Contact

Contact was short, so there wasn't much of a chance to flesh things out. I did spent 11 hours on it initially, but atleast 4 of those was straight up power leveling up. There's only 9 Islands and only a few of them are big enough to hold a dungeon. There just wasn't enough content in the game to really hold the interest in the RPG fan inside me.

Overall, my first initial run was fun, but I still feel a little gipped about things. The music was good, the graphics were good, the controls were ok, there just could of been more to accomplish.


----------Battle System----------
Contact is a top-down-view dungeon crawler MMO-styled RPG. You can only play as Terry. You hope from Island to Island helping various characters out while trying to retrieve green gems that powers the Professors ship. He can equip suits, these suits give Terry different abilities and attributes to use in your journey. For example, a Monk can dig holes, and has extra Earth resistence and powers, while the Shadow Thief costume can pick locks and treasure chests. Terry can also equip a ton of different weapons, including a knife, sword, mallet, fishing pole, pan, etc. Some weapons can only be equipped with certain costumes, for example you can only equip a pan by the Chef or the fishing pole by the Fisher King.

When you get near a monster, you have to hit the B button to get Terry into attack mode. Terry attacks by himself, you control where he walks, but it's up to him to swing his attacks. Once you're in attack mode you can use special attacks for Terry though. If you hit the Y button you can scroll through all your special attacks. Each Special Attack will use EP points, you can only hold 5 at a time and you can't recharge it with food or healing items either. Everytime you kill 2 monsters without using EP attacks you gain 1 EP point. So it's wise to save these for the bosses.

Terry gains experience not by killing monsters, but by doing actions and skills. There's over 20 different things to level up in this game, and you can max out each up to 100 levels. Everytime Terry swings his sword he'll gain experience for his strength and sword abilities. Everything he cooks something he'll gain cooking experience. Each costume and weapon (sword, hammer, knuckle) has 7 abilities to it also. Once you reach to a certain level in each category you'll gain a new ability.

The biggest flaw in Contact is gaining the abilities, the goals are to unreachable at the start of the game. Leveling up takes way to long, and even if you stick to one type of weapon and one type of costume you still will only learn a few abilities until you beat the game. There's isn't much reward for maxing out your skills either.

The level designs are short and rarely do they have any type of puzzles in them. I was expecting atleast fun puzzles in this game, but the whole goal is to make it from point a to point b without dying. There's challenge in that sure, but nothing a little power leveling can't fix. This game doesn't take brain power, it takes pure patience. The fun of the game mostly consists of collecting each type of weapon, food and item.


----------Characters / Story----------
The simple story goes like this, the Professor and his faithful companion Mochi first meet you, yes this game actually makes you as a character. They don't really use this as much as you would think though. After the initial set up, the professor is looking for green crystals, and happens to find one that next to a kid, the kid is Terry the main character in the game. Terry is a silent hero like Link for the most part. They talk and Terry gets on his ship and they sail off until they get attacked by the CosmoNOTs. After this attack they lose all his green crystals that power his ship, so Terry ends up going on a quest to find all the missing pieces and to stop the CosmoNOTs plan.

The plot was good enough for me, it's just has weak dialog for the most part. While the game was wacky, I was expecting even wackier stuff. For the most part, the game was a typical RPG.


----------Graphics----------
While I loved the graphic style of the game, the level design for the dungeons and caves were very bare bones, repetitive, and pretty short. There's a ton of blacked out areas in the dungeons, and re-used backgrounds and graphics, it's almost a bore to look at. On the other hand the areas where you are side scrolling have beautiful backgrounds, and in some of the beach areas look great also.


----------Sound----------
The music is excellent, all the songs fit the levels perfectly. The sound effects were ok at best, the most annoying was when Mint or any other main female in the game had dialog and they would repetitively giggle with each line. Mouchi would also repetitively meow all the time too. At the begining of the game there was voice over of a very distorted phone operator but that's the only thing in the voice over department of things.


----------World Map----------
The world map is displayed by an actual globe sitting by Terry's bed. When you click on it you can rotate it in any direction with the stylus or d-pad and pick which island you want to hop to. Once you pick your destination you have to go to sleep or wait until the ship arrives. This is the most annoying thing about the game actually.


----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save before final boss)----------

11:07

After you complete the game you gain 4 new items, and you can continue from your last save. If you don't save before fighting the final boss, then you'll lose all the experience and items gained since your previous save. When I beat the game I only saved at the first save spot in the Castle and ended up losing a ton of things.

There's new sidequests, fetch missions and minibosses to fight after the game is complete. The main quest is rather short, but if you complete the game 100% you can get into the 50 hour range, maybe even more.