Reader Reviews

Zoids Legacy (GBA)

by tengu

As someone who has a soft spot for anime related tat, I actually kind of like Zoids. The model kits and toys are cheap and look nice enough to fit in perfectly with the décor in any geek's bedroom and the recent TV show isn't the worst thing I've ever seen, so chances were high enough that they'd be able to manage a good game based off the franchise, right? Right?

After the dismal GameCube game 'Zoids Battle Legends', my hopes for Zoids Legacy weren't high. Sure it was an RPG and I usually love those, but I wasn't going to expect miracles after the last game. Just as well, because this is awful. The worst part is, though... it could have been really good.

The game is an RPG in a very similar vein to the 'Pokemon' games, with you as the hero, travelling all over the world on various quests collecting various Zoids as you go which you can then customise and ride into battle at your leisure if you like them. The battles are traditional turn-based affairs, with you controlling a party of up to six members at a time. They are very easy throughout the entire game, though, and the in-battle graphics are horribly static, poor-looking affairs while the graphics in the rest of the game are quite nice for the most part, if a tad bland.

The actual gameplay is really rather simple and easy to pick up, and can even be fun at first, but it doesn't take long for the repetition to set in as one Zoid starts to feel exactly the same as the last and the battles start to feel like the most horrid of chores soon after. Then there is the actual customising of the Zoids, which is a pointless task as any upgrades you make rarely add anything useful to the actual performance of the machines. It feels pointless and unnecessary, which is the perfect description for this game as a whole really. The game really doesn't have much in the way of variety like you would hope for from a decent RPG either. It really is just the rather short feeling main quest and practically nothing else, no real sub-quests, no bonus areas, nothing.

Believe it or not, the above problems aren't even the worst part of the game. No, the worst part is, without a single doubt, the story, specifically the plot and the script. The story is some gibberish about space/time warps causing the past, present and future to collide or something, it was hard to pay attention. The translation is pathetic, and the dialogue seems to have been written by a complete imbecile. An imbecile who doesn't speak English I might add. There are spelling mistakes every other sentence, bad ones too, and there are entire scenes of dialogue that are so badly written they make absolutely no sense whatsoever. 'Space' is regularly written as 'sapce', there are made up words which look idiotic ('Changemise'?) and in what I can only assume is some kind of twisted homage to 'Zero Wing', one character even exclaims at one point: "What you say?!". Ironically, the last time in recent memory I can remember seeing the English language so horribly raped was in Eurogamer's own 'Zoids Versus' comments thread.

This is a game that could have been enjoyable if a little, just a LITTLE more effort had been put into it. Unfortunately this is like slow torture to an RPG fan, with all the things that make RPGs great turned into horrific chores completely devoid of anything resembling fun due to the most minor of irritations all over the shop. I would say this game is like a cheap alternative to Pokemon, but this costs exactly the same amount of cash Pokemon on the GBA does, so it doesn't even have THAT much.