like, for example, Pokemon, it's easy - Pokemons have their types and attacks also have types. Those types come with their resistances and weaknesses. Thus, knowing those is crucial to success in battles.

Medabots Metabee/Rokusho had something like that. Depending on the legs chosen, medabots had their strenghts and weaknesses. Sometimes those strengths in the form of being faster to attack in certain terrains, having more odds of dodging attacks. Weaknesses came in the form of being slower or having attacks that can totally ruin you. An easy example of this is flying medabots - if those got hit with Anti-Air missiles, they could take severe damage. Likewise, if a sea medabot got hit with a torpedo, they'd take a lot of damage.

This game, on the other hand, isn't very clear. I found that my attacks from shooters would sometimes do pathetically low damage. It's not like there is a great difference in the levels of medals on my side and the AIs, and type advantages don't come into play nearly as much as in Medabots Metabee/Rokusho. Nonetheless, the AI opponents you face can all be easily taken down if you have these kinds of medabots:

• A medabot that can take hits and has a powerful shooting attack when it transforms - the game literally gives you one called Kaiser Beetle, along with its medal, past the halfway point in the story. More on transforming later, it may sound cool, but this is no Transformers, I'll say that much for now.
• A medabot that can shield your allies - Bravenurse is handed to you and her head medapart works like a charm, protecting allies for two turns.
• A medabot that can improve the accuracy and strength of the team via the Scan ability.
• Two mildly strong medabots that can be improved via the Scan.

That's about it. I found that some tough battles became laughably easy with that setup. The only battles that always remain somewhat interesting are ones that involve Transforming medaparts - in this game, when the battle begins and such a medabot has to move, the game will immediately transform those parts into others, at random. That can lead to very wacky setups, sometimes giving a medabot ridiculously strong weapons.

Speaking of ridiculously strong weapons, let's talk about transforming, or rather Medachange. Some medabots can transform into different forms that look like vehicles. I always found this to be lame when I saw it in the anime, but at least this game has a trade-off. You transform to get powerful attacks at the cost of your life meter setup. Normally, medabots have a meter for each of their four parts. Upon tranforming, those morph into one lifebar. It's a risk. With four separate bars, only weapons with chain reactions can carry on with their damage after a medapart is destroyed, giving you a hint of help at times. That's out the window when you transform.

Kaiser Beetle's main weapon upon Medachanging is a gattling gun which does ridiculous damage AND has a chain reaction, meaning that it can damage more than one medapart. Again, this can make battles laughably easy. Just point at the enemy's leader and blast away after Scanning.

There's also the Action Points mechanic which seems like an unnecessary annoyance. Basically, every time a turn starts for a medabot, you get APs - any action you take afterwards will take some APs. If you didn't spend them all in the turn, the remainder gets turned into medaforce energy points. A full medaforce meter lets you unleash either a very powerful attack that takes all of your meter, or a helpful move that doesn't take all of the meter.

The really powerful parts, like say, most of what Mega-emperor offers, require a lot of APs to use them. That's why I'm saying APs can be annoying, you can end up wasting turns waiting until you can use certain parts.

All of this is there at the service of a battle system that is ultimately not very fun. When you're not cheesing through battles with my tactic, you'll end up being bored with the slow animations, the pitiful damage some attacks do, waiting for the AI enemies to be done with their attacks, wondering what exactly determines who goes first, etc.

Medabots Metabee/Rokusho had it about right. Really, the Metabee version is the only one I'd recommend on the GBA. At most, you had 3-on-3 battles, with relay race cycles to determine who attacked next, easy to understand advantages and weaknesses, medaforces, no APs, and none of the silly designs that came from Medachanging. Medarot Navi was one of many steps in the wrong direction for the series. Medabots Metabee/Rokusho were remakes of Medarot 2, which, in my opinion, should have been the bible to the rest of the series of games.

As if these problems weren't enough, the post-game is rather barren. Once you see the credits, you can get into battles with familiar faces from the past (Ikki Tenryou among them), and their signature medabots to help. Other than that, you can keep repeating battles on some cluster modules (the flying saucer looking things you travel through in order to make progress in the story) and that's it. Cluster modules are mostly empty, too, with maybe one or two NPCs you can talk with or battle. Really uninspired design, and the punchline is that if you want to get all the medaparts for your extra tinpets (i.e. the skeletons of your medabots), you have to trade with a Kuwagata version save.

Imagine trying this in 2022. Hell, imagine playing this in 2022, unless you had someone else along for the ride with you.